Postius I might actually be Deadius (aka Postius about Romius 2)

Reasons I might actually be deadius; I haven't blogged in so long it's a reasonable conclusion or if I don't blog soon my parents might actually kill me.

Our second day in Rome we headed to the Vatican and Basilica di San
Pietro. Now Rome has an extensive train/metro system, it's made up of
two metro lines in a vaguely cross shape and then seven train lines,
the whole thing on a map looks kinda like this:

Vatican City is sort of below, between orange metro stops Cipro and
Ottaviano-S.Pietro. I have no idea where we got off but we did lots of
walking to get there. And it was very hot. And we were wearing
Pope-worthy covering clothes (or for those of us who weren't; carrying shawls). When we finally arrived (by way of
someone other than Manny navigating) we then had the debate of who
wanted to go where; a few of the girls had already been to the
Basilica or the Vatican Museum so all of us going to one was going to
be boring for someone. In the end most of us ended up deciding to go
to the Basilica leaving Manny and a few others to go to the museum or
shop until we were finished. Going to visit Basilica di San Pietro on
a Sunday; not advisable. Entry is however free on Sundays, this could
possibly be why the crowd was off the hook, but that could also have
been because we were in Pope-ville, on a Sunday. This is what Piazza
San Pietro looks like:

this lovely image is from GoogleMaps

Now imagine the whole thing as a watch face so I can explain how busy
it was. Entry is at about 11 o'clock, you can see the little rat-race
thing there, and 6-8 was under construction or getting painted or
something so it was all blocked off. The line started at the rat-race,
went clockwise until it reached 6 o'clock and them doubled back to
about 5 o'clock, that's where we got in it. It's safe to say we got to
know each other quite well while we were in at line, in the middle of
the day, with little shade.

Malin, Mollie & Chloe

Mollie

Mollie, Maria, Elina

Ellie, Malin, Tash, Elina, Mollie, Chloe

By the time the we'd got to 6 o'clock and then all the way back to 4
o'clock we'd been in the line for 40/45 minutes. At this point the
Pope appeared. Well in theory it was the Pope, a window opened in the
top of a building and a little red carpet was draped out it and then
an old man appeared and started talking. It was actually rather
impressive he talked in Italian, French, German and English but I'm
not sure what else. It could have been a puppet or a stunt double, but
it was probably the Pope. A fantastic thing happened while the Pope
was talking (which he did for quite a while). A whole bunch of people
in the line decided that they'd be better able to hear him if they
stood in the middle of the Piazza, this in fact is probably not true
as there where speakers all the way around but anyway, and just
abandoned waiting. This means that when it hit an hour of us being in
line we were well around and just a little shy of reaching 12.

Pope

When you get to the edge of the rat-race it's a little deceiving; you
think you're almost through, when in actual fact it just fills up with
people and smooshes you together like sardines. There is actually one
good thing about this, it means that you can duck into the shade of
other people's umbrellas while you wait. Once you've gone through
airport style security it thins out quite a bit and you're free to
wander around the the Basilica. It's really rather huge, but
personally I didn't think it was that impressive (other than the
size).

Obligatory 'I'm in the Basilica' photo

After we'd had a good look around it was getting close to the
time we were supposed to meet up with the others so we had a decision
to make; postpone meet up and wait in another (seemingly unmoving
line) to go to the top of the Basilica or trudge off to find water,
the others and food. There was only me and one other girl who really
wanted to go to the top, and the rest refused to stand in line any
more, wanting to sit down and eat rather than wait an extra hour and
be able to say they looked down on Rome from the top of the Pope's
Basilica. So we headed out. Into a practically empty piazza. Moral of
the story; if you want to visit the Basilica, go at 1pm (and don't
chicken out of going to the top just because you're tired).
After we'd refuelled and had another lengthy discussion about where we
would go next we headed off to find Trevi Fountain (deciding not to go
to the Vatican Museum because we didn't have time to look at it all
before it closed). Somehow we though it was a good idea to walk there,
but it really wasn't. It's only 2.5km and straight most of the way but
somehow we managed to get very lost and despite the fact Manny kept
asking for directions (from shop owners) we ended up having to back
track quite a bit. We eventually fount it, did the obligatory money
throwing and picture taking before getting gelato and heading off back
to to hotel nap, and get ready to go back into central Rome for
dinner.

I've now also added the photos to 'Postius about Romius 1'

Postius i went on a cruiseius

I've spent the past week on a Boat Cruise around the Greek Island area, contrary to the information on the company's website the freewifi cost 10euro/hour and thus what i though would be a productive blogging time turned out to be useless =C

there will be a blog coming in the next few days with more stuff about Rome, but in the mean time this is a Vlog (a video log = vlog, like a web log = blog) about the cruise i've just been on. The Critter Chronicles is a collaborative youtube project that I am doing with my best friend and her younger siblings based on what Hank and John Green have been doing for the past 4 years with Brotherhood 2.0 and now the Vlogbrothers. I won't go into more detail here but if you are interested in learning more about it our blog to go with the youtube channel can be found here.

Sorry, hiatus again =C

Domani mattina io vado al mare con Sele e suo fidanzato. dunque non posso aggiornare prima Domenica sera, mi dispiace =C

tomorrow morning I go to the sea with Sele and her boyfriend. Meaning I cannot upload before Sunday night, I’m sorry *sad face*

I will how ever be attempting to write some while I am there (hopefully I’ll be more successful than last time we were al mare). We are training and it's 4 hours each way so I’m hoping to write some then as I don’t feel like reading my book the whole time because then it will be finished. Mum only gave me two in the US and I’ve already finished one as we've spent a whole day at a water park and a half day at the pool, and apparently you don’t actually swim the whole (or even the majority of the) time you are there, you just spend the whole time trying to get as much skin cancer as possible. I refused to and thus wore LOTS of sunscreen and hid in the shade, I was the only one not bright pink at the end of the day.

