Rome

This is the first place we went, and while we were surrounded by big, old buildings, I asked for a picture with Tigger. This was the first picture on my camera from Rome.

 I don't exactly know what this is.

I'm gonna make a guess and say this is named the Fountain of the Spitting Lion.

 Mimes.

Altare della Patria!

 Old Rome.

 Tossing our coins into The Fountain of Love.

 At the Vatican the Nativity Scene.

 Nearish the vatican, I think.

 The Colosseum.

 At the volleyball games. This kid was so funny, at times it was hard to understand him though "because of his accent".

 The coolest town ever.

Today I am in the greatest mood of all time. Why? I have no clue. Realistically I should be crabby. This bright and sunny morning started out with me walking 8 blocks in pouring rain. My host sister didn't go to school today, because she had homework. So I was on my own for this adventure. I passed two bus stops, but being the Minnesotan that I am, and thinking buses are a little scary on my own, I passed by. We normally ride with our friends, but it's a long walk to where we meet up with them, so when it is raining we always ride the bus.

Since I live at the bottom of the mountain, I was walking through a waterfall everytime I crossed a street. On the plus side by the second half of my walk I didn't have to worry about trying to avoid the currents with heavy water, because my shoes, and socks were already as wet as they get. I was officially soaking wet by the time I got to class.

Once I reached the classroom, I discarded my shoes. Everyone looked at my weird, because they even wear shoes inside the house. But I really didn't care. I don't exactly want to sit in soaking wet shoes all day. We'll see who looks weird when they're all sick tomorrow with snot running down their noses, because they sat in wet shoes all day.

Now, as to why I am in a good mood? Instead of rain, to me it was a challenge. My host mom had asked me if I wanted to skip school, but I decided to go.

Another not as in depth, but still amazing thing to me is this. The clouds sweep in around me, they cover the mountains. When the clouds leave, we're surrounded by beautiful white, snowy mountians.

There's been several things in the last few days that have happened. I just have a hard time getting on the computer to update my blog more often.

For those of you who didn't see it on facebook, tomorrow I leave for Rome.

This morning while I was at the waiting spot for my friends, a lady walked out of her house. She looks at me and goes "Hello! Good morning! You're name is Louisssss?" She trailed of hesitently with the ending part, I told her, and she said "It's really nice to meet you!" It still amazes me sometimes with how news spreads in a small town. I don't know who she was, but sometimes it's just really cool being the "Exchange student" or "the girl who speaks English".

Sorry if there's any spelling errors, or typing mess ups. I don't feel like looking over it anymore, and my stupid blog has the spell check for Italian words, so I almost all of my words are underlined red.

The volcano from the previous post

Yeah, I obviously didn't take this photo. But remember how I mentioned the volcano across the sea steaming 2 blog posts ago? And how I questioned if it was normal, and they assured me it didn't mean it was erupting? Yeah. I'm feeling like a boss right now beause it erupted a few days ago. BOOM! My host mom showed me it last night on the news. I know this is a really pointless blog post. But I really felt like sharing that I am living near a erupting volcano. It gives life a little more excited twist to it for me.

Weekend with the Prof!

First off I'm going to apologize ahead of time, I think this blog post is going to be really freakin' crabby, unenthusiastic and lame. I'm in the lamest mood ever because my awesome weekend was perfect until I got home and now my stupid computer won't work. I've been seriously working at this dumb blog post and these pictures for over half an hour, and just now am I finally makin' progress. I have literally re-started my computer 4 times now. I really hope that this time I will be able to get this post finished.

This first picture I'm starting out with is a picture from my "wedding" that we had in my class. It's just a silly picture, it was a joke of a day.

This weekend I was at my Italian teacher's house. It was really fun! I honestly had an incredibly fun time. We started out the night on Friday hanging out and relaxing. I can't really remember much of what we did, but I remember we skyped my family. It was just a really fun night, I didn't get to bed until 3am. Then Saturday I woke up and ate breakfast, then watched a movie with my Italian teacher's husband, Massimo. After the movie was finished he brought down his gun to show me, it was a revolver and he was surprised when I noticed that it was dirty. It was funny because then he bragged about that to my teacher Maria when she walked in the room, he's like "this girl knows guns!". It kind of made me feel cool. I don't really know guns that well, but I guess I still probably know them better than most Italian people my age. Massimo also thought it was cool that I'd named my cat Winchester after the kind of gun.

