Well over a month into my Italian placement already! Time flies when you’re having fun. I’ll tell you when I’m not having fun though, when I’m working in an Italian primary school. The kids are little rascals. They cough and dribble all over me and they actually have fist fights over who get’s to stand next to me. Yet, when I’m trying to teach them important things they refuse to listen to me. They have definitely heard the word ‘duckling’ ‘farm’ and ‘ugly’ over a hundred times but insist on forgetting their meanings. I think they do it on purpose to wind me up. I have a class of 20 kids after school on a Wednesday on my own, its 100% the worst lesson of the week. I send half of them outside the classroom over the period of the 1 hour lesson (which 30 mins of it is spent telling them to sit down at the start of the lesson or pack up at the end of the class). I cannot deal with children.
Living the Italian life here is pretty easy though. The family take care of everything for me, so there’s no need to worry about getting milk in late on a Sunday night for my Cocoa Pops on a Monday morning. The food is still questionable at times (what Italian family eats things like chicken breast and shaved carrots for a main dinner?), but the majority of the food is edible, besides their famous ministra soups. I was pretty sick for a week or so, so living with an ex-pharmacist or an adult in general, and in a centrally-heated house was super comforting.
Language wise, things are looking up. I’m no longer a mute as I was when I arrived in the country. My level has definitely improved, and family dinners completely in Italian are no longer as daunting as they were. However, I’m still at that awkward stage where I don’t have a personality when I speak Italian because the only adjectives I can use are ‘good’ and ‘nice’. I also am still making fundamental errors like this week when I didn’t buy an amazing home-baked Italian cake at the school bake sale because I thought they all contained grapes. Confusing uova and uva isn’t that bad, but I’m now questioning my common sense for thinking that over 200 cakes contained grapes as key ingredients.
I’ve even managed to head out in Brescia a few times. They have been odd times, but still. We obviously did something wrong as the bar we chose had no one under the age of 50 in there. I have also made it to Verona to catch up with some pals from home. Verona is much, much prettier than Brescia. I saw the Arena and even Juliet’s balcony (briefly) after fighting with Asian tourists for a view.