I’m off to grumble at the internet in an attempt to load this before packing and then settling down for some nighnighs

Postius about Romeius 1

I'm currently sitting in the airport at Paris on the way home from FPS in America and BOY has it been a long time since I’ve written a blog! I’m very sorry I’ve just been so busy and so tired I just haven't gotten a chance before now.

Right so now we go back 2 ½ weeks to May 28^th, the day I headed to Rome with Chloe. We had tickets on the frecciarossa, a fast train that, that meant it would only take us 4 ½ hours instead of 9+. The train was leaving at 8.25 and then Corrado was on a 9 o'clock train to Venice so Sara said she would drive us to the Lingotto metro station and then Corrado would metro with us to Porta Nuova and make sure we got on the train ok. Designated leaving from house time was 7.45. At this time, and In fact at even 5 to 8 Sara was washing the dishes from breakfast while Chloe, Corrado and I were hovering on the doorstep. It turns out that Sara thought our train left at 8.45 and so was in no rush for us to leave. Once Corrado corrected her we drove slalom style to the metro stop, ran down the steps and made it onto a metro that left just after. Then, when we got to Porta Nuova we had to go up from the metro stop to the train station above, normally there is and escalator/staris from the inside of one to the other. However when we legged it up a massive flight of stairs it was to find that these were closed and thus we had to leg it up another set of stairs before running through the station, finding our platform and then running down that until dudes started blowing whistles at which point Corrado stuffed us on the train and said we'd have to find our carriage from in there. It was a very exciting and overly stressful start to the weekend.

By the time we managed to find out seats I had a dry rattly cough and wheezed if I breathed to deeply, I believe my comment to Chloe at the time was “I'm never running again in my life” her response was “would you like to use my asthma puffer” followed by “at least you wore your hiking boots not flats”. We swapped seats with a family of three so they could sit in the group of four chairs together while we sat in a 2 and didn't have to worry about annoying anyone else. The trip to Rome was rather uneventful; Chloe and I chatted for a while before she settled down to sudoku and I started studying 'emergency planning' for FPS. The only other vaguely interesting thing I can remember is when we got to Florence Chloe decided she wanted to get off the train and stalk the cast of 'Jersey Shore' I told her that was a stupid idea and I was in the isle seat so she couldn't really get up anyway.

When we arrived at the train station in Rome we discovered that neither of us actually had a phone number for Manuella, the lady from Mondo Insieme (my Italian exchange company) who was taking us around Rome. And now, before anyone starts raving about the lack of organisation or back up plans or anything; Chloe had the number on her phone or one of her SIMs (she has two, both Italian but one with better rates for calling overseas). When we checked through her phone and both the SIMs to get the number it had some how managed to get lost so we were numberless. We headed to the platform we remembered some information we revived telling us to wait but couldn't find Manuella or any other exchange looking students. In the end I texted Sara who had Sele text me the number. When we finally got hold of Manuella it turns out she was waiting two platforms down from where we were at 12 not 10 (I’m still very sure the information said 10, especially as some of the others got lost too).

We had a little wait in the station while we waited for everyone to arrive from their various locations. In the end we had Me and Chloe from Torino, Tash from Vasto (on the opposite coast from Rome), Mollie and Ellie (two Kiwis) from Naples (or just outside), Marlin and Karoline (Swedish and Norwegian) from Sicily and Helene (another Norwegian), Elina and Maria (both Finnish) from I can't remember where. And of course Manny, how we arrived at this nick name is a story I shall tell later.

The hotel we were staying wasn't actually in the center of Rome but was a little way out (I’ve no idea if it was in fact technically in Rome, it appears that were we'd say something was in another suburb they say its the next town). To get there we had to metro and then get off and walk a little way to a train stop and get on a train and THEN walk for about 5 mins to get to the hotel, all with our bags, oh yes! And also with Manny, who has a rather.....lacking sense of direction, leading us. We ended up spending rather a while sitting in the train station, while we waited for a train that stopped where we needed to go, this wasn't really the end of the world because we just spent the whole time chatting and getting to know each other which was really great.

On the outside our hotel looked like a total dump, faded paint and water stains and so everyone was grumbling that Manny was useless (this also has to do with the fact that several of the trains we didn't get on because they 'didn't stop at our station' did in fact stop at our stop). Inside however the hotel was perfectly fine, the rooms were small but really, why do you need to have a big luxurious room? We're in Rome to do Rome things and explore Rome, not live in the hotel room. We dumped our stuff, spent a while just chilling and then headed back into Rome for a mini exploration then dinner. 3 min walk, traffic light, 3 second walk, traffic light, 2 second walk, traffic light, 2 min walk, 10 second stair descension, and that's just to get to the platform for the train. Right so get on the train, for.... I’m not really sure how long, it was long enough that we wanted to get a seat but we always seemed to almost miss it so it can't have been too long... then for the trek from the train platform to the metro there were about 5 stair cases/ escalators you had to go down then a 2min walk to the metro entrance and then another 3 sets of stairs to get to the right platform. Yeah Rome real organised!

We headed into Piazza di Spagna where there is a huge set of stairs that lead up to a church at the top. Unfortunately dusk/sunset isn't the best time to visit here if you want to take pretty pictures, and there were LOADS of people, but here's a picture anyway:

We then went on a bit of a walk to have a look at things, Manny wouldn't let us into any shops which was amusing for me and annoying for most of the others. Right so Manny; she's quite petite (as in she's shorter than me) she always wore elegant cloths, at night she always wore heels (as in stilettos) even when we had planned extensive cobblestoned walks and she was always telling us to act like 'laaaaaaidies'; 'oh no girls don't do that, it's not ladylike, if you don't act like a lady no man will be interested in you'. Yeah we found this absolutely hilarious and tried to do as many unladylike things as possible, then when she went to tell someone they weren't acting like a lady we'd jump in with 'laaaaaaaaidy' (if you've seen Little Brittan you'll understand).

