I cannot believe that I have been here for 5 weeks already. It in no way feels like I have been here that long and I still find new things here every day. Yet it feels like I have been here a lot longer too. I feel very settled, getting to know people by name rather than just sight, and school is becoming just like school at home, relatively boring. At the moment, because I don’t understand much, I don’t really have much to do for the 6 hours that I have to sit in a freezing cold classroom. I will hopefully have a basic knowledge of French by the time I am back in New Zealand, which Douglas should be pleased about, because it’s one of the only subjects I understand. I also help with my English class and the English class of my Italian tutor (she teaches English to the students at school and Italian to me after school in private lessons). Giuseppe and I have the same English teacher and she wants me to go to his class sometimes but I am yet to do that. I have attempted to do economics and the economics they do here also includes accounting. Lucky the accounting they are doing at the moment is equivalent to the accounting I already completed in level 1 so it makes things easier to understand when the teacher is trying to explain to me in broken English.My art history teacher was also pleasantly surprised with my increased knowledge of Italian so I'm glad that it has become noticeable. But as of the start of November I will be changing timetables again (it’s already happened twice) to do simpler classes for French and Italian while having German, PE and English with my normal class. I will also have a multitude of free periods to do “individual study” but we all know that in NZ that codes for “mess around and do nothing” (unless things have changed in the last 5 weeks but I doubt it from the pictures I have seen on facebook :P) but I may actually use these ones to do homework so that I won’t have to do it at home. If I haven’t already I will again mention the fact that students here study for a living. It’s crazy. They go to school for 6 hours straight (to be honest they don’t seem to do much more work than I do in class, well my class anyway), go home for lunch, then study for another 2 or 3 hours straight. They do all this study because they have these things called oral interrogations and they are scared shitless about them. Basically what they are is the teacher randomly picks students to answer questions about the work they have been doing in class (but in class they have only really touched on it and most of the work has been done in study) and they are given a mark on their answer from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest. Generally only marks from 3 to 8 are given but if you get a bad mark (below 5) then its affects your entire year and you have to study like a demon until the next interrogation to get a better mark. From my understanding if you get too many bad marks then you may have to repeat the year. Now we all complain about NCEA being crap but in this instance I think we have the better system.
Now for an update about what I’ve been doing. There’s not really much to report apart from the visit to Milan and Como and camp in Castellaneta Marina. Life here is settling in to a nice rhythm. Get up, go to school, be bored for 6 hours, go home (it’s a long walk. The 100 metres round the corner from school is tough. I’d actually say climbing the 6 flights of stairs to our apartment is more difficult), eat, wash the dishes, be bored again for another 2 hours (unless I'm on facebook which is becoming more and more often) because everyone is studying, then do something in the evening, generally have an Italian lesson then go out with Giuseppe or Lorena, the girl from Paraguay also in Gravina, go home, eat and then sleep. I know it seems sad that I can predict my days like that but it is extremely comforting to know what I'm doing each day after a month of not knowing and getting used to things. I don’t feel stressed about it when I don’t know but I just like knowing stuff, having plans.
