Ask me what I really think
As I said, I went to the doctor last week to get a prescription. This is the doctor BU recommends we go to, and she has walk -in hours from 8:30 to 11. So my dad and I go at 8:15, hoping to be early in line so I can make it to my 9 am class…. not what happened. The waiting room is full to maximum capacity with really old italian women and other BU people. While we were waiting, a particularly mean old italian woman (who didn’t work there) started yelling at one of the other BU girls to take her feet of the couch. Jessie started apologizing profusely and this woman kept yelling that, “In italy we don’t put our dirty feet on the furniture and she should have learned some manners before coming to italy” and then after Jessie apologized over and over again, the woman very very rudely corrected her italian. If it were me, I would have like cried and left. I ended up waiting three and a half hours and missing a really important class to see a doctor who wasn’t particularly nice and spoke not a single word of english. First of all, if you’re sick and slightly nervous, it’s hard to speak italian. Second, we don’t really learn medical vocabulary in class, so going to the doctor is basically like taking a really difficult oral exam on top of what ever is wrong with you.
This one episode was certainly not the worst thing in the world, but the sum of all of these smallish things has started to really wear on me (and everyone else in my program) and is making me feel almost hostile towards Italy and Italians (just ask my dad how long I ranted about what a backwards screwed up country italy is that day) and I really don’t want to feel that way for five more weeks. It makes me really depressed to think of the possibility that this whole experience will have closed my mind instead of opening it.