We eventually found a pizza joint to eat at, but as you can imagine walking into a small pizzeria, in a popular tourist destination, at a peak eating hour with eleven people it's kinda difficult to seat you all together. So we ended up with two tables about as far apart as was physically possible. We were supposed to be mingling but we didn't do a very good job deviding for tables, I ended up with the two Finns, a Norwegian and Manny near the door and everyone else was over in the opposite corner. After we'd finished eating and done some (not very) complicated math to split the bill we headed off to another near by piazza. I actually have absolutely no idea the name of the piazza we were in but there was a pointy monument thing and castleyish building behind it, I’ll get back to you. Put 10 teenagers in a relatively unpopulated piazza towards the end of the night and silly photo teimz ensue:

Maria, Helene, Karoline & Malin

Manny & Chloe

Malin, Ellie & Natasha

Mollie & Chloe

Manny, Chloe, Mollie & Ellie

So obviously I’m not in the airport at Paris any more, I’ve actually been back for two weeks, oops! More of an explanation about how I’ve been 'using' my time will come in a later post. Also keep an eye out for more about Rome, we did SO much there is no way I could get it into one reasonable sized post so you can have several. Hopefully the rest will follow in the next few days.

(mum has alerted me to a possible reason for my blogger not working at night as an issue with blogger not functioning well with Google Chrome which is the internet browser I use, thus tonight I am running a competition between GC and Internet Explorer to see which will function/let me upload first. If I am still having some issues, please check back tomorrow or later today for any images that don’t upload tonight)

Updatius I got interrogatedius

I’ve actually been interrogated twice, and had a conversational Italian test. My first interrogation was last Thursday with Religion. Susi had organised with the Prof.ssa that I would just remember some information and tell it back to her rather than have to answer any questions. I’d researched about the '39 articles of religion' that are (you guessed it) 39 articles that state what makes Anglicanism different from Catholicism and then simplified down all the information so I could use Google translate to get it into Italian. Then all I had to do was remember it all so I could say it back to the teacher. I spent a while on Wednesday night and all of the bus and metro ride to school on Thursday reciting it until if I went very slowly and thought rather hard I could get through it without looking at the sheet. I decided that I would write some bits on my hand, a couple of words from each section to prompt me where I got stuck. This was more because if I wrote them on my hand I knew I’d remember what I’d written rather than with the intention of reading them off, because somehow that's just how my brain works.

I’d spent the whole time I was practising imagining that I would be sitting up the front of the class with the teacher at her desk telling the information to her and possibly Ila & Susi, like every other interrogation has been. This however was not the case. Religion is the only subject you can choose to take or not, most of the class does not. This was also the last assessment for the year which meant that there wasn't anything for the class to go on with while the teacher interrogated us (normally you read the textbook, do physics equations, text, sleep or leave the class). So small class + last assessment = teacher interrogating us in font of the whole class from our normal seats. While I knew that the whole class would be listening to mine anyway it somehow seemed much more of a big deal when it was officially in font of the whole class =S

I was the second person to go (after Ila) I went veery slowly and attempted to get my pronunciation right, but I used my notes a lot more than I was when I had been practising before school. There were apparently a few bits where the translation was really strange, but I don’t see why because I checked over how google translate did and I thought it was ok. meh. The rest of the class went after me but I honestly don’t really remember any of their stuff. This is partly because they were talking waaay to quickly for me to understand a topic I didn’t already know but mainly because I was having a mini die after doing mine.

Normally after an interrogation you give your little marks book to the teacher and they write in the mark you get but because we weren't sitting up the front with the teacher this time we didn’t do that. I don’t actually know how she announced the marks because I didn't even know she had until Susi asked if she could write my mark down for me. I got at 10. all the marks here are out of 10. It's very exciting! The Prof.ssa for Religion is really nice and at the end of mine her comment was something like 'see you can speak Italian, you must do it more' so I’m sure that my uber high mark was in part because I had put in the effort to do it in Italian because I didn't cover the information in very much depth.

I’ve actually been doing rather well at school here, in the subjects that I’ve been doing at least. I’ve got a mark back for one of the two Matematica tests I’ve done and I got 7 ½ and I got 8 in both the Fisica tests I’ve done, in one of them I only got one question wrong and I think it was because I had no idea which of two values it wanted me to find so guessed and did one and it was the wrong one. I also got and 8 in Inglese Letteratura, I’m not a fan of English lit here... it was a test on 500 years of English history and then like one page of the text book was on the medieval ballad. I had another English lit test yesterday (friday if I don’t get to put this up straight away) that I only found out about the day before...yeah the teacher seems to enjoy saying when the assessments are very quickly in Italian.

So my other interrogation was for History, Storia. After ignoring me for the first two months that I was in her class the teacher came up to me one day and declared that I have to get a mark. And instead of choosing the option I had a better chance of being able to actually do well in she decided that she was going to interrogate me. She also chose a very boring topic for me to study, the EU, and declared that I had to find all the information by my self. I’m not a big fan of this Prof.ssa, she changed that date that I was going to be interrogated about 5 times and every lesson she told me something different, you have to do it in Italian, the English teacher will come and translate for you, what are you talking about the English teacher's not coming. urgh, I was not pleased. And then beucause she didn’t give me any information like she said she would I had no idea what depth I needed to learn things in and if I was just supposed to learn the history of the EU or if I needed to know how it functined and the complicated election system and politics and stuff... in the end I when with just attempting to learn the history of it in English because she seemed to think she would be able to understand me enough.

