Postius about Foodius

Right so this is a post about food and food related things. I’m in Italy so what better place to start than with pasta? I’ve eaten A LOT of pasta. When I first arrived Gabri declared that 30 hours of travel was entirely too long but before I was allowed to sleep I had to shower and eat. Giu was translating a list of foods that Gabri was offering me but my brain was halfway between language input overload and tiredness fog so I went with pasta because a) I knew what to expect, b) I like pasta and c) it was first on the list. I had very tasty pasta with sugo (sauce) made by Nonna Scaletti. Gabri has also made tiramisu which she declared to be solely mine. Since that first day I can think of all of about 3 days where I haven’t eaten pasta, and I think of two of those three I ate copious amounts of pizza to compensate for the lack of wheat I would otherwise have consumed that day.

Now I’m sure the majority of family/close friends reading this will be aware of the fact that I don’t generally eat much wheat or diary products. For those of you who don’t know; since around the time we moved from Geraldton to Perth (2003ish) mum has had me and Tibs on diets of varying strictness to determine which things were were allergic/intolerant to. Now that we're older it's generally up to us to decide what we eat but we rarely have proper milk in the house and we only use wheat flour in baking, sticking to gluten free pasta and soy milk to rest of the time. As you can imagine going from eating virtually no gluten to consuming copious amounts of it ogni gorni (every day) is something my system isn’t really a big fan of. After the first few days I had managed to piss my digestive system off enough such that with in 20mins of eating pasta it would retaliate with stabbing pain. Pasta is tasty and I wasn’t going to let my stomach win without a fight so I decided I was just going to put up with it being painful for a while and see if it was going to get over it. It took a week or two but I’m still eating pasta and my stomach doesn’t generally retaliate. I’m hoping that if I inundate it with enough gluten it will miraculously start producing the enzyme/enzymes that help with digestion, either that or I’ll develop coeliac disease, I’m not sure if you can even develop it like that but I’ll get back to you.

Now, in Australia, when you go to a supermarket there isn’t a whole lot of choice of shapes of pasta, (granted we get our pasta from the health food isle where the choice is spaghetti, curls or penne, but) as far as I’m aware in the normal pasta isle you get varying diameters of spaghetti/tagliatelle/fettucini, spirals, penne and bowties of different sizes and colours, maybe some shells or elbows and then if you are lucky a very limited range of soup pastas. Well here there is a MASSIVE range of pasta (as you would expect). I love all the different shapes, they all hold sugo/panna differently, take different lengths of time to cook, cook differently and plus, its just fun trying to work out how on earth a machine produced something that looks like that! My two favourites so far are; ones that start looking like a curl of pasta and then unroll as they cook and these strange ones that look like... I’ve got no way to explain it other than nudibranch sea slugs... they don’t sound very appetising but they are really tasty, I’ve eaten them all so I cant get pictures but I will take some next time we've got them.

And now to go with the large range of pasta shapes you've got to have a range of ways of eating them. I’ve had pasta with Nonna Scaletti's sugo, panna (cream), panna di salve (sage cream), burro (butter), burro di salve (sage butter), olio (oil), ricotta, piselli e procutto (peas and bacon), panna e uova (carbonara) and Simona's sugo di pesce (marinara). I was going to tell you which one was my favourite but I really cant decide... they are all really nice, however I think that both panna di salve and burro di salve are (separately) very nice on fresh tortilini. I suggest you try it sometime, it appears that sage can be kept in the freezer which is interesting, all you do is pull some out, put it in a small saucepan with either cream or butter and bring slowly to a simmer while stirring to stop stickage...

so now that I’ve written a whole page just about pasta I’m going to move on to something else food related (however if you want to know anything else about the pasta I’ve been eating just ask and I’ll put it in my AOD). We went out to a pizzeria for dinner with Gabri's sister in law and her two daughters one weekend. After eating pizza (I had funghi (mushroom) which is really tasty) most of us orders dolce. I chose panna cotta along with a couple of others. When it came out it was the wibbleyest panna cotta I have ever seen, it made me want to sing 'jelly on a plate'. It was extremely delicious very creaming and smooth, I have now decided to make it my mission to, at somepoint, make uber nommy panna cotta, anyone interested in helping?

While we're talking about soft squishy foods that are tasty; one weekend Gabri brought back from the mountains (where she'd been skiing) AMAZING ricotta cheese (in actual fact she brought back a bunch of things but this was the best). It was sooooo tasty. It was the consistency of lightly whipped cream and was soo soft and tasty... mmmm nomnomnomnomnom.... I ate quite a bit just by its self and then I was told that I must have it on my pasta... it was fantastic...

In Australia, in my family, for as long as I can remember (with the exception of the first few years we were in Perth) we've eaten fish (or seafood) for dinner on Friday. I love seafood, and growing up in Geraldton shelling crayfish and eating occy I don't know how I couldn't. Since being in Italy I’ve eaten seafood twice. It was nice, but was missing the whole family element. Simona, Gabri's sister, made sugo di pesce both times. It was nice but the main point of me writing about this is that it had stange little crustacea in it. They looked like uber mini crayfish. I didn’t initially realise that they weren’t small prawns (there were also prawns in it) because the ones that I had were missing their claws. But when I got to shelling their tails I was halfway though before I realised that they had the arched shaped tail with a flat underside like a cray as opposed to a prawn tail. If anyone’s got an idea as to what they are, let me know!

