So much to say!

Starting nowhere in particular, Thursday was absolutely amazing. My host parents had to go to Como in the afternoon to sign something for their insurance company, and afterwards we drove all around the lake that connects Como and Lecco. The lake is quite extensive though, so the road winds for miles and miles through little tiny towns (which by now exist solely through the life-blood of tourism), all perched precariously on the cliffs and mountains overlooking the lake. The weather was very luckily gorgeous - there will be pictures eventually, although there's no way they can possibly do it justice!

There have been lots of really interesting moments in the past couple of weeks that stem from being an American abroad at a very interesting time in American and global history. I have yet to meet anyone who isn't very, very enthusiastic Obama - and simultaneously, very, very strongly anti-Bush. But at the same time, everyone is worried stiff about the economic crisis. Italy's economic boom is relatively recent, especially in terms of how old the country is, and there are still a lot of areas of instability, which are compounded by rising immigration, high unemployment rates, and the fact that everybody is disatisfied with everything the government does. All the time. Pretty much without exception, at least for the small part of Italy that I've seen. So sometimes people just ask questions about American music and habits (and usually if we're all overweight or obese), other times they very, very directly confront you about America's role in creating the current crisis.

It was really neat in today's English class, though, because we started analyzing Obama's inauguration speech. The English teacher is very good - she studied in England for a few years, so she speaks perfectly, and most of the class is actually focused on literature (we've been reading Richard III, and are starting Macbeth next week), so you don't actually lose out on much being a native-speaker. And today we started talking about accents in the US and Italy, because la Maroni (the English prof), had read an article in Time about people in the US cultivating their accents to alter their effect on other people. Afterwards, I tried to teach the other students how to talk like an American trying to talk like an Italian, and then they taught me how to speak like an Italian trying to speak like an American but actually speaking like a British person, who's confused about their place of birth and may or may not actually be Italian. This continued all the home on the bus.... Bellissima!!

Now approaching the seven week mark, it's easy to say that pretty much all of the expectations I had about everything have turned out to be completely wrong. :) There's absolutely no way to anticipate how complex everything ends up being. For example, the last thing I expected is that living in a family would be the hardest part of the experience. But in fact, everything is going absolutely wonderfully except, at times, the relationship between me and my host mother. It's very easy to forget that we've only been living together for 7 weeks, so you don't have the 17 years of mutual understanding that goes unsaid between me and my own parents. And when I found out I would be living in the north of Italy, I immediately switched mind-sets and assumed that I would be with a family that was very cultured, very modern, and very mainstream-European. Instead, my host mom takes enormous pride in still making gnocchi by hand, nobody uses a drying machine for laundry, and one of the most difficult conversations with my host mom was trying to explain the concept of pre-made spaghetti sauce. And I've learned to appreciate the fact that there's a whole lot more to this style of life than simply wanting to be "quaint."

Lots of exciting things coming up!! Tomorrow I'm going skiing with Intercultura, although unfortunately I'm actually the only student going... Everyone else is away with their families or doing an exchange in another part of Italy (unfortunately apparently not an option for the semester students in my region), so it will just be me and the volunteers. Although it's all good because they're all really nice and young and enthusiastic, and I want to talk about the host family stuff. The only problem is the "skiing" part, since my only skiing experience was a total and complete disaster, on the daunting peaks of the Rhode Island mountains. So probably I'll be sledding in the Alps, instead of skiing. Tuesday my class goes to Florence for three days!! And Italians know how to plan their school trips, so there's lots of spare time for strolling through piazzas, in addition to all of the Renaissance art-devouring. Then the 18th birthday of Viviana, one of the girls in my class is Friday, and Saturday Serena and I are planning to go to Milan to see Peter Pan. In Italian!

If people want to write letters, my address is towards the bottom of the blog. :)

Baci a tutti!

I really should start writing more often - way too much happens and changes in the course of a two weeks that can possibly be contained in a single entry, if we're aiming for a length shorter than the fifth Harry Potter.

