Lost in Translation: Pesce d'Aprile- APRIL FOOLS!

April 1st!!!!!!!!! Hope you played some awesome tricks on people today!

Today was also my coaches birthday, and last week we were told that we were planning a surprise party for him at our house after practice. BUT they neglected to tell us, or tell us so we could understand, that we had to make a dish to bring to the party, SO, upon waking up this morning, Maria reminded us that we had to bring a dish to the party. GREAT! Well with the stores being closed from 1-4pm, I had limited options for making something, and anything too elaborate was out, so I thought to myself, what are typical dishes that one would bring to a potluck? FRUIT SALAD!!! So at around 5pm I headed out to the stores to find the different fruits that I wanted to put into the salad. I got fresh pineapples, oranges, strawberries, apples, and kiwi. I sat down at the kitchen table and chopped up all the different types of fruits, everything was going great until I started to peel the oranges. Apparently I picked up RED oranges. I have never seen these before, but they are a huge thing in Italy, they have several different pops and juices made of red oranges. It was too late to go out and try to find orange oranges, so I just used the red ones. I finished making my salad just in time to get ready for practice.

Since today is Friday, we always have a talk with our coach before practice in the locker room about the team we are playing. Lynnea and I decided that we would play an April Fools joke on our coach and our team. We took a couple of our teammates outside with us to talk about it, and they agreed to help us! So after our coach got done talking about everything and was about to leave the locker room, Lynnea jumped out of her seat and screamed that she saw a mouse, and started pointing by me, so I swung my feet on the bench and the other girls involved did the same! Our coach jumped around and yelled and looked, and by the look on his face, WE GOT HIM! At the end of it, we yelled "pesce d'aprile" which literally means fish of april, which is the Italian April Fool's day saying. Read all about the traditional Pesce d'Aprile jokes. I really wish I was able to capture his expression on tape, it was HILARIOUS.

After practice, everyone came over to our house and sat in the kitchen to wait for our coach. It worked out perfectly that two of the girls in our house are kinda of sick, so we were able to call him over to bring medicine with our manager and he would come in and talk to the girls. Then when he got the the kitchen, we turned on the lights and all yelled surprise! haha poor man, got surprised twice in one day! It was tons of fun, everyone ate; I got kind of worried because nobody was eating the fruit salad or "macedonia" as they call it, but then I remembered from my kiwi experience, that Italians usually eat fruit after the dinner and before the sweets. Sure enough, after dinner, they headed for the fruit salad, and they LOVED IT!!! Everyone seemed to be having a great time, my coach was joking around with people, and dancing, it was really funny to seem him this way!

What a successful April 1st in Italia!