Postius I wore a Dressius

(name due to popular demand from my mum)

right so last weekend one of Giulia's friends (also conveniently named Giulia) was having a party for her 18^th birthday. If I remember correctly I have already told you that while I was going though the traumatic experience of blow-drying my hair Giulia (my sister Giulia not the other one) asked me if I wanted to come with her. Taking mum's 'take all the opportunities you can' speech (it wasn’t really a speech but anyway) to heart I said that I would come, despite the fact I was quite nervous about going. I didn’t know very many of the people that would be there (I didn’t even know who WAS going but the fact I had only met a few of Giulia (my Giulia not the other one)'s friends and of those I had met couldn’t remember many of their names I was relatively sure I wouldn’t know very many of the people there), I wouldn’t be able to converse very well with any of the people there and in Australia I never really did the whole 'normal' teen party thing so I wasn’t really sure what I would be expecting if it had been in Aus let alone in another country all together! (wow that was a long sentence! Sorry if you are reading this NutchMan/Tom I swear that I swear that I learnt things in English!). So upon asking Giulia where the party was she replied that it was at a pub... this didn’t really do much to ease my nervousness because to me the word 'pub' describes an overly crowded, loud musiced place where I was going to feel majorly out of place.

We had to be at this 'pub' at 7.30 so 6.15 was declared start pimping time (really why you need this long quite honestly escapes me... I believe it has something to do with allowing you extra time to apply and remover make up until you are happy with it). Ermi appeard around the start of pimping time to get ready with us so I was content with the fact that I would know now at least 2 people at this thing. From what I could gather from the arm waving that was occurring between Ermi and Giu (Giulia, my Giulia not the other one) the aim was to wear the shortest dress possible (or wear a shortish dress and a belt and then hoik it up so above the belt was loose and bellow it made the dress really short) and then sheer tights (apparently for the cold but I think it was really just to get away with such short dresses. Fortunately dress dramas had no effect on me; not intending to go to a party on my first weekend over seas and also not excepting to have a short dress competition in winter while it got down to bellow freezing at night, I only had two dresses and only one was suitable for wearing at night.

In the pimping process the door to my room (well technically it is Giulia's room but I’m in it at the moment) was open (it is normally closed if someone's not in it or I don’t feel like being on Cleo patrol or other wise things, mainly my slippers and socks, go missing) because obviously me, Ermi and Giu where going it and out of it. After waking up that morning I thought to my self 'maybe tucking Jace (my teddy more on her in a later post) into my bed is not the best plan in case Cleo gets into the room' so instead I put her in the furthest part of the bed in the corner, up against the wall. This however did not deter Cleo who some how managed to evade the three off us and get hold of Jace. Fortunately I noticed this fiendish act as she was leaving the room with her bounty in her mouth. Alerting Giulia we (Ermi doesn’t like dogs) chased Cleo around the house until she dropped Jace and I managed to scoop her off to safety. Jace, fortunately, was fine with only a few of slobber to accompany the psychological trauma she would have sustained from the unwanted adventure. Needless to say Cleo wasn’t getting any pats from me for a while.

At some point in the pimping process Ermi decided that I needed to wear make up proceeded to deal with that. Another of Giu's friends Silvi (Silvia) who I'd already met (more on that in a later post too) also appeared at some point planning to catch the metro with us. However by the point where Ermi, Silvi and Giu where ready it was like 7.25 (or some other stupidly late time that was still slightly before 7.30) so someone (I think it was Silvi because Ermi couldn’t make the phone work) called for a taxi and we ended up arriving only 15 mins late as opposed the the 25 we would have been if we'd metrod (we still arrived before most other people so I’m not sure what the major stress was). The venue was really nice (I'd say more of a bar than a pub) and we had a reserved area down stairs where the music wasn't too obnoxiously loud (well not to begin with anyway) and it way wasn't over crowded. There were more people that I knew there (however I didn’t know their names at the time) and so I just casually followed someone that I knew around as they floated and talked to people they knew. I generally got introduced as ' this is Breanna, she's from Australia and doesnt understand Italian' however this was eventually shorted to 'this is Breanna. Speak English!'.

Now the problem with people who smoke is that they always want to go out and smoke. This generally isn’t a problem at school when you have a break every two hours that it continently just long enough to smoke a cigarette in, but when you are at a party the time intervals between cigarettes seems to dramatically decrease and thus the person I was casually following would frequently disappear off outside to smoke. 'Not a problem' you say 'find someone else to follow' but you see no, you cant just go and smoke by yourself, you've got to take all your other smoker friends with you. And that there is a problem because most of the people I was shadowing smoked, which means they alllll disappeared off together. And so because it's winter and it's cold every time you want to go outside to smoke you've got to find you coat and find your scarf and no doubt if you're looking for them they’ll be at the bottom of the coat/scarf mountain. Yeah I refuse to go outside with the smokers and not just because of the coat/scarf issue, I’m kind of waaaay over passive smoke.

