Host family!!

Last week I found out who my host family is! Couldn't be more excited - I'll be staying in a small town of 4,000 (Monticello Brianza), 20-30 miles north of Milan and 15-20 miles southeast of Lake Como. It'll be a totally different experience from staying in the south, like I was expecting. That's probably a good thing - AFS hits you over the head with the message "don't have expectations", and I know much less (and thus many fewer stereotypes and generalizations) about life in the north.

My host family seems wonderful! I have two siblings - a brother named Luca, who's 27 (I'm not sure if he lives at home or not), and a sister named Maria Gloria. I'm especially excited to meet my sister, who has more or less the same name as me, and also happens to be only four days younger than I am! In the age of instantaneous communication, we've already started chatting over Facebook. Today I actually had a real-time conversation with her! But then I got nervous and decided that it was a good time to start getting ready for ballet... :) Having the chance to see pictures and talk a little about daily life is such a huge help for getting rid of the initial awkwardness and requisite ice breakers (I hope, anyway!). And I'm already getting a sense of the language barrier- my Italian is getting better every day, but it's still very minimal, and I don't think my host sister has very much English, but we've figured out ways to talk about food and school and what we do for fun. After looking up a few words, I finally managed to translate her note today saying that they've already gotten snow! Ah, well at least spring will come sooner there than it does in New England....

Benvenuti!

Welcome! I'm a high schooler from the US who will be leaving shortly to spend six months studying abroad in Italy as an AFS exchange student. Hopefully it will be a chance to learn the language, appreciate good food, good art, and good music, and learn how to live life like an Italian!

There isn't much to report yet...

Other students are starting to hear about their host family placements, so hopefully I'll be finding out soon! I was totally wrong about second semester students being placed in the south - everyone I've heard about has been placed in the north- so there go the dreams of escaping New England winters.

Learning Italian is coming along, albeit slowly. It's at least very amusing to make up new ways to practice- I think the people who pass me while I'm walking George might think I'm crazy, because I've started reading the numbers off of license plates to try to process their names faster. I'm counting on at least being able to follow what's going on in math class... And most recently, I've finally found a way to make use of the fifty-five minutes I spend every day translating Vergil with Mr. De Boo - a new Italian journal! Unfortunately my vocabulary and grammar are so limited right now that no one will ever be allowed to read it to tell if I'm actually writing things correctly. Hopefully eight months from now I'll be able to recognize all the grammar mistakes on my own.