Well for starters, as most of you will already know, we went to Como for a wedding of one of the cousins on my Pappas side of the family. We didn’t actually see any of Milan apart from the airport (god I hate airports now) and the motorway (they have great motor ways in the north) because where we were staying was only 20km from Como which is about an hour north of Milan. The towns are called Ponte L’Ambro and Erba (they are really close to together and the family is spread between them) for any of you that want to have a squizz. They were absolutely beautiful and the scenery was very much like that of New Zealand, which actually set off a little bit of homesickness. We flew up on Wednesday 7th of October and flew home on the Sunday after, arriving in Milan at about 10pm and despite the fact that the drive home should have been about an hour, it took about 2 and a half because of some roads works on one of the lanes of the autostrade that held up all the traffic, and there was plenty, despite the time. So we eventually got to where we were staying in Ponte L’Ambro/Erba around 1ish and fell in to bed at about 2 – 2.30. It was an incredibly long day. On Thursday, we visited LakeComo which is a lot bigger than I expected. There are a lot of towns around the outside of the lake and it would take about 4 or 5 hours to go around the whole thing by a relatively fast boat without stopping. After a bit of a look around Como, we went by boat to one of the more famous towns on the lake, called Bellagio. It is one of the most authentic looking Italian towns I have seen so far (probably after Gravina which is about as authentic as you get) and is well worth the long boat ride to get there (2 hours one way but you can drive, it’s just better to go by boat because then you get to see all the towns, from the boat, along the way). So we had lunch there and then looked around and boated back to Como for another look there. And for Moni and Paige the best gelato flavour I have had here is yoghurt and berry. It tastes good with chocolate. I know that sounds really weird but it tastes great. On Friday we had the wedding and of course it rained. The only day it rained while we were there was the Friday, unfortunately for the bride. But she looked beautiful anyway as they always do. The ceremony was pretty standard to someone who didn’t understand anything but Giuseppe said that it was an evangelist ceremony (the couple are evangelists). The reception after pretty much consisted of eating for about 3 or 4 hours and then dancing for the rest of the night. There were like 6 courses from memory but they weren’t big portions so it was easy enough to eat it all when it was spread over such a time. I went home with the aunt (she speaks fluent English and is so lovely) we were staying with and her daughter around 10, but they told me in the morning that about an hour after we left, everyone was looking for me to sing an English song. Thank god I missed that one. I think if they heard me sing, they would be glad too. Saturday we didn’t do a lot apart from, you guessed it, eat. We went to the mother of the brides (my Pappas sister) house for lunch and then drove to the newlywed’s new house just outside Milan. It was a 3 room loft basically. VERY small. If they have a child they will have to move, that’s how small it is but from everyone’s reactions it was a relatively normal sized house for them to have moved in to. Sunday we only really went for a walk around one of the smaller lakes north of Ponte L’Ambro/Erba. It reminded me a lot of LakeMangamahoe but with paved cycle lanes and walking tracks around it. We flew home at about 6.30 pm that night, arriving in Bari around 8pm and back in Gravina at about 9pm to the very welcome sight of my bed.
Camp for 4 days in a seaside town in a 4 star hotel sounds like my sort of camp! Well it was fantastic. I loved mostly every minutes of it. The minutes I didn’t were the ones when I had to wait for the South Americans for vacate my room so I could sleep. They were in there because my roommates were friends with them. Now I didn’t mind having them in there for the first 2 nights because I wasn’t in there until a bit later anyway but on the third night I just wanted some sleep so I could function. Over the course of 3 nights I had 12 hours sleep. But the rest of the minutes were great. I got to see Taylor from Aussie, Julianne from Denmark and Ashika from Welly again which was awesome coz I really missed them. And no matter how much I love my friends in Gravina, they will never match up to being with other exchange students. There’s just that bond between them and the ability to be best friends after only knowing each other for a few days and the whole shared experience thing just adds to that. Unfortunately my friends from this camp (mostly Scandinavians and Americans who had just as shit Italian as I do. Go natural and just as good as natural, English speakers!) live south of me by about 3 to 4 hours so if I want to see them I have to convince AFS and my host family to let me go. The thing I enjoyed most about being with them though is that I could just not worry about anything. I didn’t constantly have to worry about someone not understanding what I said and what people would think about me (we are ambassadors for our country after all) and we also had a little more independence than I’ve had at home (not that I'm not independent I just like taking care of myself). We got given rooms, told times and we were the ones responsible for ourselves. So at this camp we did more orientation about being exchange students and adjusting to a different culture. But the free times were the times we all enjoyed most. I think most of us would have been happy with 4 days in a hotel together without any orientation, just hanging out. I doubt we would have gotten bored once. There were about 50 of us there from around the Puglia and Basilicata regions. We left about 8.30 am on Monday morning (18th October) and got to the hotel about 11 and left Thursday (22nd October) at about 2, arriving home at about 4.
Before camp we hadn’t really done much. The flu has done the rounds through the family and Michele and I were the last one to have it. I’d been going to school but it probably didn’t help it at all because it’s so cold in the class rooms. On the Friday and Saturday I wore 5 or 6 layers and still felt slightly cold (though that may have been the flu) and that was with merinos on. I'm not looking forward to winter at all if this is the sort of cold I'm going to have to sit through for 6 hours a day. And they say the south is warmer in winter. Phft! This makes New Zealand look like the tropics!
So after a very long post that has occupied my afternoon to write, I bid u adieu!
