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
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