The Last Full Week: Review, Thanksgiving, Offida and Grottammare

A View of the Historical Center of Grottammare

For Thanksgiving, most of us students went over the girls’ apartment. Erica, Darin, and Samantha made turkey, green beans, potatoes, salad, bruschetta and antipasto. I made sauce and brought it over for the second course.

We made the best out of what we could find in Italy. The turkey was turkey breast, not a whole bird. In Italy, they don’t sell whole birds in the marketplace. You have to special order turkeys from the meat.

However, they do regularly sell turkey breasts prepackaged in the meat case. Darin told me he basted the turkey with chicken broth. It was really moist and served as a pretty good substitute for a real bird.

For dessert, the girls bought panatone. Panatone is an Italian. It resembles the same consistency of fruitcake. Panatone is not my favorite. I brought a large Toblerone bar to share.

Of course, I wish I could have spent Thanksgiving with my family. It was great to talk to my aunts, my grandmas, my mom and dad, my brother and sister and my cousin Marissa. I really miss them, and on Thanksgiving it was a little bit hard for all of us to be away from our families. We will all be home for Christmas, though, and that’ll be great!

On Friday, Ben, Samantha and I went to Offida for the day. It was a 45 minute bus ride from the Giogli Hotel near one of the movie theatres in Ascoli. It was cold out and it poured for most of the day.



Upon getting to Offida and entering the historical center through a portal in the medieval wall, we found that Offida didn’t have much to offer. We got there around 1:00, and in Italy that means everything is closed. Everything.

There were several bars that were open, though. During our time in Offida, with nothing else to do, we visited three of them. In the first one, Sam and I got coffee and Ben got a sandwich. The second and third one, we all got glasses of wine.



To be honest with you, this was a really fun experience. The last bar we went to was decorated for Christmas and it was a very nice Italian café in Offida. I bought funghetti, which are little anise cookies that are shaped like mushrooms. They taste identical to the cookies my grandmother makes, except hers are dipped in confectioners sugar and have jimmies on them.

Even if we had come in the morning or stayed until the late afternoon, we probably wouldn’t have missed much. Offida is very small and when we were walking around we didn’t even see a lot of shops.

And visiting cafes isn’t so bad. And the views of Offida were beautiful. So, I am glad that I went.

When I walked back home from the bus stop I went through Piazza Arringo. There was a big wooden layout on the piazza. There were wood beams and people working on making what looks like a stage. I found out later that they are building an ice-skating rink for Christmas. That must be the wildest thing to have an ice-skating rink right in the piazza. Unfortunately, I’ll probably miss the finished product, but it did seem really cool.

Saturday, Samantha and I went to Grottammare, the seacoast town next to San Benedetto del Tronto. It was about a 45 minute train ride from Ascoli to Grottammare and we had to change trains in SBT.

We walked around the town for a bit and then walked to the historical center on top of a hill. The historical center was a small maze of streets with old brick houses running slanted on steep hills. It was beautiful.



Grottammare is very much an extension of San Benedetto. The two cities are a three minute train ride away from each other and they look identical.

Unfortunately, in winter, a lot of the shops are closed as both Grottammare and San Benedetto are summer resort towns. Still, we found some stuff to see and do. We had piazza bianca at a pizzeria in the center of town. The pizza is a piece of bread lightly brushed with garlic and olive oil and topped with some rosemary. It was very good.

Sunday, I packed some of my luggage, studied and cleaned the apartment. Tonight, more studying for Silvia's Italian test tomorrow and then more packing.

Today, I had my final for Christina's art class and the speaking portion of my Italian test. I think they went well.

In between Italian and Art, I had my last lesson with the 5th grade students at St. Agostino's. Over the past few weeks, I've been dictating sentences for them to write. After, we go over it together and fix any mistakes. Along the way, I taught them some grammar and colloquialisms that are used in the Northeast. I'm really going to miss those kids. The experience hasn't changed my career aspects to that of a elementary school teacher, but now I know that if that's where I end up, it wouldn't be so bad. Tomorrow will be my last day with the 3rd graders.

Then, I'll be leaving on the 2:30 bus to Rome. I'm going to stay about two miles away from the airport at a hotel and will fly out Wednesday morning at 10:00. I have a 2 hour stopover in Amsterdam, and will get into Boston around 5. Including the stopover, my total travel time clocks in at around 13 hours!

My time here is almost done. Reflections of my time will come in a little while, once I've gotten back and have settled back into home. After that I'll be blogging from a different website: www.writingcontemporary.blogspot.com Stay tuned!

Alex