So walking down the street last night, reading a txt in a Italian so i was concentrating and then WHAM! walked straight in to a pole

I thought that walking in to a pole was hilarious. Giuseppe was with me and he just didn't say "watch out for the pole" because he just assumed that I would see it. I told him he should never assume things like that with me :P I cant believe he didn't laugh at me more, I was cracking up!

So it's now officially winter here and it's cold. Christmas is coming too but because it's cold and dark early at night it doesn't feel like Christmas at all. good thing I suppose because it means theres less time for me to miss Chrissy at home. I'm becoming more and more fluent in Italian and sometimes I don't even notice when I say something in Italian compared to in English. Very positive for me and it feels really good! and then school again getting better and better and everyone knows me by now.

So have had a good month. around the middle of November, Maxime, the girl from Holland, had her 17th birthday so we had a small party for that at her house with a couple of her friends from school and then us exchangees. Also saw New moon in Italian. Italian makes everything seem ALOT more dramatic. And the kids in the theatre would scream every time someone took their shirt off or something happened that was exciting. Got really annoying by the end but my friend, Titta, and I had great fun mocking them. About 2 weeks ago I had lunch with my Italian teacher and that was good, seeing in to the lives of different Italian families. And then the first Sunday after the end of October, Lorena and I went with my aunt and uncle to Naples to see the Christmas market. Naples is about 3 hours drive away from my town so it is the closest major Italian city to where I live. We left home around 7.30 in the morning and arrived in Naples around 10.30. We first went to the part of town where the market was held, had a look at the stalls, bought some souvenirs, had a look at some of the really beautiful churches around the area (these ones had frescoes covering the walls and ceilings. I have pictures of one and I will put them up on facebook and maybe a few in here) then got pizza (yussss! pizza in naples!) and went to the marina to eat it. Neapolitan pizza is definitely better than that stuff we have in Gravina and the stuff in Gravina is pretty good too. It was good to visit the sea again, smell the sea air and be around the water. I really miss it. After we had eaten we went for a drive around the Amalfi coast which is just south of Naples. It's an absolutely beautiful area. The drive was long though, winding in and out of the cliffs but it was worth it and again I have plenty of photos. Sometimes I think I'm secretly an Asian tourist with the amount of photos I take. We got home that night about 10.30 and it was a great day, seeing some more of Italy. The this Saturday my friend Massimo, who is a native of Denmark, and lives in a town about 3 hours south of me with AFS, came to visit for a few days. It was great to see him as we haven't seen each other since camp about 2 months ago. So Saturday night, Massimo Lorena and I went out for a drink, Sunday we went for a trip around my town and some pizza at Lorena and my favourite pizzeria(we frequent it about once a week) and Monday we tripped it to Bari for a day of shopping and meeting up with all the other AFS exchange students from around our area. In the end we had about 10-12 of us there. I got to see Ashika from NZ again and that was really good. Talking on Skype and hearing a kiwi accent in person is very different. We all had a great day and I think now that we have done this more trips with all of us together are sure to come. It's relatively easy to get to one another because of the train network, we just have to get permission from our parents to travel to the other towns, which is sometimes difficult for some. But it was a great day, wandering around, shopping, talking, and eating fast food (some of us haven't had it in 3 months!). We had Monday and Tuesday off for a religious holiday and we made the most of Monday for sure. other than that Lorena and I are forever going out. We never seem to run out of things to talk about and it actually feels weird to not talk to her everyday now, as we usually do. We know each other far to well now too and its nice to have someone there again who really knows me. I also do A LOT of baking for my family. When I get bored I bake for something to do and I have now made chocolate chip muffins, chocolate chip cookies, shortbread, pikelets and something that resembled lolly cake (it wasn't due to my shit baking, they don't have condensed milk in supermarkets here. They don't even know what it is).

So in the next month we have christmas. On the 24th we go to Mass at church and on the 25th we go to my Papa's mothers for lunch. And they don't celebrate boxing day so thats it. Maybe we will have another day in Bari or Matera with the exchange students and on the 23rd there is a Christmas party that Lorena, Maxime and I want to go to. We also finish school that day and have 2 or 3 weeks holiday, which I'm thoroughly looking forward to.

Write again after Christmas!
Ciao!!