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 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

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 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!