Sorry, hiatus again =C

Domani mattina io vado al mare con Sele e suo fidanzato. dunque non posso aggiornare prima Domenica sera, mi dispiace =C

tomorrow morning I go to the sea with Sele and her boyfriend. Meaning I cannot upload before Sunday night, I’m sorry *sad face*

I will how ever be attempting to write some while I am there (hopefully I’ll be more successful than last time we were al mare). We are training and it's 4 hours each way so I’m hoping to write some then as I don’t feel like reading my book the whole time because then it will be finished. Mum only gave me two in the US and I’ve already finished one as we've spent a whole day at a water park and a half day at the pool, and apparently you don’t actually swim the whole (or even the majority of the) time you are there, you just spend the whole time trying to get as much skin cancer as possible. I refused to and thus wore LOTS of sunscreen and hid in the shade, I was the only one not bright pink at the end of the day.

I’m off to grumble at the internet in an attempt to load this before packing and then settling down for some nighnighs

Postius about Romeius 1

I'm currently sitting in the airport at Paris on the way home from FPS in America and BOY has it been a long time since I’ve written a blog! I’m very sorry I’ve just been so busy and so tired I just haven't gotten a chance before now.

Right so now we go back 2 ½ weeks to May 28^th, the day I headed to Rome with Chloe. We had tickets on the frecciarossa, a fast train that, that meant it would only take us 4 ½ hours instead of 9+. The train was leaving at 8.25 and then Corrado was on a 9 o'clock train to Venice so Sara said she would drive us to the Lingotto metro station and then Corrado would metro with us to Porta Nuova and make sure we got on the train ok. Designated leaving from house time was 7.45. At this time, and In fact at even 5 to 8 Sara was washing the dishes from breakfast while Chloe, Corrado and I were hovering on the doorstep. It turns out that Sara thought our train left at 8.45 and so was in no rush for us to leave. Once Corrado corrected her we drove slalom style to the metro stop, ran down the steps and made it onto a metro that left just after. Then, when we got to Porta Nuova we had to go up from the metro stop to the train station above, normally there is and escalator/staris from the inside of one to the other. However when we legged it up a massive flight of stairs it was to find that these were closed and thus we had to leg it up another set of stairs before running through the station, finding our platform and then running down that until dudes started blowing whistles at which point Corrado stuffed us on the train and said we'd have to find our carriage from in there. It was a very exciting and overly stressful start to the weekend.

By the time we managed to find out seats I had a dry rattly cough and wheezed if I breathed to deeply, I believe my comment to Chloe at the time was “I'm never running again in my life” her response was “would you like to use my asthma puffer” followed by “at least you wore your hiking boots not flats”. We swapped seats with a family of three so they could sit in the group of four chairs together while we sat in a 2 and didn't have to worry about annoying anyone else. The trip to Rome was rather uneventful; Chloe and I chatted for a while before she settled down to sudoku and I started studying 'emergency planning' for FPS. The only other vaguely interesting thing I can remember is when we got to Florence Chloe decided she wanted to get off the train and stalk the cast of 'Jersey Shore' I told her that was a stupid idea and I was in the isle seat so she couldn't really get up anyway.

When we arrived at the train station in Rome we discovered that neither of us actually had a phone number for Manuella, the lady from Mondo Insieme (my Italian exchange company) who was taking us around Rome. And now, before anyone starts raving about the lack of organisation or back up plans or anything; Chloe had the number on her phone or one of her SIMs (she has two, both Italian but one with better rates for calling overseas). When we checked through her phone and both the SIMs to get the number it had some how managed to get lost so we were numberless. We headed to the platform we remembered some information we revived telling us to wait but couldn't find Manuella or any other exchange looking students. In the end I texted Sara who had Sele text me the number. When we finally got hold of Manuella it turns out she was waiting two platforms down from where we were at 12 not 10 (I’m still very sure the information said 10, especially as some of the others got lost too).

We had a little wait in the station while we waited for everyone to arrive from their various locations. In the end we had Me and Chloe from Torino, Tash from Vasto (on the opposite coast from Rome), Mollie and Ellie (two Kiwis) from Naples (or just outside), Marlin and Karoline (Swedish and Norwegian) from Sicily and Helene (another Norwegian), Elina and Maria (both Finnish) from I can't remember where. And of course Manny, how we arrived at this nick name is a story I shall tell later.