One last interesting thing that I’ve eaten; coniglio (rabbit). I’ve actually had it three times; twice from Nonna Scaletti and once from Zia Pina (I’m sure that's spelt wrong but that's how I’ll be spelling it). It's quite tasty but nothing extremely special, it's been in a stewish thing every time. Gabri always gets annoyed when I eat rabbit; I attempt to eat it with a knife and fork but she always motions for me to just pick it up, rabbit is quite small so it is actually easier to eat with your fingers. Coniglio ribcage is rather fun to eat; you can pull the ribs apart and eat each individual intercostal muscle separately (no don’t be freaked out, its just like eating pork spareribs only tinier). I got taught an Italian word through eating coniglio; scarpetta where you get use a piece of bread to clean your plate and/or the pan the rabbit was cooking it. Now when ever we get to the end of a meal that was cooked in a pan with some form of sauce Gabri will push the pan over to me with a 'Bre, scarpetta' its very cute.

Out of the vast range of things I’ve eaten there has been only two things that I don’t like. Gorganzola cheese; in my opinion it tastes like the smell of vodka. Apart from the obvious fact that is a blue cheese and I’m not a fan of blue cheeses its very strong, I can cope with a little bit of it on grisini or if its in cooking but even the thought of eating a chunk of it like Gabri and Giu do makes me cringe. The other thing was this raw meat looking sausage thing. Nonna Scaletti brought it for Tuesday night dinner probably my second or third week here. Yeah... it wasn't particularly appetising. And while we're on the topic of raw meat I ate something recently that I though would be rather gross but actually wasn’t. 1.5mm slices of raw meat that you put oil, salt, pepper and lemon juice on. I was rather sceptical about the whole raw meat thing but once you put lemon juice on it some crazy enzyme thing happens which is enough to ensure me I’m not going to die (oh yeah and also everyone else was eating it). The texture is a little strange but if you leave it in lemon juice longer it gets less strange as more cool enzymie things happen.

Right so I wrote most of this yesterday with the intent of finishing it an posting it after dinner however when we finished I was really tired and decided to go to bed despite the fact it was 8.45. This morning, however, I discovered why Gabri and Giu didn’t find this time stupid; we'd just started daylight savings. No one told me this so I had no idea that they started this early in the year so this morning I had Giu come into my room at 7.30 declaring that that was the time. School starts at 8 and I normally get up at 6.45 so as to have time to reply to emails, get dressed, eat breakfast, walk Cleo and wait for Giu (each taking 15min). So when I get told that there's 30mins until school starts my flow chart gets messed up, in the end I ate what we normally take to school for a snack for breakfast, getting dressed and walking Cleo in 20mins in time to be back and hovering for my ritual 10mins as Giu finished getting ready.

Anyway the point of me saying that I wrote most of this yesterday was to add the fact that yesterday was my forth pasta free day. However to make up for it I had a toasted sandwich for lunch and bread with dinner which was uber delicious fughi risotto that Gabri made. It was very tasty and wafted the lovely smell of mushrooms around the house for a while, something that my mum would absolutely have hated!

Introductionius to 3°G-ius (+PicSpam)

I want to preface this post with an instruction; as you read this (or in fact any following post that mentions my class at school) your head has to say 'terzaggi' which you pronounce more like 'tertzagi' with the gi from gist. This is because I’m technically in '3^rd G' as opposed to 'Tre G' which would be how you'd assume you'd say 3G but 'Three G' just sounds like the inferior cousin of a G6 or an Australian phone company. I can assure you that 3°G is neither inferior nor a phone company.

3°G is an amazing class and I am really luck to be spending my time with them. Having said that they are also a little insane, which is possibly why I get along with them so well! I’ve already written about how I was introduced to the entirety of my class in around 3 mins flat and how some boys appeared with a table and chair hoisted above their heads for me (I still cannot recall who it was that did this but I’m thinking one of them was probably Ricchi). What I have not told you is that, for whatever reason (I’m sure there is one I’m just not aware of it), there is a theme for dressing up on Mondays.

Right so explaining things about my class is going to be rather difficult for you to follow if you've got no idea who I’m talking about. So I’ve got you a photo. This is from Wednesday (it was a very busy day with the photo, my adventure at the piscina and Notte Tricoloure) and has everyone but me and another boy in it. I’m not in it because I was in 2C for Italian so I arrived after this (but I am still in the one for l'annuario/yearbook), Alessando (the boy who is also missing) isn't in it because he is off at a maths competition because he's our resident maths god (it's actually because he placed in a national competition and is off at a European on). As you can see to combat his absence there are printed pictures of him and posters declaring him the maths god that he is (the sign says 'Mastro' as this is the start of his last name, I’m not entirely sure of the full thing but we call him Mastro). Right so now for the photo:

and we'll list people from left to right, back to front, pretending the there is only one standing row zigzagging from the boy on the right of the short row the to girl in front of him. I’m going to give you full names because we apparently call people by their last name quite often and I’ll put in brackets what it appears we call them. Oh and I’m getting names from facebook so have please keep in mind they could be incorrect.

Boris Agramonte (I believe we call him 'Boris'), Mattia Comoglio (this is the first of two Mattias, if we call him anything other than 'Mattia' I’m not aware of it), Davide Messina (we call him 'Messi'), Daniele Padovano (as I said when writing about Chiara's party we call him 'Pado'). Next is Riccardo Roba ('Ricchi' still said with a ck not a ch because the English pronunciation is the opposite of Italian, it appears that it is also written 'Riki')

Now we zigzag down to the girl in front of Ricchi, Silvia de Michieli ('Silvi'), then Ilaria Meirone ('Ila' although I think I’ve hear 'Ili' too), we then come to the second Mattia (I’m also not aware of us calling him anything different so; 'Mattia'). Next up is the first of FOUR Giulia's, yes you hear correctly four, this one is Giulia Carino (as far as I’m aware you just shout 'Giu' and then proceed to 'Giulia' and then on to a last name if you don’t get an answer or get an answer from the wrong Giu, assume this for all the others too). Then there's Daniele Russo (yes we've got two Daniele's as well I believe we call him 'Daniele', maybe even 'Russo' or some variation there of and you say it 'roos' sort of like book), Susanna Mestriner ('Susi'), Giulia Moschella, Valeria Piampiano (I’m sure I’ve heard 'Val' used at some point), Maria Fejr (I think I’ve heard 'Maria' and 'Mari' used), and then to finish off the back row is Fabio Lorenzini (for some strange reason we call him 'Febio' as in we say and write it with an 'e' however I’m sure it's actually spelt with an 'a').

