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....