The hotel we were staying wasn't actually in the center of Rome but was a little way out (I’ve no idea if it was in fact technically in Rome, it appears that were we'd say something was in another suburb they say its the next town). To get there we had to metro and then get off and walk a little way to a train stop and get on a train and THEN walk for about 5 mins to get to the hotel, all with our bags, oh yes! And also with Manny, who has a rather.....lacking sense of direction, leading us. We ended up spending rather a while sitting in the train station, while we waited for a train that stopped where we needed to go, this wasn't really the end of the world because we just spent the whole time chatting and getting to know each other which was really great.

On the outside our hotel looked like a total dump, faded paint and water stains and so everyone was grumbling that Manny was useless (this also has to do with the fact that several of the trains we didn't get on because they 'didn't stop at our station' did in fact stop at our stop). Inside however the hotel was perfectly fine, the rooms were small but really, why do you need to have a big luxurious room? We're in Rome to do Rome things and explore Rome, not live in the hotel room. We dumped our stuff, spent a while just chilling and then headed back into Rome for a mini exploration then dinner. 3 min walk, traffic light, 3 second walk, traffic light, 2 second walk, traffic light, 2 min walk, 10 second stair descension, and that's just to get to the platform for the train. Right so get on the train, for.... I’m not really sure how long, it was long enough that we wanted to get a seat but we always seemed to almost miss it so it can't have been too long... then for the trek from the train platform to the metro there were about 5 stair cases/ escalators you had to go down then a 2min walk to the metro entrance and then another 3 sets of stairs to get to the right platform. Yeah Rome real organised!

We headed into Piazza di Spagna where there is a huge set of stairs that lead up to a church at the top. Unfortunately dusk/sunset isn't the best time to visit here if you want to take pretty pictures, and there were LOADS of people, but here's a picture anyway:

We then went on a bit of a walk to have a look at things, Manny wouldn't let us into any shops which was amusing for me and annoying for most of the others. Right so Manny; she's quite petite (as in she's shorter than me) she always wore elegant cloths, at night she always wore heels (as in stilettos) even when we had planned extensive cobblestoned walks and she was always telling us to act like 'laaaaaaidies'; 'oh no girls don't do that, it's not ladylike, if you don't act like a lady no man will be interested in you'. Yeah we found this absolutely hilarious and tried to do as many unladylike things as possible, then when she went to tell someone they weren't acting like a lady we'd jump in with 'laaaaaaaaidy' (if you've seen Little Brittan you'll understand).

We eventually found a pizza joint to eat at, but as you can imagine walking into a small pizzeria, in a popular tourist destination, at a peak eating hour with eleven people it's kinda difficult to seat you all together. So we ended up with two tables about as far apart as was physically possible. We were supposed to be mingling but we didn't do a very good job deviding for tables, I ended up with the two Finns, a Norwegian and Manny near the door and everyone else was over in the opposite corner. After we'd finished eating and done some (not very) complicated math to split the bill we headed off to another near by piazza. I actually have absolutely no idea the name of the piazza we were in but there was a pointy monument thing and castleyish building behind it, I’ll get back to you. Put 10 teenagers in a relatively unpopulated piazza towards the end of the night and silly photo teimz ensue:

Maria, Helene, Karoline & Malin

Manny & Chloe

Malin, Ellie & Natasha

Mollie & Chloe

Manny, Chloe, Mollie & Ellie

So obviously I’m not in the airport at Paris any more, I’ve actually been back for two weeks, oops! More of an explanation about how I’ve been 'using' my time will come in a later post. Also keep an eye out for more about Rome, we did SO much there is no way I could get it into one reasonable sized post so you can have several. Hopefully the rest will follow in the next few days.