This is the beautiful city of Paola at night! :)

This is the streets of the old part of the town! It was really cool. On Saturday I walked from the bottom part of the mountain up to the top where the castle tower was. It was a really long walk, and honestly there's probably more stairs just in that one town than there is in all of Minnesota.

This is halfway up the mountain. Below us right under where the picture ends is all the steps up until there. One of the girls we were walking with got tired and one of the guys had to carry her part way.

And we finally made it up to the top of the town to where the tower is! It wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped, because we couldn't go inside of it. I

I made Italian pizza. It was so good! I've honestly been so full the last few months! I hate soda, so I never drink it. Pizza was the only thing I drink it with usually, but I figured out something better. I think I'll be drinking beer with my pizza from now on.

Needless to say, I had an amazing weekend with my teacher. I think I will be going to her house a few more weekends. We also talked about going to Rome in a few weeks. We'll see if that works out. :)

Also, once again I was amazed by Italian boys. My teacher has two sons, one is in Rome at school, that one is my age. But the other is at home studying university online. I've seriously met so many polite boys here it's insane! I don't understand why no guys in Minnesota that I've spent time with are like that. There's only one of my Minnesotan guy friends I can think of who'd be thoughtful. I don't dig anyone here very much, because I obviously can't really get attached to someone since I'm leaving. But I just can't believe the attitude difference between guys here and guys in Minnesota. Giuseppe asked me several times during my weekend there if he could get me anything to eat, or to drink. He came upstairs to ask me once. He's not the first one who's like that though, it's the majority of them. I pray God helps me raise my sons, if he blesses me with them, into complete gentlemen.

Okay, this is a quick summery of everything that's happened the last few days.

2 days ago, I got married to one of my classmates. Of course it wasn't a real wedding, but I kind of felt like I was going to kindergarten again! The cool thing though, was that the "preacher" was saying the words in Italian. It was really cool hearing the wedding vows in a different language. The last three days haven't been the greatest, but aside from that I'm having a wonderful time here. I'm not sad about the last few days being down days, because if every day was great, then there'd be know difference between normal and great, and then I wouldn't appreciate my blessings as much. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Sorry if it's confusing.

I think it was yesterday on my way home from school, as we were twinding down the mountain side, on our little hairpin turns, I saw the volcano out in the sea. It was just the atmosphere of the day that made it visible, but I was amazed when I saw the top smoking. At first I was like "Elisa! Is that normal?" I was kinda worried about being buried alive. Elisa then assured me that it's completely normal for volcanoes to smoke, even when they aren't about to erupt. It was so cool though, definitely something I don't see in Minnesota, with our high cloud cutting mountains that we have in Oklee.

Also yesterday I received a package in the mail from my amazing, sweet, caring sisters. It was incredibly special and I loved every sweet little thing they put in it.

Today I wore a necklace to school that my sister Sophie had sent me, and I lost it. But I was surprised when during my last hour a teacher came into my room and asked if anyone had lost a necklace, and held up my necklace. That made me very happy.

Tomorrow I am going to my Italian teacher's house for the weekend! I'm really excited for that. But I'm even more excited for my Grandma and my two great aunts who are visiting me in April!

I really feel blessed with my family, from the Christmas presents from my sisters to the itinerary of my grandma's trip. I am so happy to have a family like mine. God has blessed me very greatly.

I'd also like to ask everyone to say a quick prayer for my friend and classmate in Minnesota. Mickala has been having medical issues starting from the time I left for Italy. Today she has surgery. Right now she's at Mayo, and if you want to read her story you can read the caringbridge site. But please keep her in your prayers.

Christmas break is over...

This blog post would be longer, but alas, my amazing, beautiful, sweet and loving best friend had to go through all her old pictures and tag me in about 60 photos, most of which I'm doing ridiculously stupid things in. It was so thoughtful of her and I really appreciated wasting my last 20 minutes going through and untagging myself! ;) It was pretty interesting reliving my childhood though. There's one picture where I fell through the ice in Rachel's ditch.... yeah.. it's ugly.. but it's funny..Anyways!! Thanks for that my dearest Rachel. 