Then when I went to actually do the interrogation she got all confused when I started answering her in English. Urgh she has quite surprising memory problems for a history teacher. We got about half way through when she started asking me unhistory related questions and trying to get me to answer in Italian, so we just spent the rest of the 25ish mins of the class not doing my interrogation and chatting. She asked what type of school I went to in Aus (in Italy there are different high schools that have a science or classical etc. focus) so I had to explain that we didn't have types of schools. Then we went into what subjects that I did and once she eventually realised that I’d never studied the EU before she asked what we studied in History. Upon hearing that I’d studied WWII she asked me when it started and finished, da millenovacento tretanove a milenovacento quarantacinque, and then because I could say numbers in Italian she randomly asked me when I was born...

When we changed the seating plan for the class, more than a month ago now, the two sweetest girls in the class, Elena and Giu Rosso, ended up in the centre front seats. So they continued to listen to my 'interrogation' after most of the rest of the class stopped, then halfway through the Prof.ssa asking me random questions Elena asked if she was allowed to ask me one. She asked something along the lines of 'this summer what do you do/why do you go to the United States?'. I’m going for the FPS, Future Problem Solving, internationals, if you've ever heard me try and simplify and explain FPS before you'll know that it's not a very simplifyable thing, now try doing that in Italian. My response was something like 'I’m going for one week for a 2 hour exam and the rest of the time I spend time with students from all the world' but obs in Italian, the next question was what subject is the exam on, that's the most difficult question with relation to FPS, it's on everything but not really and in the end I think I managed to explain it was written problem solving and that it's on most subjects but I’m not really sure.

At the end of the lesson I took my marks book up to the Prof.ssa so she could give me a mark and she was like 'oh we didn’t finish, I’ll give you a mark after we do the other half next week'. Stupid annoying lady that is not inconveniencing me because she got distracted, urgh!

The Italian teacher came on Thursday and took me out of my 2 hours of Italian in other classed to give me a test. There was a listening section that I did ok with, a writing section that I did not that well on because I didn’t know the majority of the words so when you have to fill in the blanks with words from a list I just guessed and a conversation section. There were two parts and each one had a choice of two questions. The first was between 'go to the farmacia and get drugs to fix these symptoms' and 'go and buy a wedding dress', I went to the farmacia, which turned out to be a good plan because I 'walked in' said 'I have *insert list of symptoms* can you help?' and then just listened to the Prof.ssa say thing for the rest of the time. It was very cute, I decided that I had to get in some Italian so I asked how much it cost and if I could please have a bag, she found this quite amusing.

The second section had two options but the Prof.ssa decided that we were going to do the one where we talk about food or cooking or something, I think she just wanted an excuse to find out about Australian food. So we ran through what type of food do you eat, what's a taditional Australian dish, what do you have for breakfast etc. I was pretty happy with that topic of conversation because food is actually something that I can do.

Right now I’m in a train with Chloe on our way to Rome for 3 nights with the Italian exchange company Mondo Insieme, we're just passing through Firenze (Florence) and I’m fighting Chloe to make her stay on the train rather than get off and stalk the Jersey Shore cast or something, they are apparently filming here. There is WiFi on the train (we are on a frecciarossa train) but we cant work out how to use it, it seems that you have to pay or something but in order to understand the website enough to do that we need to use google translate. I shall write about our exciting adventure getting to the train and the train ride another time (but they will probs go up together) because I’m now going to pack up my laptop and get onto some study for FPS.

I am aware of the EXTREMLEY long time since my last blog post, and I apologise for it. This update has been sitting on my computer, completed, for almost a week and a half. Unfortunately I don’t have another that I’ve written in that time because for the past few weeks I’ve been trying to split my time between studying for FPS, studying for school, writing in my travel diary and writing blog posts. Unfortunately the last two have lucked out most of the time. Since I wrote this post I’ve spent 4 days in Rome, gone to school for a day, spent 4 days in Venice and then had one more day at school. Tomorrow morning I get up early to leave the house at 5.30am to get to the airport for my 7.15am flight to America. I hear you saying that the 12 ½ hour flight would be a good opportunity for me to get out some more blog updates but I am dedicating it to FPS study as 'Emergency Planning' seems to be a rather complicated topic. The flights on the way home aren't really designed to allow me to be productive, I leave at 3pm and arrive at 8am so I’m not sure I’ll get much written then but while I’m in America I’m missing the last few days of school so when I return I will have some hard core blogging sessions and catch up on all the things I’ve neglected.

Updatius I had a Birthdayius!

Oh yay, in the time since I wrote my last blog post I had a birthday, now I’m writing to you a whole year older. Well no I’m really only 16 days older, that's one of the main things that annoys me about birthdays; I’m not suddenly a whole year older. All the maturing and growing and changing doesn't all just get dumped on you every 365 or 6 days. The fifth of May is just like any other day, like the 4th of May or the 6th of May or the 12th of August. Everyday your one day older, everyday you learn something new, every day you grow a little; it might be your bones, it might be your hair, it might be your brain; something changes every day. To all those people that wait until midnight to shout "It's your birthday", well done, you are correct,  just please don't follow that sentence with "You're a whole year older" because you're not. Yes its the day of your birth, but you're one day older than you were yesterday, 1 hour older than you were 60 minutes ago, 1 minute older than you were 60 seconds ago but you are not, suddenly, a whole year older. And if you are going to get into the whole "Oh my, you're a whole year older" thing you may as well wait until 10.20am GMT+8 time, just to be accurate (we are of course ignoring the little irregularities where the days get longer and shorter and there are leap years and leap seconds and earthquakes and tsunamis).

Well that was quite an awesome introduction, if I can say so myself. I don't want to write any more of a post now because it wont match up to the awesomeness of that introduction =C. Oh well, here it goes!

