School here kind of sucks, as I can't understand anything. The only class I really like is art. We're drawing the human form,
specifically the head and face at the moment. It's enjoyable, and I've been doing well. Other than that class, school is long and drawn out, with lots of block hours (I feel like Harry Potter, off to Double Potions!). It's a good thing the actual school day is short, because it gives me the rest of the day off-- school lasts from 8:30 to 1:00.
Usually Martina and I got to the piazza (city square) and hang out with her friends for an hour or so before going home for lunch. All of her friends are goth and death metalheads, which is a bit of a change from my usual crowd. They all love Death Note and Fullmetal Alchemist, but have not heard of Host Club or Avatar, They are all very nice-- one even gave me a webcam so I can (hopefully) talk on Skype soon. We all hang out together in the evenings as well, from around 9 to 12ish. Every. Single. Night. A little too much social activity for me, but I am trying. It's difficult, though, as I can't really express myself or understand others properly.
Last Saturday night, some of us went to a tea room called the ShaZa in a secluded area of the city. It was a really cool setting, with dim lighting and silk cushions. I ordered the Istanbul Tea, which was a fruity concoction that turned out to be disgusting (I couldn't resist choosing it over a much blander tea I knew I was guaranteed to like. I mean, come on! It was called ISTANBUL).
I made a stir fry for my family last week as well. They had never tried it before, and we had to go to a specialty asian market to buy the soy sauce. We could not find any broccoli (Out of season apparently), watercress (Not a single grocer or Italian we encountered had any idea what 'cresione' was), or snap peas. I ended up making it with noodles and carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, mushrooms, and frozen peas. Not the ideal combination, but they liked it well enough ("Strange, but good!").
We also made chocolate chip cookies, which were, as I could have predicted, a disaster. My host father was able to locate mini chocolate chips at some obscure store on the edge of the city, and we compiled all of the usual ingredients, although there were some major differences-- the vanilla extract here is powdered and comes in little packets, and the brown sugar isn't soft and clumpy, it's granulated like regular sugar. Anyway, I managed to mess the whole thing up by miscalculating the conversion from cups to ounces or pints or whatever it was. I added about five times the necessary amount of sugar, and the cookies came
out flat and meshed together, they had enough sugar in them to make you hyper for hours off of one bite. They were more like sugar cookies with chocolate chips than anything else, but everyone seemed to love them, which was good. Yesterday I made a slightly better batch with the proper amounts of ingredients, but they still didn't really turn out. And I could hardly suggest that everyone dip them in milk, because it's gross here. It's condensed and powdery, and is always heated before it goes into a cup or on top of cereal. They don't seem to like it to much either, actually...
The city of Avellino is technically much smaller than Gilbert, but it has way more city, as houses are uncommon here and everything is close together. My host family has a townhouse with a small garden on the outskirts of town. It takes five minutes for us to get to school driving and twenty minutes walking. The house is roughly the size of my mom's townhouse, only there's no garage, an attic with three bedrooms, and a basement. So it's actually bigger than mom's. They looked up Gilbert on google earth and were shocked by all of the pools and freestanding houses. I showed them my dad's house, and they said it was "bellissima". Here you have to be wealthy to own a swimming pool, and most houses the size of dad's would house two families instead of one. It was difficult trying to explain that in Gilbert, and the US in general, these things are very normal, and you don't have to be rich.
I have taught Martina to play cards-- she had never played before! Her favorite game is Go Fish, followed closely by Speed and Old Maid. She and her friends have taken to declaring "Go fish!" whenever something goes wrong (Like when we went to the tea room last night only to find it closed). It's hilarious.
specifically the head and face at the moment. It's enjoyable, and I've been doing well. Other than that class, school is long and drawn out, with lots of block hours (I feel like Harry Potter, off to Double Potions!). It's a good thing the actual school day is short, because it gives me the rest of the day off-- school lasts from 8:30 to 1:00.
Usually Martina and I got to the piazza (city square) and hang out with her friends for an hour or so before going home for lunch. All of her friends are goth and death metalheads, which is a bit of a change from my usual crowd. They all love Death Note and Fullmetal Alchemist, but have not heard of Host Club or Avatar, They are all very nice-- one even gave me a webcam so I can (hopefully) talk on Skype soon. We all hang out together in the evenings as well, from around 9 to 12ish. Every. Single. Night. A little too much social activity for me, but I am trying. It's difficult, though, as I can't really express myself or understand others properly.
Last Saturday night, some of us went to a tea room called the ShaZa in a secluded area of the city. It was a really cool setting, with dim lighting and silk cushions. I ordered the Istanbul Tea, which was a fruity concoction that turned out to be disgusting (I couldn't resist choosing it over a much blander tea I knew I was guaranteed to like. I mean, come on! It was called ISTANBUL).
I made a stir fry for my family last week as well. They had never tried it before, and we had to go to a specialty asian market to buy the soy sauce. We could not find any broccoli (Out of season apparently), watercress (Not a single grocer or Italian we encountered had any idea what 'cresione' was), or snap peas. I ended up making it with noodles and carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, mushrooms, and frozen peas. Not the ideal combination, but they liked it well enough ("Strange, but good!").
We also made chocolate chip cookies, which were, as I could have predicted, a disaster. My host father was able to locate mini chocolate chips at some obscure store on the edge of the city, and we compiled all of the usual ingredients, although there were some major differences-- the vanilla extract here is powdered and comes in little packets, and the brown sugar isn't soft and clumpy, it's granulated like regular sugar. Anyway, I managed to mess the whole thing up by miscalculating the conversion from cups to ounces or pints or whatever it was. I added about five times the necessary amount of sugar, and the cookies came
out flat and meshed together, they had enough sugar in them to make you hyper for hours off of one bite. They were more like sugar cookies with chocolate chips than anything else, but everyone seemed to love them, which was good. Yesterday I made a slightly better batch with the proper amounts of ingredients, but they still didn't really turn out. And I could hardly suggest that everyone dip them in milk, because it's gross here. It's condensed and powdery, and is always heated before it goes into a cup or on top of cereal. They don't seem to like it to much either, actually...
The city of Avellino is technically much smaller than Gilbert, but it has way more city, as houses are uncommon here and everything is close together. My host family has a townhouse with a small garden on the outskirts of town. It takes five minutes for us to get to school driving and twenty minutes walking. The house is roughly the size of my mom's townhouse, only there's no garage, an attic with three bedrooms, and a basement. So it's actually bigger than mom's. They looked up Gilbert on google earth and were shocked by all of the pools and freestanding houses. I showed them my dad's house, and they said it was "bellissima". Here you have to be wealthy to own a swimming pool, and most houses the size of dad's would house two families instead of one. It was difficult trying to explain that in Gilbert, and the US in general, these things are very normal, and you don't have to be rich.
I have taught Martina to play cards-- she had never played before! Her favorite game is Go Fish, followed closely by Speed and Old Maid. She and her friends have taken to declaring "Go fish!" whenever something goes wrong (Like when we went to the tea room last night only to find it closed). It's hilarious.
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