This is a picture of a picture that I have of our whole group 2 days after arriving here in Carpi. In this picture are also our directors from the US and our directors from Italy. Sorry it's blurry!! :(
Last night I set my alarm for 9:00 this morning because we didn't have school today due to it being a holiday. My body woke me up at 7:00 am anyways because that's what it's used to now. GREAT. Anyway, most of the shops were open and there was also a market in the square to celebrate the holiday where there were tons of people selling clothes, shoes, purses, flowers, housewares and many other things.
The past few days I've felt as though I've been exposed to a lot more of the Italian family dynamic. After meeting some of the other American's families last night, today we went to Alessandra's parents house for lunch. Her mother was out of town, but we had lunch with Grampa and 2 cousins, Georgia and Francesco (Frenchy for short). Grampa didn't speak English but we did the best we could to communicate using the little Italian and French that we know.
RANT ABOUT COMMUNICATION
Listening to entire conversations take place in a foreign language is an exhausting task. On top of feeling excluded because I don't understand, I'm constantly listening for words similar to French so it is always a cycle of translation. Italian to French to English, and by the time I understand what they're saying that part of the conversation is long past gone. I definitely am looking forward to being in France and only having to use 1 translation in my head, and I'm even more so looking forward to the USA if not only for that reason alone. It will be so nice to have a simple conversation not be such a mentally exhausting task.
END RANT
Back to today... While Alle prepared the lunch I went to walk around in the market. I bought a pretty black and white scarf for 1 euro!! And on my way back to the house to eat lunch I walked by an Italian man playing Dear Prudence on the guitar. I gave him 50 euro cent just because I love the Beatles and was in a good mood. After eating the pasta with salmon that Alle (short for Alessandra) prepared, I rode the grandmother's bike back to the house bacause Alle had to stay and help Frenchy with his homework and then go to dance until 7:30. So I went back and watched Now and Then. For dinner we went to a family friend's house. They have a young daughter around 9 or 10 who was very helpful and changed the TV to English so I could watch. Granted it was the Disney channel, but still very nice. (If anyone is interested, I just wanted to let you know, Disney Channel "in English" is really weird to watch. All of the voices are English but they either have an Italian accent or a British one. It's semi annoying. End of story.) The other daughter was a young teenager who said hello and turned back to Facebook and chatting on MSN without even telling me her name. This reminded me that no matter what language you speak, teenagers are the same where ever you go. Monica, their mother, made a delicious dinner of cheesy rice as well as ham and cheese on toast. This family's home was very different from ours because they live in the country about 10 km from Carpi. It's a very large house but they only seem to use half of it. And the rooms were either very empty of wall to wall with very old furniture. While we were there, the youngest daughter Francesca and Asia drew me a picture:
Now I am sitting on my bed doing this and trying to figure out my plans for the next week or so. I'm also getting really frustrated with the fact that all of the host parents are treating the Americans like we're 12. No, we don't really speak Italian but we aren't stupid because of it. It is a constant battle of reporting in to our host parents all the time (which for me is quite difficult because unlike most of the other students here they either had theirs from home or their host parents gave them one to use), having to be driven/taken everywhere, and not having any alone time for fear of offending the host family if you by chance want to watch a movie alone (in English!!) or something. Thankfully my host mom understands this a bit more lately and has been okay with me taking some time to myself because I've been tired and sick. I CAN say that I am glad that Alle and Andrea speak fairly well in English. Alison Wolfe's family came to the family pizza party and none of them really spoke any English. So she's having a harder time than most of us communicating with her family. I couldn't imagine being homesick, physically sick, stressed AND not even being able to speak English to my host family if I wanted to.
Anyway, tomorrow I will be teaching my lessons again so that should be fun. We're also going on a tour of one of the museums in Carpi in the afternoon, and a group of us are supposed to go out to celebrate the birthday's of a few of the girls tomorrow night. Also, some of us are also talking about maybe going to Verona on Saturday but we're not sure.
Write again soon! Ciao!
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