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
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