Italy gets Baracked

Let me say as a disclaimer that this post is not an attempt to impose my political views onto anyone. These are simply my personal observations of what inauguration day was like abroad.

Being able to watch the inauguration here in Italy was a little difficult to make happen, but I am happy to say I was able to hear the 44th President's inaugural address, thanks to MSNBC radio. Some technologically savvy boys were able to hook some speakers up to one of their computers so we could listen to the radio broadcast in english. We then found a channel that was showing a live broadcast, which of course was in Italian, so we muted the sound and watched and listened to the speech from two different sources.

 

It was a unique experience to listen to the speech via radio with everyone in the villa (professors included) downstairs in the cantina. It creates a totally different vibe for the recipient and I felt it his speech had a more powerful effect on me personally because I really had to focus on his words as opposed to seeing his speech accompanied by his posture, body language, and also how the audience was responding (I opted not to watch the muted speech on TV because the sound delay was a little distracting). So as my dad my say, I had an old school experience (excluding the fact it was being broadcasted from a computer as opposed to an "old school" radio) and it was really cool to listen to it with input from 20 other students and my professors. Although during the speech everyone was intently listening to the new President's first official address to the people as Commander In Chief.  I wish I had the ability to use language like President Obama does, his rhetoric is really unbelievable. 

It will be interesting to see now that we have such an internationally popular figure as President how the rest of the world will view Americans. Whether just or not, nobody can deny that the world's opinion of us, especially in the last decade has not been a favorable one. My room mate has already had a conversation with a total stranger, who approached her while she was running, about President Obama. He stopped her, gave her a hug, and told her how happy he was that we finally had a new President. I think it's safe to say that the general world population would agree with that statement.  The way the rest of the world views our country is important and we have elected a leader who for the most part has earned a lot of respect and hopefully will succeed in rebuilding our reputation domestically and abroad.

To completely change topics now, I signed up for an internship to help teach kids at a local elementary school english. I think the students I will be teaching are in 3rd grade, so they won't know too much english. The teacher said bringing songs, nursery rhymes, and things like that are usually a big hit with the kids, as long as the words are relatively easy to understand. I'm sure they will be able to help me with my italian as well. 

A lot of people in the program are traveling this weekend, but I want to stay here in Florence and do some more exploring before tourist season. Starting the first weekend in February my weekends will consist of non stop traveling until after spring break. Hopefully this weekend I will make it to some museums. Although tomorrow morning my art history class is meeting at The Uffizi (I still can't get over my art history lectures are on site at the works we are studying) and it will be my first time there. :)

Ciao for now