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