(mum has alerted me to a possible reason for my blogger not working at night as an issue with blogger not functioning well with Google Chrome which is the internet browser I use, thus tonight I am running a competition between GC and Internet Explorer to see which will function/let me upload first. If I am still having some issues, please check back tomorrow or later today for any images that don’t upload tonight)

Updatius I got interrogatedius

I’ve actually been interrogated twice, and had a conversational Italian test. My first interrogation was last Thursday with Religion. Susi had organised with the Prof.ssa that I would just remember some information and tell it back to her rather than have to answer any questions. I’d researched about the '39 articles of religion' that are (you guessed it) 39 articles that state what makes Anglicanism different from Catholicism and then simplified down all the information so I could use Google translate to get it into Italian. Then all I had to do was remember it all so I could say it back to the teacher. I spent a while on Wednesday night and all of the bus and metro ride to school on Thursday reciting it until if I went very slowly and thought rather hard I could get through it without looking at the sheet. I decided that I would write some bits on my hand, a couple of words from each section to prompt me where I got stuck. This was more because if I wrote them on my hand I knew I’d remember what I’d written rather than with the intention of reading them off, because somehow that's just how my brain works.

I’d spent the whole time I was practising imagining that I would be sitting up the front of the class with the teacher at her desk telling the information to her and possibly Ila & Susi, like every other interrogation has been. This however was not the case. Religion is the only subject you can choose to take or not, most of the class does not. This was also the last assessment for the year which meant that there wasn't anything for the class to go on with while the teacher interrogated us (normally you read the textbook, do physics equations, text, sleep or leave the class). So small class + last assessment = teacher interrogating us in font of the whole class from our normal seats. While I knew that the whole class would be listening to mine anyway it somehow seemed much more of a big deal when it was officially in font of the whole class =S

I was the second person to go (after Ila) I went veery slowly and attempted to get my pronunciation right, but I used my notes a lot more than I was when I had been practising before school. There were apparently a few bits where the translation was really strange, but I don’t see why because I checked over how google translate did and I thought it was ok. meh. The rest of the class went after me but I honestly don’t really remember any of their stuff. This is partly because they were talking waaay to quickly for me to understand a topic I didn’t already know but mainly because I was having a mini die after doing mine.

Normally after an interrogation you give your little marks book to the teacher and they write in the mark you get but because we weren't sitting up the front with the teacher this time we didn’t do that. I don’t actually know how she announced the marks because I didn't even know she had until Susi asked if she could write my mark down for me. I got at 10. all the marks here are out of 10. It's very exciting! The Prof.ssa for Religion is really nice and at the end of mine her comment was something like 'see you can speak Italian, you must do it more' so I’m sure that my uber high mark was in part because I had put in the effort to do it in Italian because I didn't cover the information in very much depth.

I’ve actually been doing rather well at school here, in the subjects that I’ve been doing at least. I’ve got a mark back for one of the two Matematica tests I’ve done and I got 7 ½ and I got 8 in both the Fisica tests I’ve done, in one of them I only got one question wrong and I think it was because I had no idea which of two values it wanted me to find so guessed and did one and it was the wrong one. I also got and 8 in Inglese Letteratura, I’m not a fan of English lit here... it was a test on 500 years of English history and then like one page of the text book was on the medieval ballad. I had another English lit test yesterday (friday if I don’t get to put this up straight away) that I only found out about the day before...yeah the teacher seems to enjoy saying when the assessments are very quickly in Italian.

So my other interrogation was for History, Storia. After ignoring me for the first two months that I was in her class the teacher came up to me one day and declared that I have to get a mark. And instead of choosing the option I had a better chance of being able to actually do well in she decided that she was going to interrogate me. She also chose a very boring topic for me to study, the EU, and declared that I had to find all the information by my self. I’m not a big fan of this Prof.ssa, she changed that date that I was going to be interrogated about 5 times and every lesson she told me something different, you have to do it in Italian, the English teacher will come and translate for you, what are you talking about the English teacher's not coming. urgh, I was not pleased. And then beucause she didn’t give me any information like she said she would I had no idea what depth I needed to learn things in and if I was just supposed to learn the history of the EU or if I needed to know how it functined and the complicated election system and politics and stuff... in the end I when with just attempting to learn the history of it in English because she seemed to think she would be able to understand me enough.