Birthday morning I tiptoed down stairs, just after getting out of bed, to turn on the internet's wireless router with the intention of checking my emails knowing mum would complain if I didn't get and reply to her's before school. Instead of checking my email I spent the 45 mins between turning on the internet and leaving the house to catch the bus Skyping with mum. It appears she set an alarm so she could be on the computer as soon as I got out of bed. It was nice but made getting ready for school slightly difficult, fortunately I can multitask almost anything with talking so it wasn't that huge of a problem.

It was Thursday so I had Religion first with just under half of the class. We were in the computer lab researching in groups our allocated religion/religious sect. I am in a group with Suzi and Ilaria, we are researching the Anglican Church. My interrogation is this Thursday (yes an interrogation, the first of 3 or 4 I must complete in my 10ish remaining days of school). Susi was the only one in the class that even had a vague idea my birthday was coming up soonish and I was happy not to remind her. The next hour we were back with the rest of the class, but the teacher (for science) wasn't there, so they spent most of the lesson chatting while I read Harry Potter e la piertra folosfale (I don't think I've mentioned it previously; I went to a book shop and bought HP1 in Italian. I'm currently 1 chapter in and have written down 250ish new words to learn). Clod (who I now sit next to, we changed the seating arrangement) remembered half way through the class and proceeded to wish me a 'happy birthday' before announcing it to the class to which I received lots of 'auguri's' while I hid in my hands (less than normal I will have you note!)

I like to play games to see how long it will take people to remember/notice things (like me having my braced off, which took all but one of my friends until recess, TWO HOURS into school), for someone I've only known for a few months I think Clod did quite remembering only 30 mins into our first class together. She cannot however beat one of my friends in Perth, Catriona, who walked up to me before school in 2009 with an envelope, said "is today your birthday?", gave me the envelope and walked off to unpack her bag before school. That was epic. I hadn't mentioned anything about my birthday at all, she just walked up, gave me the envelope and walked off leaving the other friends around me in a stunned state of 'omg, today's your birthday?'.

I don't remember anything else interesting happening at school that day so I'm just going to assume the rest of it was a normal Thursday at school. When I got home from school, I talked to a friend, the Kuostar, on Skype for a while, then ate half my lunch before talking to Dad and Tibs, then just Tibs on Skype. By the time I finished that it was past 4 in the arvo and the second half of my lunch had magically disappeared somewhere so I gave up and decided to just hang out to dinner. For dinner we had lamb because when Sara asked if I liked it (to prove that Sele is strange for not) I said that I did and eating lamb was kinda Australian.

In the afternoon Sara set about making a torta for my birthday cake. It was a sort of sliceish thing with jam in the middle. She made one with plum jam made by Nonna Giovannini and another with store bought apricot fam. We had rather a dilemma about what candles/numbers to put on the top as they had practically every number except and 8 (and possibly there was no 2 either). In the end we were coming up with interesting ways to get to 18 via addition, we had 17 and 1 at one point but my personal favourite was 3177. In the end we went with 93 up the front (my birth year in case you didn't know/can't add) and three 6 candles. It looked something like this:

I am not sure how I managed it but some how I have forgotten to tell you that Sara's friend Carman came over on Wednesday evening to 'spend some time on my hair'. She attempted to curl it with a straightening iron, I say attempted because it worked fine up until she split the curls at which point it just turned into normal person wavy hair, I found it rather amusing. I think it was supposed to be a sort of birthday gift, some how appeasing my intense desire to have straight hair. Yeah, I'm not really fussed that my hair is slightly mad, it has character, but having straight hair was rather a novelty. The thing I wanted to do was tie it in a ponytail that would hand down and swish rather than a giant pompom velcroed to the back of my head. Yeah, it's definitely a novelty. In fact, keeping on the novelty track (and jumping to Sunday) I got bored after watching a You Tube tute on what Tibs did to her hair to go our one day and gave myself (semi-fail) Victory Curls. I have only crappy webcammy photos of it and the weren't that good so you'll just have to wait until I have straight hair again for a photo of it.

For my birthday party we decided to invite people over to the house for an afternoony teaish thing. Sara decided that Friday would be a good day for this. As it turns out the majority of my class does sport on Friday afternoons. No-one told me this until Thursday evening which was a pain but anyway, we decided to go out the next Saturday night. So on Friday we ended up having only a bunch of Sele's friends and the other Aussie exchangie in Torino, Chloe, come but it was still fun. We spent a while playing card games with the Briscola cards that Chloe got me for my birthday, and then Sele, her friends and Tancredi got up and danced to a bunch of songs which was hilarious! I collected Chloe from the Centre on my way home from school and when we got home Sara excitedly came up to me with a little paper bag. When I opened it up it had a candle, a little stand and a 1 and an 8 in it. She'd gone out and bought them so we could have the right numbers on my torta/cake this time.

Right so, last thing I write about before I go nighnighs; what I got for my birthday. So as I said before Chloe gave me a set of Briscola cards, Sele gave me a pair of jeans, I'm wearing them at the moment so it's too difficult to organise a photo of them but I'll let you know when they make an appearance in another photo. From Sara I got a silver necklace with a black cat on it. From Nonna Irma and Nonna Aldo I got a lovely bunch of roses (which I stupidly didn't get a photo of =C), a wooden jewellery box and a little coin purse. My host cousin, Bianca, gave me a pair of shorts. Tibs is organising to get me a sciencey computer game where you build molecules an stuff, which sounds really cool. Mum and dad gave me a pair of Dr Who boxers (as an early present), a CD and some wool and a crochet hook (as a late present because it took forever in the post) and I get my more serious present when I see them in America for the Future Problem Solving Internationals in three weeks (oh my god that's soon!). Explanation about the wool and crochet hook; I said that I needed to do something with my hands because I am a do-ey person and all this learning a new language is brainy stuff and I'm not doing anything. And thus Mum has given me the means where by I must relearn how to crochet.