Now, the front row; Giulia Rosso, Elena Bertoldo (I’m not aware of anything different to 'Elena'), Claudia Galioto (often called 'Clod' and spelt that way too), Giulia Felician, Marta Parena (I’m only aware of 'Marta' but I’m thinking people might use a derivative of her last name as well), Greta Rista (often 'Gre', this is who I sit next to), Nibras Dannawi ('Nib') and on the end Chiara Piccinelli (who it we often call 'Picci').

So looking at the picture you may have noticed that almost everyone is in plaid/checkered shirts, while I’d love to say we all telepathically managed to match this was not the case; there was a very elaborate spread sheet where by we could choose our favourite few themes for the picture. However on hearing that the picture was much sooner than antricipated and not having decided on a theme everyone was happy with Ricchi proposed we wear 'camicie a quadri' and thus you have it. Also somewhere along the way hats were added but not every one had them but that's cool.

Right so the first Monday I had at school was actually my third in country, my first having been my sleep/blog/unpack day and the second I spent filling in paper work. By this point I’d been added to 3°Gs facebook group and with the extensive use of google translate I had determined that it was 'Nerd Day' however I had absolutely NO idea what this meant and nothing very nerdy to wear so I turned up at school completely expecting to be the odd one out. Turns out that only two people out of the 25 in my class had dressed up but it was still pretty amusing. At school there are breaks at 10 and 12 for I’m not really sure how long, on Mondays these breaks are used for photo shoots of people who dressed up in the theme and on other days they are used for stealing each others snack, mock fighting, stealing and/or hiding each others possessions and really just being rather insane. Oh and on the days where there is a written verification or an interrogation these times are used for last minute cramming, hassling Mastro for maths help and sharing woe over one's impending doom.

On 'Nerd Day' it was Marta and Ricchi that dressed up, and this is what occurs when you give someone a camera during 'intervalo' on a Monday. (also featuring Susi)

The second Monday I was at school was San Valentino and our instruction was to wear red. I was really excited because in my limited supply of cloths I actually have a red top which meant I could join in. When you turn up at school rugged up in a coat its quite difficult to see what someone is wearing underneath, so when I unwrapped my self and undid my leavers jacket I got a mini cheer (from I think Marta) for wearing red. Surprisingly some people in the class didn’t have any red cloths but they overcame this problem by wearing red socks, shoes or a hoody with red print on it. And of course our obligatory intervalo photo shoot... there was actually a couple of other people in red that didn’t make it into the photo.

once again; left to right, back to front: Nib, Clod, Mattia, Febio, Ricchi, Pado, Silvi, Chiara, Giu, with me, Marta and Mastro in the front.

Next up we had 'Gangster Day'. I once again didn't have anything gangster so I didn’t dress up. I attempted to make a paper Fedora but it was an Epic Fail and has been resigned to life in my file of 'awesome things from exchange' despite the fact its not all that awesome.

This one goes: Ricchi, Mattia, Febio, Messi with Nib, Marta and Silvi in front.

I forgot to mention that we have a class mascot. Her name is Carmen Terzaggi and she lives on the coat rack at the back of the class. And what would what would 'Gansgter Day' Monday be with out the class mascot dressing up?

After gangster came 'Hippie' and once again I was determined to dress up. I went with green and purple striped thermal pants and denim skirt and with a floaty floral top over a long sleeved one. Ooh and I made a peace sign, out of a cereal box, that I tied to a stupidly coloured shoelace. It is apparently genius that I though of making something out of cardboard as I had a bunch of people exclaim over it...

In the first image you've go Maria, Silvi and me and the second is Clod.

Next up was 'Sailor Day', this one came with the instructions of 'blu, bianco, righe'. I have cloths with blue and white stripes but they were going in the wrong direction to be sailorish. In the end (with extensive help from friends and fam back in Aus) I decided to make from paper a sailor hat and the typical square backed collar thing and just wear them with normal cloths. I don’t have any pictures of me wearing them because I put them on Clod for the photo shoot intervalo. Once again there weren't many people dressed up at this one, but there were a few people who where wearing white and blue.

In the first there's Clod (on a chair) and Ricchi. and the second is Maria and Clod with Messi in the for the epic photo bomb 

We didn’t dress up on Monday the week just past but that's ok because we had Plaid/checkered on Wednesday to make up for it.

Here it's Ricchi, Febio, Daniele, Pado and Messi

Photos are taken from facebook so they have not been taken by me, even the ones from my camera were not taken by me. It seems if you bring a camera to class it will be rather quickly appropriated for use by everyone. It's really rather cool, I was surprised that the first thing a couple of people did upon picking it up was to ask where the switch for manual focus was, most people cant even work out how to turn a reflex on.

Postius about my Dayius

Right so a VERY short post about my day. and I mean very short... its really rather late (and by that I mean early) here and curling up in a nice, warm, dry bed is very appealing right now.
So, things that have happened today; I've seen a very large number of naked people, I've had Gabri tell me that if I wasn't home by 1.30 she was going to call the police and I've been summoned via whistling... these events are however (thankfully) unrelated (Dad/Nanna please stop stressing now!).


