Tomorrow marks one week in Monticello!

I've been really lucky and don't start school until Monday, so I've had a week to get to know my host family and learn their routines and habits, and to desperately attempt to learn as much Italian as possible. The best part? I'm learning Italian mainly by reading Twilight! Oh yeah. And I think sometime soon Maria and her friends are going to watch the movie (in Italian), so I'll get the full dual-language Twilight experience.

Thursday was the AFS Intercultura welcome party for the second semester students! We had to drive to Lecco, which is only 20 kilometers away, but distances are kind of misleading here because even though Italian drivers are ABSOLUTELY CRAZY, totally putting Rhode Island drivers to shame, the roads are so curvy it still took 30-40 minutes to get there. Everyone was crammed into the kitchen, and we met all of the year students, host families, and liasons. There's a girl from the Faroe Islands (!), and a girl from Hong Kong who lives just a few minutes away. There are two other new students, one from New Zealand and another from Columbian, and I think there are 8 or 9 of us in all.

Last night I met my host dad's parents, who live in a town called Osnago, near Monticello. AND OH MY GOODNESS IT WAS AWESOME. The town itself is like 1000 years old (I think - all of this information was delivered in Italian, so the margin for error is, hem hem, very very high), and the house where i nonni live has a room with walls preserved from the 1400s. Che bellissima!!! My host dad has seven brothers and two or three sisters, so the house (which is right in the middle of the town) is basically an entire building overlooking a courtyard inside. And one brother runs a pasticceria (a bakery), so to go upstairs to kitchen, you walk between the shop and the pasticceria kitchens. And oh man they make some truly amazing chocolate cream puffs.

Two days ago I got up the courage to ask my host mother if I could go for a walk, since I do it all the time at home in the US and the area around the house is mainly fields and little narrow roads. Except that then she asked what I thought was "you won't get lost, right?" and so I nodded cheerfully and said "certo!" (certainly). But apparently she was actually asking something more like "But won't you get lost?" So that didn't really work out. But then she offered to walk with me, so we ended up walking into the center of town, and because then it started raining we ran into the Gruppo Alpini building, which is (again piecing things together from what I could pick out of my host dad's explanation) a branch of the Italian military which does something in the Alps. Google to the rescue! Anyway. So downstairs there's a bar which was filled with older men chatting and drinking coffee, and upstairs is the club office, where my host dad is the secretary. The walls are covered with Alpine hats and the whole building looks like an Alpine hunting lodge - it's a really interesting contrast with the rest of the buildings and town. And then my host mother started speaking the local dialect, Brianzolo, with an older man who was also upstairs working. That was really cool, because you can hear all of the French and German inflections. The only word I know is "nem!" which means the same thing as "andiamo!", or let's go! And like some of the older people in town, this man doesn't actually speak Italian, only the local dialect. But sadly the language is dying out - Luca and Maria can understand it, but they don't speak it, which is true of pretty much all the younger people here.

I'm going to go keep reading Twilight.... :)

A presto!
Mary