Actually, no! I think I will briefly write about what I did with my class mates too. We went out to a pizza place and this thing called 'pizza giro' which is really just like all you can eat pizza; you pay a fixed price and they just keep bringing out pizza to your table in waves until you tell them to stop. It was quite fun. There ended up being 15 of us which is about all the people I've vaguely had anything to with, minus a couple who had something else on or were sick. I had Happy Birthday sung to me in three different languages; English, Italian and I'm not sure what the other one was.......... Nibras taught it to the karaoke dude so it's what ever language they speak in the country she's from, but I'm not entirely sure what that is. Anyway from the class I got a very nice braccialetto (bracelet).

Postius I am completing this Missionius

NOW a post about what I did on my first weekend with my new fam. All the interesting things (well really it is a thing) happened on the Sunday so I shall ATTEMPT to write briefly about the Saturday because really it is rather boring.

On Saturday morning when I got up and headed down stairs Sara's mum Nonna Erma was visiting. After I’d eaten breakfast Selene and I headed out with her to the local markets that are all of about 150m away. We bought some veggies and fresh pasta and spent a reasonable amount of time stopping to Nonna Erma could say hello to people she knew. We then went to one of the local maccellerias on the way back to her apartment. Nonna Erma is very nice, but she doesn’t speak any English at all, this is no longer a problem for me as I have learnt how to get on with people with out being able to hold a proper conversation with them. Nonna Erma informed Sara that she must give me a hug every day, because my family is so far away and isn't able to give me hugs. She also says ciao to me every time she is talking to Sara or Selene on the phone, it's very cute.

Selene it appears doesn’t have school on Saturdays and it seems that only a few of her friends do as well. So we went into the centre to go shopping. When I went into the centre with Giu we would head in, spend a max of 2ish hours and then come back. This is apparently not the case with Selene. We were in there for 6 ½ horus. Well, no, that's how long it was from when we left the house to when we arrived back again, it's still a long time! We did a lot of walking, picked up and deposited a bunch of people on the way. I don’t know whether there was really a point to going shopping or if we were just blowing a few hours or what. It was rather amusing, I met a bunch of people who's names I don’t remember and spoke very little.

On the bus on the way home Sele managed to provide me with a land mark for pressing the button to get of the bus. Really I don’t see why she couldn’t remember to tell me to get of at the stop after the giant pink building. It's giant and pink and rather hard to miss. Oh well I know now when to press the button. By the time we were on the bus on the way home it was like 8pm. Sele was on the phone to some one because there was apparently some drama where by we hung out with I think Alice's boyfriend with out her being there or something. Anyway Sara was apparently trying to call to see why we weren’t home and in the end called me so I could pass my phone to Sele. This has happened a couple of times and I find it rather amusing.

At some point on Saturday Sara told me about this thing that her, Tancredi and some friends were doing on Sunday morning. A walk that happens every year and is at the start of spring so you can walk through all the little blossoms. Selene apparently wasn't interested in walking and didn’t want to get up early to go, I however decided that even if I was going to be tired and get hayfever I was going to go because it would be awesome. The place we were going was a little way out of Nichelino/Torino so we all pilled into one car (there were 7 of us in the end) and headed out. It turned out being 2 ½ ish our walk. Which we started at 10am... along the way there were marquees where they gave out water/coffee/hot chocolate, giant mini toast with nutella/marmalata (not not marmalade, jam) or mini sandwiches and things of that sort. This however does not make up for that fact that we were walking for several of the hottest hours of the day. And practically NO ONE wore sunscreen. In fact I’m relatively certain I was one of the few that was, most people were there in singlet. And no one wore hats! I didn't have one and spent the whole time feeling horribly unsunsmart but everyone else seemed content to just get urber burnt =S

Sara's friend Carman came along with her partner and son who's names if temporarily forgotten. I spent quite a lot of the walk going along next to her which was rather amusing. She's got less English that I do Italian but we still managed to have several rather decent conversations, we even managed to have one about whether Australia was suffering with a dogey ecconomy like the US. We really didn’t get to in-depth with that one but after talking about what I was going to study at Uni we got onto if there was a job market in Australia.

After we finished the walk we headed to another friend (who's name I remember but can't spell)'s house for a few hours where I snoozed in a chair and bonded with Tancredi and his friend (Carman's son) by teaching them how to use a magnifying glass to make leaves smoke. Now before you start raiving about how this makes me a bad role model; they already had the magnifying glass and the leaves, they were just doing it wrong. All I did was tell them they needed to use brown leave and taught them about focusing the light on the leaves. I managed to do this in Italian using 'solo marrone' whilst holding leaves and 'poco poco poco' while pointing at the focal point of light. We never managed to get them to light on fire but we did get an impressive amount of smoke off them.

And now for some beautiful pictures of the walk we took:

This would be me, Sara and Tancredi

Postius I have a Missionius

I have a mission for today, just one, well no not actually just one but one main one and other smaller side missions to help the completion of the main one. My mission: to write blog posts, yes postS plural. Side missions include; not getting sucked into the land of Nerdfighteria or the land of the Vlogbrothers, not spending stupid amounts of time lost in the interwebs, not spending copious amounts of time watching recorded, streamed or live tv. So it's four verses one and I’m hoping that the one will win out, and I’m sure you are too.

So things that I want to tell you about over the course of my blog friendly day: Introduction to my new family, adventures of our first weekend, adventures of our second weekend and adventures over Easter. Most of these have several pretty pictures to accompany them which is good because it gives me something to write specifically about as well as giving you something interesting to look at rather than just a bunch of black and white pixels.