The naked people is because I went to the swimming pool in sport today and thus I discovered that in addition to a different sized personal space bubble (I will explain this in one of my other posts) they also have a VERY different level of acceptable modesty. There's nothing hugely wrong with it, I can deal, it was just a bit of a curve ball I wasn't expecting to have to deal with. I will write about my piscina adventures in greater detail later.


Having Gabri tell me that if I wasn't home on time she would get worried and call the police... I found this really sweet. So why, you may be asking, would I be planning to be home at 1.30am on a weeknight... well today was Notte Tricolore and a very special one at that; Italy turned 150. In the center there where stally things (I really didn't understand what they were and there were too many people for me to see) masses of people and fireworks. Most of the peeps from my class were heading in together to celebrate so I was actually spoiled for choice as I also had to option of going with Giu and her friends. I decided that I would go with my class and then when I was getting ready to leave I realised that I should probably have chosen to hang with Giu and her friends because I'll be moving families soon but I'll still have the same class. In the end I am actually happy that I chose to go with my class because I had a great time.


The plan was to meet up with my other class mates at 9 at Porta Susa (a metro stop) and Giu's plan was to have her friends come over, eat dinner at 9 and then head in to the center at 10.30. Thus I missed out on the tasty dinner they prepared and their two hour long pres... I was however around for about 30mins of pres, mainly with Giu, Matteo (remember that guy from other Giu's party all those weeks ago who said I looked like Nicole Kidman who is a milf?) and Matteo's friend. I was eating tortellini for dinner while they were having their aperitivo.


I was upstairs getting changed when Giu 'vieni qua'ed me to come down and hang. Matteo took this as his invitation to consistently call me until I appeared a few mins later... I say called but really it was mostly whistling, in the way you would whistle to a member of a lesser species to get it to magically appear in the same room as you. Matteo is an idiot, we get on well.


When I got to the metro stop (the one close to the house not Porta Susa) only one of the ticket machines was working and there were about 100 people milling about. I got inline to wait to get to the ticket machine and a very boring 10mins later I had a ticket...by now it was 5 to 9 and it's an 11min metro to Porta Susa, did I mention I had no credit on my phone? Fortunately two other people from my class had appeared and seemed to be using their phones so I assumed that they had told someone we were late. The next delaying factor occurred when we went to go through the barrier things with out newly acquired tickets (me and Greta, the girl who sits next to me, had tickets and Giulia, the girl who sits next to Greta, had a SmartRider type thing). only one out of about 15 gates was accepting tickets... halfish of them were for exiting and the wrest were broken or having issues with accepting tickets (but would still take 'SmartRiders') uber bottleneckage ensued... in the end Greta and I got through because we got Giulia to pretend she was exiting so the gate would open and then a whole bunch of people mobbed the gate and you eventually get through.


This really isn't turning out to be short.... I shall hurry the rest along. When we arrived at Porta Susa mostly everyone was there. One girl, Marta, (I promise I will write my class intro tomorrow) had some cool makeup with her. You see, when your country's flag isn't complicated like a Union Jack and 6 stars it is possible to produce an oval shaped lipstick/facepaint type thing for drawing of ones self. She had one of these and we spent a few mins drawing on most peoples faces. Then we headed outside into the perpetual drizzle (I don't think it even counted as drizzle it was so light) to walk around the center.


We eventually ended up in Piazza Vittorio (which i am told is the largest Piazza in Europe) but we had however by this point managed to loose a few people... and by a few I mean our group that had started out at 17 was down to 6. We spent about and hour trying to find some others, calling them and swearing at them when they said they were next to a light pole, things like that. During this search I honed a skill that I am now very good at; choose someone from the group and stay on their six, preferably only 1 step behind them. This sounds rather easy but is inactulfact very difficult when you've got an ombrello and so does everyone else around you... eventually we all just gave up on umbrellas because we then had a greatly increase ease of sneaking past people, however this did mean that we were no longer protected from the annoying drizzle/mist.


Now you may recall that I missed Australia Day and thus the loverly skyshow that goes with it, I feel however this has been made up for by the fireworks I saw today. While most of the fireworks were ones I had seen before it was the fact that we were within 100m of where they were shot from and in a crowd of thousands that really made it special. We were so close to the fireworks that when they went of the sound reached us in around a second (so they were aprox 340m away however this is based on 20°C and it was 7°C and raining). This was actually quite annoying because you ended up blinking and missing part of the firework.


So after 30/40 mins of fireworks the ENTIRE crowd decided they wanted to leave at once... this is incredibly difficult when you are squished like sardines and thus so as not to be separated from a) someone who knew how to get to a metro stop, b) someone with a phone with credit and c) someone who could speak Italian I turned into a limpet and found someone to cling onto, this was initially Fabio and then Marta. I feel very sorry for them both as Fabio practically just muscled his way through the crowd with both me and Marta trailing him and Marta I just clung to for like 15mins until finally we could actually stand without touching other people.


By this point we had been standing in the rain for over 2 hours... some people decided to use their umbrellas again now we had the room but I decided that I was already wet, my hair was already dripping on my and I was still going to get wet with an umbrella so I didn't bother. Now the thousands of people crowd all have to get home some how right? well that would be by metro. Once again uber logjam for the tickets/gates and because I live within a metro-stop of the school I dont have a 'SmartRider' like everyone else. Once again I had the gate held open so I could get through but this time by Fabio (I don't make a habit of this I promise).


Now metros are a certain length and you can only fit a certain number of people into them before breathing gets a little difficult. And because of the HUGE number of people trying to get on them there were people banked up the entire platform, stairs and a larger portion of every where else as well. Someone in my class is really clever. We got on the metro heading AWAY from where we wanted to go, got of after one stop and then crossed the platform to go in the direction we wanted, thus ensuring that we were already on it when we came to the busy platform. Genius I tell you.