Then when I went to actually do the interrogation she got all confused when I started answering her in English. Urgh she has quite surprising memory problems for a history teacher. We got about half way through when she started asking me unhistory related questions and trying to get me to answer in Italian, so we just spent the rest of the 25ish mins of the class not doing my interrogation and chatting. She asked what type of school I went to in Aus (in Italy there are different high schools that have a science or classical etc. focus) so I had to explain that we didn't have types of schools. Then we went into what subjects that I did and once she eventually realised that I’d never studied the EU before she asked what we studied in History. Upon hearing that I’d studied WWII she asked me when it started and finished, da millenovacento tretanove a milenovacento quarantacinque, and then because I could say numbers in Italian she randomly asked me when I was born...

When we changed the seating plan for the class, more than a month ago now, the two sweetest girls in the class, Elena and Giu Rosso, ended up in the centre front seats. So they continued to listen to my 'interrogation' after most of the rest of the class stopped, then halfway through the Prof.ssa asking me random questions Elena asked if she was allowed to ask me one. She asked something along the lines of 'this summer what do you do/why do you go to the United States?'. I’m going for the FPS, Future Problem Solving, internationals, if you've ever heard me try and simplify and explain FPS before you'll know that it's not a very simplifyable thing, now try doing that in Italian. My response was something like 'I’m going for one week for a 2 hour exam and the rest of the time I spend time with students from all the world' but obs in Italian, the next question was what subject is the exam on, that's the most difficult question with relation to FPS, it's on everything but not really and in the end I think I managed to explain it was written problem solving and that it's on most subjects but I’m not really sure.

At the end of the lesson I took my marks book up to the Prof.ssa so she could give me a mark and she was like 'oh we didn’t finish, I’ll give you a mark after we do the other half next week'. Stupid annoying lady that is not inconveniencing me because she got distracted, urgh!

The Italian teacher came on Thursday and took me out of my 2 hours of Italian in other classed to give me a test. There was a listening section that I did ok with, a writing section that I did not that well on because I didn’t know the majority of the words so when you have to fill in the blanks with words from a list I just guessed and a conversation section. There were two parts and each one had a choice of two questions. The first was between 'go to the farmacia and get drugs to fix these symptoms' and 'go and buy a wedding dress', I went to the farmacia, which turned out to be a good plan because I 'walked in' said 'I have *insert list of symptoms* can you help?' and then just listened to the Prof.ssa say thing for the rest of the time. It was very cute, I decided that I had to get in some Italian so I asked how much it cost and if I could please have a bag, she found this quite amusing.

The second section had two options but the Prof.ssa decided that we were going to do the one where we talk about food or cooking or something, I think she just wanted an excuse to find out about Australian food. So we ran through what type of food do you eat, what's a taditional Australian dish, what do you have for breakfast etc. I was pretty happy with that topic of conversation because food is actually something that I can do.

Right now I’m in a train with Chloe on our way to Rome for 3 nights with the Italian exchange company Mondo Insieme, we're just passing through Firenze (Florence) and I’m fighting Chloe to make her stay on the train rather than get off and stalk the Jersey Shore cast or something, they are apparently filming here. There is WiFi on the train (we are on a frecciarossa train) but we cant work out how to use it, it seems that you have to pay or something but in order to understand the website enough to do that we need to use google translate. I shall write about our exciting adventure getting to the train and the train ride another time (but they will probs go up together) because I’m now going to pack up my laptop and get onto some study for FPS.

I am aware of the EXTREMLEY long time since my last blog post, and I apologise for it. This update has been sitting on my computer, completed, for almost a week and a half. Unfortunately I don’t have another that I’ve written in that time because for the past few weeks I’ve been trying to split my time between studying for FPS, studying for school, writing in my travel diary and writing blog posts. Unfortunately the last two have lucked out most of the time. Since I wrote this post I’ve spent 4 days in Rome, gone to school for a day, spent 4 days in Venice and then had one more day at school. Tomorrow morning I get up early to leave the house at 5.30am to get to the airport for my 7.15am flight to America. I hear you saying that the 12 ½ hour flight would be a good opportunity for me to get out some more blog updates but I am dedicating it to FPS study as 'Emergency Planning' seems to be a rather complicated topic. The flights on the way home aren't really designed to allow me to be productive, I leave at 3pm and arrive at 8am so I’m not sure I’ll get much written then but while I’m in America I’m missing the last few days of school so when I return I will have some hard core blogging sessions and catch up on all the things I’ve neglected.