So I’ve just spent the majority of the day attempting to write a post introducing you to my new family. It hasn't gone very well... despite my attempts not to get distracted I found myself battleing with the internet to load pages while I though of what I wanted to write next. So I’ve decided to give up on that post and jump straight into what we did the first weekend I was here.

Ok so it turns out that in the mornings it takes about an hour 10 to and hour 15 to get to school via bus/metro. Despite the fact that I’d already determined it took approximately this long Selene was sure that I would be at school on time if we left when she normally does. I don’t know how she determined this as she gets off the metro at the 5^th stop and I need to get off at the 4^th last and yet she arrives at school only like 10mins before class starts. Anyway I had Sara fill in a justification for being late for school and we just didn’t write a time so I could fill that in when I got to class. It turns out that I was about 15 mins late, to which Selene's reply was 'oh ok, we'll get on the bus that leaves 6 mins earlier' if anyone sees how that math works let me know.

To get home form school I had a set of instructions that said something along the line of “take the metro to Lingotto, then get on bus 35, get off at *insert stop name here* which is approx. the 11^th stop”. Very descriptive. Also it would have made me slightly more content if Selene had pointed out in the morning where I had to get on the bus. It turns out that there is only one bus stop but it still would have been nice to know that was where I was meant to get it from. When I was on the bus Sara called me to see if I had gotten lost because it was 2 and she somehow thought I would have magically gotten home by then. It turns out that as I was on the phone to her I missed the stop I had to get off at and thus I had to get off at the next one and walk back to the actual stop and then back a little more to take the road that eventually gets me back to the house. Did I mention this was one of those kinda warmish days? So I managed to get home all by my self, despite the fact Sara said she would come and pick me up if I got lost on the walk.

After lunch I talked to Tibs on Skype for a bit and had my first real encounter with the SHOCKING internet we have. We just had a voice call and it dropped me off 8ish times over I think around 40 minutes. Grrr. We weren't even having a video chat, I was the only person on the internet and I wasn’t trying to do anything else at the same time. I have yet to determine how people actually live with crappy internet. Surely having to get up every 15 mins to reset your wireless router gets kinda annoying after, I dunno, the second time you do it, let alone having to disconnect and reconnect your computer every time you want the internet to actually function. Surely you just call some dude who sits in an office doing nothing and ask why it's so shit. I have determined that part of the problem is the bandwidth. One person can be using the internet and it can be working completely fine but as soon as someone else tries to use it as well it makes me wish we had dialup. At least then if you waited long enough things would actually load.

Anyway I’ve written more than a page and haven’t even got to the weekend yet, this may end up being a long post. But hey, I’ve written more of this one in an hour than I did of my abandoned post over the rest of the day. Friday night Selene was going to a birthday party so I went along aswell. When Selene came home from school she brought a couple of friends with her. This was fine, I was on Skype to I waved at them through the door then they disappeared down stairs and I assumed they'd gone home. They hadn't actually gone home, it turns out. When I was downstairs a little later Sele ushered me into a room where I proceeded to spend the next 20mins leaning awkwardly against the wall while they all exfoliated/plucked/epilated/hair-straightened themselves. Not really something I enjoyed that much. Neither was sitting on the door step breathing second hand smoke and watching them wax. I eventually found a legitimate reason to leave and retreated to a safe place.

Eventually we headed off to Alice (said Al-lich-e) and Irene (Ir-en-ne not eye-rean)'s house (I believe they are sisters) for more getting ready before Alice's boyfriend pick us minus Irene up. We were apparently running late (I’m sure that if everyone runs late as often as the host sister I get then no one should worry about being late because everyone would always be late) so I was only rapidly introduced. Driving with Mattia (Alice's boyfriend) was rather amusing. He has an oldish FIAT Panda Young which is almost not quite bunky but has had a decent sound system installed to make up for it. When we finally arrived at our destination after some debate on where it was we were going and then on where we should park I was introduced properly. This introduction was another amusing one to add to the list, it was something along the lines of 'she's not mute, Breanna's just from Australia and can't speak Italian.'

The party was rather average for someone who couldn’t really talk to anyone but it turns out that Mattia can speak a reasonable amount of English so I chatted to him for a while. I also got to meet Selene's boyfriend for all of about 10 mins. What was amusing however was the way this girl's birthday present had been wrapped. They placed a large box on the table for her to open, large as in A3 by 70cm or so. When she opened it, it was full of little foamy packing peanuts or whatever they are called. After digging around in the packing things several small presents were produced. Most of them were silly things like a toilet shaped container of goo and a toothpaste box filled with hole-punched type paper pieces and one eye-liner pencil. Yeah it was amusing, and then at the end she picked up the box and tipped the remaining packing things onto I think it was her sister.

And now that I’ve finished almost two paged of non weekend related stuff I shall upload it before the internet goes completely to poo and then start on a weekend related post. However I’m not sure the weekend one will go up today, it will evolve photos and slow internet+photos =/= functioning blogger

Postius about the weather

So apparently my last post was really sad, it wasn't meant to be but I guess reading it back I can see how it was. Tibs put out a pitiful plea for me to write a new blog post so that when she opens up my blog she doesn’t see the sad one any more. I actually started writing this last Friday with the plan of finishing it on Saturday or Sunday. But on Saturday we headed of to Museo Nazionale dell'Austomobile where we spent a whopping 4 hours and then when I thought I’d have Sunday to curl up, write and then sleep we headed off to a thermal spa hotel a few hours drive away to visit Nonna Erma, where we spent the whole day. While I’m sure you're looking for a post about my new family I wont be writing about them now. They are very nice and I’m happy here, but I do miss Gabri and Giu alittle. As far as I can tell tomorrow is my last day of school before Pasqua vacanze (Easter vacation) which lasts until I think the second of May. For some of this time we are going to Liguria, the province bellow Piemonte where Torino is located, to the family's beach house. I’ve got a couple of other blog posts that I’m planning so I’m hoping to get a few up over the rest of the week, however my ability to write them depends on the amount of surprise activities we partake in. For now however; a long awaited post about the weather.