I'm not allowed to walk home from the Metro at night because Gabri doesn't think it is safe (and nor does Giu and she gets all pansy about it) so I had Marta walk with me, she lives with in walking distance of the same stop and was (shock horror) walking home by herself so just detoured with me first. I didn't feel unsafe. We only saw two prostitutes and they were just huddled under their umbrellas at the intersection of a main and small road... other than that we didn't see anyone but I guess its better to be safe. And that concluded my epic school night out... although it is technically not a school night as we do not have school tomorrow, thankfully as this turned out to be a not very short update. Now I go to bed with my still wet from the pathetic rain hair... enjoy the rest of your day!


ohh I just remembered as I was about to post; I heard a brass marching band playing YMCA... it was epic

Postius about Carnivaleius

Last weekend my school Liceo Scientifico Carlo Cattaneo had a carnivale disco. I have yet to determine the precise reason for Carnivale but I believe it is a celebration that has some linkage to Easter and lent... The information that I found seemed to say it was before the start of lent, possibly to have a party to eat all the non lent food (like pancake day) but I’m not really sure. So anyway dress up disco. A few weeks beforehand when Giu has asked me if wanted to go, Gabri declared that I was to wear the Australian flag, only the Australian flag... Being the Cramer that I am this presented a challenge I was not going to fail at. Unfortunately when I was buying my Aussie flag before I left I didn't fully brainstorm the possible functions that it would have and thus I had not purchased one that was wide enough to easily be turned into a dress. The flag and I eventually reached the agreement that it would function as a dress if I wrapped it slightly diagonally around myself.

Even if I went with the diagonal wrapping it was still rather on the short side and would fail Dad's length test of bending over (and not being able to see your undies). It was however about the same length as the dresses that Giu and her friends wore the other time we went to the disco so I decided that was probably going to be ok. After contemplating the maximum length of the dress that could be made from a flag the size I had for several days I decided that it was really rather short and I would feel more comfortable if it was slightly longer... To come up with a new way to wear the flag I put on my Aussie Day thinking hat and decided to channel teenage Aussie Day chic. This ended with me deciding to wear shorts and the flag as a top.

If I had been clever and remembered about Carnivale before I had left I would have been able to pick up a bunch of Aussie Day paraphernalia and would have had a full kit of stuff to wear. However I wasn’t this clever and only had the flag. Giu declared after school one day that she was going into the centre with a friend to buy masks for the disco. I however had to go to and out of school Italian lesson so gave Giu some money so she should pick me up a mask. She got me a lovely black and silver one that cots €4.90. I am still amazed that you can buy masks this cheaply. In Australian it would have cost around $20 despite the fact it wasn’t really that fancy. But I guess the demand for masks in Aus is much lower and thus it is no necessary for them to be as affordable (I am aware that this is against the typical invisible hand market forces but it still makes sense so deal with it).

The disco was on Friday night which is not normally the night were you go out because most people have school the next day however we had that Saturday off. I have yet to word out if we had the party on Friday because we had the Saturday off or if it was the

other way around... I’m thinking probably the former but the latter isn't that unrealistic either. When Giu appeared home from her dance class (which she had on Tuesdays and Fridays from 6 to 7) one of her friends, Cry, came too (I will write more about the random appearance of people late) to hang and get ready for the disco with us. Cry decided that she was going to do my make up after she'd finished with Giu's. So while she gave Giu Egyptian eyes I had my weekly hair debate as I tried to wrangle it into something not ridiculous. While I thought at the time I had managed this, looking back on photos it was still pretty wild, In fact I think I looked like 80s perm meets 70s punk rock/protopunk.

I’m not entirely sure why it was that I needed to be wearing make up since I was going to have a mask on as well but Cry had declared it so. Fortunately she didn’t do anything drastic and with the exception of the foundation being slightly to dark for my skin I think it looked ok. Which is unusual because I generally hate how I look in make up and yet Cry managed it so I only looked slightly like a zombie. Giu's house seems to be designated meeting/sleeping place as a few of her other friends congregated here before we all got a lift from on of their dads. I’ve not made a post introducing you to everyone yet but anyway; Giu was an egyptian, Cry I’m not sure if she was dressed as something/someone but she was in an interesting black dress and decide to have a piece of lace as her mask and Silvi and Other Giu were sort of belly dancers.

At the Disco there were some interesting costumes... as you would expect there was a possie of scantily clad 'cheerleaders' and several cupids/angles/winged devils. There were however also several costumes that I wasn’t expecting to see. Of these the ones I found most amusing were; possie of boys in Vans/Cons (these are brands of shoes), short shorts and too small mostly pink tops, several of whom also had neck scarves on or were supporting hand bags and a group of people in hard hats and DayGlo vests. The DayGlo boys I believe were mostly peeps from my class and I admire them for deciding to wear hard hats, I can say I would have wanted to jump around dancing with one of them on. The possie of gay boys did very well, the strutted everywhere and generally just did other amusing things that fitted the highly offensive stereotype well. Giu and her friends knew several of them so they came to hang with us for a bit. I once again encountered the humour of boys that attempt to speak English. One of them asked me if I wanted to go home to which another other added to bed with them. As per normal when Giu's friends are being stupid I laughed at them while someone scolded them in Italian.

I hung with Giu and her friends the whole night despite the fact I could have gone and hung with my class mates... I decided that since Giu and her friends already knew I couldn't dance there wasn’t much point having to inflict my lack of skills on my class mates as well. I forget how long we'd been there for but at some point Giu and Cry decided we were leaving so we went out and called a taxi to go home. I’m really not sure why we did this because something like 20mins after we got home Silvi arrived, having been doped off by her dad to spend the night at Giu's. Overall it was quite an amusing night, but not quite as much fun as the first disco I went to (which I will eventually write about).

