Saturday, March 10, 2012

So Much To Do, So Little Time

Hi everyone!

I've been meaning to write again for a while now but I never got the chance. Nothing too exciting has happened in the past week! I was sick on Wednesday and Thursday so I got to find out how unpleasant it is to be sick abroad. Rosanna (my host mom) was great and made me feel a lot better, but somehow it doesn't quite compare to being in your own home, in your own bed, etc. So, I was a bit homesick for those two days, but it quickly passed as I started to feel better. Other than that, this week has been filled with the typical school days, stuffing myself with food, going to the gym...to pretend I am working out enough to work off all that food, sleeping, and spending time with my friends and family. Might not sound like much, but it has become my own special little lifestyle in Italy. It is filled with similarities and differences from life in NC, sometimes there are challenges or parts of it that annoy me (a similarity to Morganton), but nevertheless I absolutely love it.

Also, in approximately 4 months I will be heading back to the States. I can't believe it. I have to look at my time to manage when and where I can travel, etc and the fact that I am already a month and a half down really jumped out at me. I don't want to start a countdown yet, it seems way too early, but I already know the next 4 months are going to fly by!

The language. I know I mentioned in my last post that the language was really frustrating me, and it is, but I found a new way to look at it. Even though I still feel like I should be able to speak more, I realized how much I really can understand. That in itself is a major barrier to cross. As long as the person doesn't speak at top speed (which I swear is like 1,000,000 words per minute) and they are talking about normal topics, I can almost understand everything. Then I realized something pretty amazing, that makes 61 million people to add to the list of people I can understand and (somewhat) communicate with. Obviously, I will not meet all 61 million Italians, but the fact that it is possible made me feel a lot better about where I am standing with the language at this point. Also, my Italian teacher told me the other day (in Italian obviously, but I'll write in English to save you the trouble from having to open Google Translate) that he is "sure in the next 2-4 weeks I will start speaking a lot because 1. I have to be able to hear the language in my head before I can speak well, and that takes time and 2. Spring is coming and he has decided that Spring = Emma speaking". The second reason didn't reassure me too much, but the first made me realize that he is right. I think in Italian a lot more than I speak. Mainly because in my head I can think about the way an Italian would speak and make myself sound like that. Now I just have to do the same thing with the words coming from my mouth. WAY easier said than done.

This weekend should be a fairly exciting one! Today I am going to lunch at my AFS friends house and out to dinner with some other friends and AFS students that are doing their exchange week in Aosta. Tonight I know there will be a girl from Iceland and a girl from Canada. Sometime this week two Americans will be arriving...time to speak some real ENGLISH! I can't wait. I love meeting new Intercultura students because we don't have to be around each other for more than an hour and we all automatically become close friends. It is one of the strangest things, and I still don't understand exactly why, but I love it. At this point, I could travel to an insane number of countries and have one, if not multiple, contacts in each. Argentina, Honduras, Norway, Japan, Turkey, Serbia, Latvia, Austria, Australia, Germany, Chile, soon to be Iceland and about 25 different states in USA. Pretty amazing! Back to this week, then tomorrow I am visiting Torino with my family! I'm excited to see more than just the glimpse of the city that I got when I was picked up from the Torino train station in January.

New travel plans: just to keep you updated, my friends and I (from school) are planning a trip to Milano over Easter break after I return to Roma. It's mainly girls and this trip is centered around shopping. I think this Spring Break might just top the ones from my past.

Hope everyone is doing well!
Love you all xoxo
Emma

No comments:

Post a Comment