When I first arrived it was rather cold. The max temp we got up to was around 10/11 maybe 12/13 if you were lucky. Mornings were very cold, only a few degrees, and it was still only 6/7/8ish when school finished at 1. The day's were very short, with sunrise around 7.30 and we only reached the max temp maybe an hour or so before the sun set at 6. To combat the cold I wore lots of warm clothes. This generally consisted of jeans, warm socks, boots (not my hiking ones, stiff leather ones), a singlet, a long sleeved top, and my leavers jacket. Then when I went out side I would wear my coat (nice and toasty warm that mum made before we went to America for Christmas a few years ago), a scarf and gloves. Still despite all this walking to school was sometimes a little chilly, there were in fact a few occasions where I wanted to break out my orange beanie and brave having to explain it to Giu and everyone in my class just so I could have warm ears walking to school. 

After I’d been here for a few weeks it started to warm up a bit, and by that I mean the max rose to 15 and the min crept up to 9/10/11. Then at the start of March we had some cold weather again where it snowed! If you remember on my first weekend here there was a little sprinkle that I got to walk through on the way to the car after Giu (other Giu)'s party. There were a few days at the very end of Feb where there was some more sprinkling on the walk to school and one day even a little bit after school. To which Giu stated it was very unusual for snow at the end of Feb, even the little that we were having. And so while all you Aussies were suffering unwavering and unusual heat, we had unusual cold, where by it snowed, rather a lot, in March. I came down stairs on Friday March 4, sat down to have breakfast, looked out the window next to the kitchen table and noticed that the oranges (Gabri's dad sent a box of oranges from Sicily) sitting on the table out side were wearing interesting little white hats. Interesting little white hats that nicely showed how much snow had fallen over night. Interesting little white hats that look something like this:

What little snow we'd had before had always melted upon contact with the ground so this was the first time I’d seen it cling to anything other than thin pieces of metal. When I walked out side with Cleo that morning it was with a bright yellow umbrello and a HUGE grin on my face because not only was there snow on the ground there were flakes lazily drifting down still and not just little flakes, big flakes 5 and 10 cent coin sized flakes. It was fun up until I realised that snow was slippery when you walk on it, however I was fortunate enough to weigh more than Cleo and thus when it was a battle for traction I won as I had a greater gravitational force acting on me. Where I walk Cleo there is one section that is grassy/muddy and then another bit that paved with these weird shaped things that leave a small hexagon for grass to grow though, I don’t have a picture but I should get one because its way hard to explain. Anyway the snow had melted in the holes and banked up on the paved bits and it left this cool bumpy pattern. I didn't take my camera with me when I went to walk Cleo because I didn't know how awesome it would be and when I went back after it had been walked though so I didn’t get one of that. However knowing that I would get in trouble if I just told you about the amazing snow, I went out again while Giu was still getting ready to take some photos.　

A few weeks after our lovely little bit of snow the weather was forecast at 17/18 on Saturday and Gabri was threatening to lock me out of the house when I next walked Cleo if I didn't make a plan to go to the centre. There were a couple of people from 3G that wanted to come in shopping with me but they had to study to I headed in by myself for a bit of an adventure. Now the reason that it was an adventure was because at this point I was still at the stage where all of the centre looked the same, I am still sort of at this stage but I have now managed to work out where some places are. The best way I have to explain my knowledge of the centre is like a map on Age of Empires (its a computer game Tibs used to play), as your ships or people travel over more land the land that they've travelled on appears on your map along with a small area surrounding where they have travelled. At that point I had the walk from two different metro stops to a strip of shops that was near by it and that was it. I now have three strips of shops from two metro stops and they join up with a Piazza. That was the first day I had been outside for an extened period with out my big coat (I think a couple of times I had walked Cleo in just a jumper but that was only for a few mins and was rather chilly) I went out in my Doctor Jacket (its brown jacket with white pin stripes like on of The Tenth Doctor's suits that I inherited from a friend) it's light, mid length and of suit jacket thickness. I was a little warm with it over long sleeves but I would have been to cold with out it.

A few weekends ago I fobbed off talking on Skype to go for a walk around and take pictures of things. This is because of a few reasons; mum was complaining about a lack of photos and also because we were having some really nice warm weather and I didn't feel like sitting inside on my butt all day. It had suddenly with in the space of about 2 days gone from 18 degree days to 22+ ones and Gabri always laughed at me because after I came home form school I spent all afternoon and night in jeans and a singlet. During these weeks I decided that Spring was my favourite season, I believe however last year I decided that it was Autumn.

Anyway Spring WAS my favorite season up until last week at which all the flowers stopped being beautiful and started dropping pollen, now it just gives me hayfever. This however will no longer be a problem once Mum sends me more Rihnocort, I stupidly managed to bring my bottle over virtually empty.

The flowers here are really nice; there is about a week where most of the trees stop looking dead and sprout tiny little blossoms and then just as the first of the blossoms start to fall leaves appear, it's really beautiful. One day I walked out of school and it was snowing, not snow but blossoms that were being blown in the wind. So anyway; here are some pictures of pretty Spring things so that I can go to bed before it gets too stupidly late with out feeling guilty that I haven't blogged in more than a week:

 I can now say I've seen actual grass that actually grows in tufts, it looks like this:

all of these images were taken between Gabri and Giu's and the school. Of which I don't seem to have any pictures so I'll get you some after Pasqua