Postius of my Timetableius

So my time table looks something like this:

Well technically it doesn’t look something like that... it looks exactly like that. I’m quite enjoying finishing at 1 most days. I can see how it would be quite useful if you were actually following all your classes and had homework and stuff... Giu seems to come home, walk the dog, eat lunch and then watch tv/fall asleep until 2.30/3 and then study until 6/7.30/when Gabri tells her to stop talking and hurry up and get to the table (her study entails reciting her textbooks from what I can tell).

The two blocks of Italiano in grey I am with class 3A, the two blocks of Lettere in brown I have with 2C and then double sport I have with 4D. Both of my classes with 3A are instead of Spanish as is my Thursday (giovedÌ) class with 2C. My sleep in and Wednesday (mercoledÌ) class with 2C is instead of Filosofia which I wouldn't have mined doing but it's not like I was going to understand much anyway. For my double sport with 4D I miss and hour of scienze which is a shame as I can understand most of it and it seems as though that is the day they get to go to the lab. Gloriously I have Saturday (sabato) free while everyone else is at school... I really don’t know why but I’ve just not got any classes then... I’m quite happy to have the day off, it lets me sleep in and use Skype at a sensible time for you Aussies plus I’m not sure that triple Italian and then History were going to be the most engaging subjects.

I’ll give you a bit of a run down on my teachers and what I do in the class here but I’ll write more about my class mates later, they can have their own intro post. Right so lets start with Monday morning and maths. Prof Cane is quite amusing; he took great joy in telling me several times every lesson for the first few weeks that there was a mathematician called Cramer that did some mathsy stuff (some mathsy stuff we happened to use one day in class). Maths was the first subject that I actually started to follow, well I was never not following it. Because I missed school my first Monday in Italy to sleep (and blog) I didn’t have Maths until Friday that week so I had time to get used to things, and hey, maths is maths no matter what language it's in. the prof also stops every few mins to make sure I understand what he's just said and gets someone to translate it even if I repeat a sentence in English in which all the major words are exactly the same. It doesn’t sound like my class likes him too much... they are always complaining about him and he apparently doesn’t notice when they take A4 pages of notes into their tests, something to keep in mind since we have a test on Monday and I’ve only been here for half the content. He also has a rather dubious fashion sense... he has a hair cut like Spock from the recent Star Trek movie (with out the pointy side bits) and has been wearing corduroy pants nearly every time I’ve seen him.

Next is History and I know nothing about the teacher beyond the fact she is not Mrs Reichelt. I cant even remember what she looks like. She came up to me one lesson and started rattling of Italian to me despite the fact I was introduced as not understanding any. We eventually established that she has to give me a mark at the end of the school year which is ridiculous because I only see her one hour a week, I don’t understand Italian and I’ve never studied the same part of history she is teaching in English (I don’t even know what they are studying but nothing I recognise). I generally spend most lessons conjugating verbs or going over vocab or staring into space, however the latter occurs only if the teacher is being loud and/or doing things that make the other options difficult.

My English teacher is quite nice, her pronunciation however is rather amusing in its wrongness. We've just finished a couple of grammar units and are now moving onto English Literature... I do however believe that even if I had done Lit in Australia I would be no better off. The first lesson we spent on it I got a crash course in the history of France and England over about 600 years most of which we briefly touched on in SOSE in year 9. I can tell you exactly where I sat in G12, what the booklets we studied looked like and which type of highlighter I used but all I can remember of the content is something happened in 1066, there was a dude called William the conqueror, a thing called the Domesday book which was like a census and that there was a pyramidal system of power that ended in serfs. This of course compares with the rest of my class who have studied that period of history... oh well it should be interesting. We appear to be going to look at the author of the Cantabry Tales who I have been told is the English equivalent to Italian's Dante

Physics, Physics, Physics, Physics, Physics... (that was a joke/reference to a Catherine Tate sketch with David Tennant in case you were wondering). Prof Cotza is TINY. And in her head is about half way up my chest and she has to bounce on her toes to erase things from the top of the black board. She's got short black really curly hair and the class seems to like her. If paid attention to most physics lessons but they are currently doing projectile motion which I’ve done quite a bit of over the past few years so a couple of lessons I got bored and went back to conjugating verbs. That was a few weeks ago and I’ve decided that I am going to attempt to understand what the prof is saying now... she doesn't seem to mind me pulling strange faces as I try to follow her/ get lost when she reads things from a second text book (I’m currently sharing with Greta next to me so if she reads from the class text I can semi follow). She was reading a problem out for us to do at home on Wednesday and I actually understood the whole thing... we had to determine the minimum velocity that a frog had to jump at to cross a pond of a certain diameter if it jumped at a given angle.

Mortellaro was the first teacher I had and it was quite a full on lesson to have first up on my second day in a new country. She mainly just reads from the text book so no one actually listens to her. Most people chat, text, do other class work, play card games or just leave to room to go to the toilet or get coffee and then don’t come back until the end of the lesson... one day there were 14 people in the classroom and we're a class of 25. needless to say that I don’t follow this class... I don’t even know when they are doing Italian and when they are going Latin! The prof got me a Italian grammar book in my first week there and I ploughed though it in about 2 and a half weeks, it was 130 I think pages long...