It's ok they know that I don't generally go with them and they try to find someone for me to hang with while they're gone. Generally its Silvi who (yay!) doesn’t smoke. So Giu, Ermi and Cri (who's name is Cristina but I didn't remember that or Cri at the time) sat me at a able with Silvi and went out so smoke. I got introduced around the table and told I should talk to this guy Matteo because he could speak English. This turned out to just be one of his friends trying to piss him off but it was still amusing; waving arms and saying random words we knew of the other language. In Matteo's case generally was 'canguro' 'bong', 'marijuana', 'crack', 'joint' and a whole bunch of swear words... he did manage to string together a couple of sentences though, I believe one was 'you look like Nicole Kidman who's such a milf' (if you don’t know what a milf is and are over the age of say 25 I really suggest you DON'T try googleing it and that's not intend as random reverse psychology) and another 'do you want to learn how to roll a joint?' (although technically that's a question and not a sentence but anyway my response was the same:) laugh, say no, laugh some more. That was generally my response to everything Matteo said 'no I don’t want to smoke a joint.', 'yes I know what a bong is', 'yes marijuana is illegal in Australia', 'no really its'.

At 11.45ish the coat/scarf mountain was disassembled and everyone headed out because we had to metro before it shut at whatever time it shuts at. It was snowing! And it was really cool (cool meaning awesome but it was also cool meaning bellow zero so I guess both work fine!). For some reason unbeknownst to me (I’m sure it would have made sense if I understood rapid fire Italian) Giulia and I got a lift with some of her friends who had a car while the others metrod... by this point I had managed to learn that Giu (my Giulia not the other one), GiuGiu (the other Giulia not mine), Ermi, Silvi and Cri were staying the night. However I had failed to understand that this was AFTER everyone else had crashed at Giulia (my Giulia not the other one)'s for a while. But we're not up to that yet because in this story we haven’t even got home yet! So there were five of us in the car, and it was a small car, and it was a highly amusing ride because the drive and the front passenger kept fighting over the stereo. We were listening to a CD but only 1 in 5 song where actually deemed listenable to by the driver, while the passenger thought it was 2 in 5... when they finally decided on a song that we could listen to they were then fighting about the volume of said song, this was made all the more hilarious by the fact they were fighting in a completely passive way; the passenger would wait until the driver was busy indicating or changing gears and then turn it down the driver would then slowly turn it up again over a period of time until it was waaaay to loud which meant that when it got turned down again it was still loud but not overy.

We arrived back at Giulia's just before the first wave of metroers, it became apparent that the reason there were two waves was because some peeps had gone of to a supermarket or bottleo or somewhere to get the Italian equivalent of champagne and some I believe the label said peach flavoured vodka, which judging by the faces of the people that drunk it was completely revulting. Over the course of the time at Giulia's I met another person who decided to do a similar thing to Matteo by saying all the things in English that he knew... did could actually speak quite a bit of English and decided to try teaching me Italian by giving me things to say when Gabri (my host mum) or a teacher asked me to do something. Fortunately other people spoke English also and told me he was In fact teaching me to tell them to fuck off, I had actually worked this out myself and I’m relatively sure everything he said to me went in one ear and out the other. I was quite pleased when everyone decided to eventually leave, I kidna like a liiiittle bit of personal space and having 14 people in a couch/floor space of a 1.5m square doesn’t really work for me for longer than like 20 mins.

I finally crashed into bed at around 3.30 after declining offers to sleep upstairs with Giu and her other friends and then slept through until 1pm... oh the joys of shutters, I woke up and my room was dark enough I could have not fallen asleep at all, it was wonderful (I’m one of those weird people that as soon as the light density in a room reaches a certain point I’m awake and not going to sleep again, its wonderful for getting rid of jet lag but horrible when you want a sleep in)

okey dokey, updatius finished and going online in time for Tibs in her morning (she was bothering me and I said there'd be one when she got up) although she probs will be getting up late enough that everyone will have read it before her =P. I didn't intend for it to be this long, In fact I think its my longest yet... I wanted to get written and so I could go to bed like and hour ago but anyway... I’m going to try and write another tomorrow or the next arvo about the past week and what I did this weekend (and yes you have permission to hound me about this one I want it up before Friday!)


oh yes and I guess you'll be wanting a picture of the dressius i woreius? here you go; (taken by the lovely Ermi who cannot use and SLR and thus ended up taking pics of me waving my arms explaining how it worked =P)