20 giorni!

Well, I have now been in Italy for 20 days! Everything here is becoming more familiar to me- I can feel myself adjusting to my new culture (and language). There have been many moments where I’ve felt confused and frustrated because I don’t understand something, but also many times where something just clicks, and I get it. I am definitely becoming more patient (because I have to be) with myself as I learn how to live in Italy.  At first I got angry with myself every time I made a mistake, but little by little I am seeing my mistakes as 1) funny and 2) an example of how not to do things. Making mistakes ends up being a good thing because I always learn something about the language. The other day I was trying to tell my host family about the factory farms in the US, and when I said, “i mucci en la farmacia” (what I thought meant “the cows on the farm”) they burst out laughing! Apparently “la farmacia” means “the pharmacy” and the plural of “la mucca” (the cow) is “le mucce,” not “i mucci”. I started laughing too, because I realized how weird "the cow at the pharmacies" must have sounded! Now every time I make a singular word plural I remember to get the gender right.

I am also working on the virtue of patience at school. Most of the time I have no idea what’s going on… but today I finally had an “aha” moment where I could understand what the teacher was saying and participate a little bit in class (don’t get too excited, I only was able to get out about one sentence)! In history we were discussing the difference between colonialism and imperialism, and the teacher asked me what I had learned about the topic in the US. I’m pretty familiar with the history about the English colonization of America, so I told her about the colonies that later became the US. Unfortunately we weren’t really learning about the US so what I said wasn’t exactly relevant, but my teacher was happy that I was trying, and it was still nice to feel like I at least was grasping the main idea of the lecture. The problem is, my school is very academically prestigious, and sometimes I understand the words being said but not the material. For example, in philosophy we are learning about the theories of famous philosophers Kierkegaard, Kant, and Hegel. Since we learned these same philosophies in my AP Literature class back in the US, it’s safe to say that I never really understood them in English, so even though I can sort of comprehend the Italian vocabulary, I’m pretty lost when it comes to contemplating the existence of humankind in Italian. Oh well. There are some classes where I’ve just accepted that I’m not going to know what’s going on (such as Latin). The kids in my class have studied Latin for 4 years and during class the teacher reads ancient Latin literature aloud for almost the whole hour. At first I was trying desperately to figure out why I didn’t understand ANYTHING she was saying, but then I realized that she wasn’t even speaking Italian! Ha! I really don’t have any intentions of learning Latin this year, so during that class I study Italian.

Outside of learning the culture and language and other such things, I have been having lots of fun living in Italy in general! There’s a yoga studio in the hotel right next to my house, so I’ve been doing yoga on Monday nights. On Tuesday nights I have church choir, and this Saturday I went to a really fun birthday party where we dressed up and danced. This weekend is my first Rotary event- all the exchange students are going to a city near Bologna for three days, so I’m really looking forward to that.

Here is a video of what it’s like to walk through the center of Vicenza, my city… Dovete guardarlo, é bellisimo J