My 3A Italian teacher is really lovely. She was the host mum for a Australian girl on a summer exchange with the same program as me who left a few weeks after I arrived. Every lesson I am allocated to a student so they can help me. Being allocated to a student involves evicting the person they sit next to down to a lone desk at the front of the room that they had to fetch for me. I’ve spent my time here conjugating verbs, working in my grammar book and for the past few Thursdays I’ve attempted to hold a conversation with a couple of girls who don’t like Italian Literature and so took me out of the classroom to chat.

I’m not a big fan of the design teacher. She is always very quiet and its very annoying. I’m in the front row and I can barely hear her so no wonder the people at the back chat so much. Design is sort of technical drawing, from what I can tell they've done stuff on how to draw things in perspective (I think) and then they analyse pictures of old paintings and stuff... not really that interesting so I don’t pay attention... my class actually has a second hour of design after the 12 o'clock intervalo but I get to go home which is cool. Giu finished at 2 on that day so I’ve got 2 hours at home by myself which is generally when all my cooking or at least the planning for my cooking occurs.

Prof Guesa of my 2C Italian class has longish blond curly hair that she never seems to be bothered to do anything with. I’m not a big fan of her either... she makes me stand up along with the whole class while she explains what they'll be doing that day, despite the fact I cant understand her and don’t follow the lesson, it wastes valuable conjugating time. Because the teachers move rooms while the students say put I generally cross paths with her on the way to the class room and we attempt to have a little chat while we wait for the previous teacher to finish. Its quite funny, I can understand what she asks me because the question is simple but I don’t know enough words to answer her...

My sport teacher is unlike any of the other sport teachers I’ve ever had. She seems quite happy to spend the first 20 mins of class chatting with us and then we do stuff for 30/40 mins and then she's like 'lesson over, do whatever' for the rest of the 2 hour block... they boys generally play soccer or basket ball and the girls and the namby pamby boys hit around a volley ball. Fortunately this is one fo the sports we've spent the most time on at Penrhos and thus I do not epic epic fail at it as I do everything else...

IRC is religion... I forgot to mention that before now... the teacher is really sweet and always says hello to me and tries to talk to me. I don’t follow much of what is happening but she's given out a few worksheets that I spend the next few classes translating so thats quite fun. Currently it appears that we are doing a cross between sex ed and the morals of abortion... we watched Juno ( a film) a few weeks ago which was a nice break from my conjugations.

Uffa! Who knew I had so many teachers!? Ok last one. I quite like the science teacher... she isn’t all that annoying and doesn't stop every 30 seconds to tell people to stop murmuring so we actually get though things in class. I can follow most of this, fortunately science words stay pretty much the same when they are translated (proof I have chosen a good degree at uni, its universal). I managed to read a whole passage from Greta's book while the teacher was organising interrogation (verbal test) dates. It was about how water is purified for astronauts. While I didn’t understand every single word I think I got about 65-70% and the wrest were mainly small joining words so I could work them out... I was very happy that I’d managed to read a whole chunk and be able to understand it.

I am aware that I was adamant to get 3 posts written before I went to bed but I am now well and truly into the hours of 'dumb o'clock' and thus I am going to post this one and go to sleep. I PROMISE I will write three over the week end to catch up for the one I missed from the week!

Postius about a Partius

I know that I said I was wanted to but up three updates in the week, I didn't however specify that they couldn't all be on the same day. And thus as 7.55 on Friday night I am starting the first of three posts I WILL write before I go to bed... 'and what about the second from the weekend?' I hear you asking. Well; I went out twice as many times last weekend and so by this reasoning I am happy with having written half as much. I was starting to think that my string of Saturday night traditions would be broken because we'd had the Disco on Friday night up until Giu said she was going into the centre with some friends and invited me.

So the second weekend that I was here another one of Giulia's friends had a birthday party (remember the first one I wrote about oh so long ago). Again I wasn’t sure if I actually knew who it was that was having a party but I went anyway (the girl's name was Chiara). To get there we walked to the metro, metroed to I forget which stop and then had a 10ish minute walk to where we were going. This would normally be fine... however Giu had declared that I must wear my heels so walking around on cobble stones for 10 mins in them was rather...interesting.

So the clock that was so awesome I decided to give this event a post to its self. Unfortunately I only have my SLR camera with me at the moment (mum has just posted my point and shoot) so taking pictures of cool things I see is a little tricky as its not a very 'hang bag friendly' camera and thus I don’t have a photo of this cool clock. I will however just have to describe it quite well. It was a round wall clock with a diameter of probs around 40cm. The fame was silver and the face either black or dark blue. Not sounding terribly interesting yet is it? Well that's just because I’ve not got to the interesting bit yet.

After first noticing it was an unusual clock I didn’t actually realise just how awesome it was because I thought it was 10 to 10. any clues about why its soo cool? No? Well the first thing I noticed was that the numbers were stuck on anticlockwise (as in 11 was were 1 would normally be and 3 was swapped with 9 etc.) For some reason I thought that only the hour hand would be going backwards and thus if the minute hand was on the 2 (as it was) it was actually 10 mins to... I eventually discovered that the whole clock ran backwards and when I had initially noticed its awesomeness it was in fact 10:10. I think the reason I find this clock so awesome is because it really doesn’t make sense... it isn’t designed to be a normal clock when you look at it straight on and it wouldn’t be right if you looked at it in a mirror either because the numbers aren't mirror image. So that is the tale of the interesting clock in all it's obscureness.