Tonight we went out to celebrate our last night before Christmas vacation ends. 

In this photo they are trying to have me act out a tree so they can explain some dialect word. This is our way of communication when I don't understand what someone is saying..

 Andddd my amazing hot chocolate...... It's even cooler because a ginger makes it for me every day that I eat it!!! :)

Oh! And great! Now I have another 20 photo's to look through! Goodnight everyone! :) I hope all of your days were absolutely amazing, mine sure was. :)

New Years Celebrations.

My computer is a disaster, a complete and total disaster. If I was famous, and being paid to make this blog about my stay here in Italy, I could just send off to some computer company, and tell them that I'll advertise for them if they send me a free laptop. Sadly, I am not famous, or being funded on this blog.

Due to the fact that I don't know how much longer my computer is going to work, I'm not sure if my blog posts will continue for the rest of my year in Italy. I hope that I can somehow stretch the life for a little longer!  I'll try! Once my computer decides it's glorious life is finished, I will try to figure out some other way to post on my blog. My sister has a ipad, so I use that for facebook. I think it'd be a pain in the butt though to type out blog posts without a keyboard. I'm not sure, we're just going to have to see what happens.

The hot chocolate here is serious the best I've ever tasted. It's thick and creamy. I'm going to figure out how to make it and bring it home because I have got to have this in freezing Minnesota.

 One of my friends asked me about the view from my new house, she said "it can't be as great as at your old house, can it?" In answer to that question, "yes, it can be". It's different, but it's still great. Instead of looking down the mountain at the sea, I can look up at the mountain, there's also a cliffish type thing out one of our windows. I'd describe it more, but I kinda forgot the word in English for what I'm trying to say.

On New Years eve, we went to the Bianco's to eat. It was a really wonderful evening. I've never had a New years eve celebration quite like this one. It was about a 5 course meal, the first 2 courses I have pictures of. But then I gave up.

 This was a bread type thing with layers, the layers were Cheese, Tuna, calamari(I think that's the right name, but it was fish eggs?). I think that's all. Uhhh.. I liked the cheese layer, but the other layers weren't really my thing.

 Then we had this amazing pasta..... ohhh myyyy gooodnessss.. It was incredible. The top and bottom were flaky pie type crusts. Imagine the flakiest, unsweetened, apple pie crust ever. That's what it was like. Then pasta in between the crusts. We then had meat and vegetables, followed by a fruit course. The fruit was more ice cream than fruit. After that was finished the dessert was brought out. For dessert I can't remember what we ate, I think it was maybe a few different things. I don't remember. All the food kind of blends together after a few days of feasting like this. The meal stretched out from about 9pm until 11:30pm. At 11:30 the wine and I think champagne were brought out. There was a count down on one of the stations on television. When it reached about 5 the champagne was opened and ate zero everyone kissed each other and drank. We then trailed outside to watch fireworks. The fireworks were quite something, since we were all sitting at the top of the mountain, we saw fireworks from everywhere. There were ones a little higher on the mountain, ones next door, ones down by the sea and ones miles down along the sea. Along the sea I counted 15 different places with fireworks going off at one time. It was really an strange, yet beautiful thing. I can't describe the feeling fully. It was exciting though.

Once all of our feasting at home was finished, about 1am the Elisa's and I met with one of our friends at the seafront. There we ate these crescents and had cocktails. It was really cold I wanna say about 38 degrees F, so we were probably only there until around 2am. When we got to Elisa(brunette)'s house we were locked out of the first gate, so we climbed over that feeling pretty BA and got into the house. We watched a movie then crashed on their living room couch.

Yesterday we had more feasting, we went to the seafront again also. Then after that around 9pm we went to our friend RosaMaria's house for a game night. We gambled our money away at SuperBingo. Ate a bunch more food, listened to Hannah Montana music, and some other stuff. I also learned a few new bad things to say in Dialect, so that was... interesting.. People think it's funny when I talk in Dialect, it's rude in normal situations, but probably because my accent or something I just make it funny I guess. The nice thing about Dialect is since it's not real Italian, only the people from my area understand it. 

We got back pretty late last night, so I slept in until 12:38 this morning. It was a good sleep though.

Happy New Years everyone!!! :) I hope everyone had a great time with their family and friends! :)