In fact, there's so much that could be said (and thus it would take way too much effort to organize all of it), here's another round of impressionism:

- kissing EVERYONE (well, more or less) on the cheek when you meet, and then again when you leave. Consider this situation: six friends meet at a pub, with two groups of three having traveled together. When the two groups meet, everyone who hasn't traveled together has to exchange kisses. The entire procedure must be then be repeated two hours later when everyone gets ready to leave. ......It turns into A LOT of kisses in a very short amount of time. It also means, though, that you immediately break through the ice when you meet someone for the first time. This includes friends of your host sister, host siblings of other exchange students, grandparents of your host sister, host parents of other exchange students, random other friends of friends of your host sister who you happen to meet at odd moments, and the occasional overly-enthusiastic canine. It also makes you particularly aware of how conscious Americans can be about the idea of "personal space."

- never wearing shoes in the house, always flip-flops. And occasionally forgetting that when I leave for school in the morning, causing my host mother to frantically yell "le scarpe!"

- oranges being red inside! Not orange!

- the fantastically amazing panorama from the church in Monticello, looking out in every direction from Milan to south, Torino to the west, and more mountains to the east.

- Carnevale! The streets of every city I've been to in the past week still show traces of all the confetti that's produced during the parades and parties. And now I have a tissue-paper lei and hula skirt which my host mother thinks I should bring back with me, since it took seven hours to make. So if you have need of a tissue paper hawaiian outfit, definitely let me know.

- The other exchange students! Saturday night a group of us met in Lecco for Sigrid's birthday, the girl from the Faroe Islands. We ended up eating in a Chinese restaurant, which was hilarious. We waited an hour and a half, because the restaurant was so small and there were so many of us, to go to "La Pagoda" and order dishes such as "spaghetti con sugo curry." Eating Italianized Chinese food at 10 o'clock at night with, among others, a girl from Hong Kong who hasn't eaten Chinese food for six months is, again, not an experience to be missed!

- Worms II. This is a truly amazing computer game that Maria introduced me to last night. Two players each have four small pink worms. The objective of the game is to eliminate the other player's worms, using weapons such as a flame thrower, teleporter, ninja star, Super Sheep, and rope. Bizarre, to say the least.

- Step Up II. Maria loves hip hop dance, and since it's a distinctly American art form, all of the television shows and movies about it are in English. So now those are my absolute favorite shows and movies, since I can actually understand them. Yesterday during Italian lessons, the boy from Ecuador tried to teach me how to do some sort of hip hop sliding move, but it was a decided failure...

- The profound grief that comes with the realization that, no matter how good it is, you can't possibly accept every offer for gelato that comes to you.

- World Year of Astronomy, enjoyed in true global style! Thursday night, Anna (a girl from my class) invited me to go with her, her mother, and her sister to the library in Merate for a lecture from the president of the National Italian Astronomy Association. Popular astronomy really doesn't change over time and space....

- So much pasta it's really kind of ridiculous.

- Starting to understand bits and pieces of the local dialect! Mainly, you just replace the endings of words with something that sounds kind of like "euhe"

- The fact that, yes, teenagers can drink, and the fact that it's in no way, shape, or form an issue, at least with the other girls in my class. Last Thursday, we went out to a pub in Merate (which in and of itself felt a little weird, since the pub is actually a Mexican restaurant, complete with fake totem pole in the middle). Before I had even started to consider the question of what to drink, Cecilia immediately said "no alcohol!" and started translating all of the descriptions of the non alcoholic drinks. But I was feeling very unwisely confident in my language ability, and assured her that I was fully capable of reading the menu myself. So, while the other girls were drinking things with names such as "Sex on the beach" (another language note: nobody actually noticed what this meant, except me - it's just considered really hip and cool to string English words together. If you're lucky, they might make sense gramatically), I accidentally ended up ordering grape-fruit juice (and also didn't pick up on the clues when Claudia said "ah, non mi piace, troppo acido". Quindi, my first night out in Italy was in a Mexican restaurant slurping grpe-fruit juice. :)

Ciao ciao!
Mary