And now for the other main thing I wanted to tell you about; the presence of the 'Penrhos-College-I’m-stuck-on-the-oval-because-of-a-fire-drill game'. So this is only of real interest to Penrhos or ex-Penrhos students but I’m sure others will find it amusing also. So at Penrhos there are regular fire drills where the whole school must migrate out of the school and onto the oval across the road. I’m not entirely sure why these must occur with the frequency that they do but when you were sitting on the oval generally in the beating sun it always seemed like the last one was too recent to need another. It could have just been my year but we never seemed to pay attention to the 'sit in a straight line in alphabetical order with your form' rule. Once we'd all lined up and been marked off by our teacher the whole thing really turned into an excuse to play a clapping game that you only ever play at fire drill or aths carnivals. It involves sitting in a circle cross legged with your hands out to the side (vaguely over your knees). Your right hand is resting on the left of the person next to you and, of course, you left is resting under the right of the person on your other side. The only song I can remember being sung is 'down by the banks of the hanky-panky' it does something like this;

“down by the banks of the hanky-panky

where the bullfrogs jump from bank to banky

with a hip, hop-hippity-hop

you better watch out or you'll be got”

While you chant this enmass you pass a clap around the circle of hands. At the end if the clap is going to end of you the aim is to move your hand so that the person to your right ends up getting their own hand and not yours. As far as I can tell there is really no point to this other than to pass time and laugh.

And this is relevant to my story because... it appears that after having something to drink in a venue that does not have stupidly loud music, it's fun to play this game. Of course the song is different (and in Italian) but it seems to be just as amusing as it is to bored pretend fire escapees, however alcohol could have something to do with that... I was watching and personally I found it only mildly interesting however I cant say I was that enthralled by it at Penrhos either...

The only other thing worth noting from the night was that one of my class mates (Daniele Padovano) was their... I have yet to work out why but I have narrowed it down to two options, they are either related or go to the same church. Yes these are strangely different options however both are with in good reason. Them being related is simply because there was a whole bunch of girls who looked similar enough to be sibling and cousins of each other and this was who Daniele (it appears in class we call him Pado) was hanging out with the most. And for the same church theory; this theory I have acually only formulated recently... when I went to Pasta Finichè Basta it was in an oratory and Pado and Chiara (and all the other similar looking girls) were helping organise it.

I am once again rapidly leaving 'short post landia' so I shall end it there. Also it is 9.50 and I’ve still got 2 more posts to write before I go to bed...

Introductionius to Jaceius(, Annicaius and Bruceius)

For those of you who are not aware I haven’t actually travelled a third of the way around the world for exchange by myself. While I am exchanging by myself in Italy I have two fellow exchanging comrades very near by; best friends Grace and Jessica are in Spain and France for 6 and 10 months respectively. I’m not sure if one of us really decided first, if one of us followed another or we just all thought it was a good idea but anyway we're all here muddling our way through school in another language and experiencing the things life in another country throws at you.

I was the first of us to leave heading off on Jan 23 with Jessica following on Jan 27 and Grace scheduled to depart on Feb 5. I say scheduled because this was when she was meant to leave. Comunque (however) she had an encounter with the Spanish Mañana, Mañana attitude and didn’t get her visa untill the 15th and thus left on the 17th. My last week in Australia was very busy with last minute catchups, frenzied packing and quality family (and second family) time. The Ritters (Grace's family and my second one) where away for three weeks after Christmas, arriving home just 5 days before left. Mum had printed me a calendar of January so I could plan my time and these 5 days were allocated as G-time (Grace-time). As it turns out I begrudgingly had to do other things with my time as well but any way. G-time still included walking the mad dog Torres (we will hear more of him later) and hanging with (terrorising) my Ritter siblings. One day was also allocated to last minute shopping (for the three of us but mainly me) to be followed by a Tri-Family-BBQ.

I don’t remember what made me think of it but I some how decided that it would be a good idea for the three of us to joint buy each other a teddy bears. If we are ever homesick or sad we can use Skype to talk to each other or our families but nothing is quite as comforting as a hug, which we can now receive from our lovely (matching) teddies. On our journey around the City looking for teddy bears we learnt a few things; 1) they are now considered only as 'baby items' and are very rare, 2) the staff in the baby section of Myer are really nice and 3) three 17 year old girls walking around the city with teddies tucked proudly under their arms must be part of a 'teddy bear club'.

At one point while we were sitting down and drinking frozen raspberry fanta taking a break from our mad shopping we decided that we were going to name our teddies a mashing together of the other two's names. Jess was the first to decide on a name and chose Bruce.. as you may have noticed Bruce is not directly derived from 'Breanna' and 'Grace'. She was going to have 'Brace' but then decided that Bruce was better. Strange we know but anyway.

I introduce you to Bruce in his natural French habitat:

I’m not entirely sure if it was Grace or I that chose next but I think it was Grace. We had some trouble coming up with a name out of 'Breanna' and 'Jess' but I’m not really sure why because I can think of a bunch now... but the options we thought of at the time included (i think) Bess. I decided to try and think of names using 'Jessica' instead of 'Jess' and we finally ended up with Annica.

And so, I introduce you to Annica in her natural Spanish habitat:

Now that just leaves the naming of my bear... I remember that we had some trouble thinking of a name for it but I cant remember any names that we rejected so perhaps we just couldn't get a name out of 'Grace' and 'Jess' as opposed to coming up with a bunch of stupid ones. We decided on Jace, I like Jace, it's a cool name; not very common and sort of punky.

Thus, I introduce to you Jace in her natural Italian habitat:

After Grace and I ended up with girls we decided that Bruce was a bit of a pimp and tried to change his name so he was a girl. Jess however had grown quite attached to Bruce and refused to change it, even when we offered 'Brucetta' which we then changed to 'Brucescetta' and rolled around laughing about for a while.

The Tri-Family-BBQ was to be held at the Milton/Ritter abode so after finishing in the City we headed over there. They had done a wonderful job with decorations; there were safe travel signs in each of our three languages, flags and mini plastic aeroplanes, it was very cute. It was a very nice evening and of course we did our share of stupid things, generally while playing the amazing game Catchphrase.