smittygal07's Xanga

What time is it?

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 06:13:42 GMT

It's PANCAKE TIME!! we're having another "international dinner" tonight, and i'm making pancakes! woot! molly has maple syrup, and she's bringing it. i just searched for teh recipe on bisquick.com (hehe) and i'm hoping that bisquick is acutally just flour put in a special box so they can put their recipes on teh back and make more money. uh oh, i haven't had breakfast and this talk about pancakes is making my stomach grumble. it's kinda strange that i'm finally making them when i'll actually be in a country that has them and be able to order them for breakfast in...5 days (gulp). oh well, better late than never.

last night i went to see italy vs. ukraine in piazza san carlo (we won, 3-0), and there was madness afterwards, of course. i finally met the famous katie, teh american who was here last year and went to my school. so we spoke english. that was fun. her brother was tehre too, and he goes to michigan, and when we were walking down some deserted street i let out a "michigan sucks!" and he insulted me and all the italians had no idea what wasa going on.

i haven't started my suitcase yet. i will today, god willing. i mailed 26 kilos of stuff home, but i had to spend 2 hours in the post office because they can't mail boxes with wriiting on them, so i left ot buy packing tape and giant paper, then i had to sit on the floor of the post office in front of everyone and cover my boxes. i was not happy.

i finally bought all my gifts. i also bought a book for me called "piemontese in your pocket," with phrases in dialect. sweet!

ok, gotta go do these panckaes and suitcase. there's a video of me up on my photobucket, if you're interested.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:17:54 GMT

mmm, i'm tired. some of that comes from the fact that i can't get to sleep anymore. i mean, i don't spend every night awake, but for a few days it's taken me at least an hour to get to sleep, between the fact that it's really hot, and it's summer, and i'm leaving in a week. i spent last night packing my suitcase in my head. "ok, so if i send those 3 pairs of pants, my boots, the dictionary, and three shirts, then the rest should be 20 kilos, and whatever's not i can put in my backpack...oh no!! there's all the purses and scarves too!" that's a fun thing to do when you're lying in bed sweating.

today i went to pick up our school yearbook, which turned out actually really nice. i mean, really nice in comparison to their yearbook from last year. i have a crazy face in the picture, i don't remember ever even making that face, and the very difficult address of ardleigh, cleveland heights was written perfectly, but my birthday was written as november 11th, 1998. um...there's something wrong there. the classmates that were tehre (8 besides me) gave me the third part of my present. the second part, which i forgot to mention up here, was purgatorio and paradiso, because we read the inferno this year an di like dante so much. this one, on behalf of the class and also the teachers, is a silver bracelet, and with a steinbeck quote engraved on the inside: we do not take a trip, a trip takes us. although it was in italian, and in italian it gives more the sense (at least to me it does) of we don't make a trip, a trip makes us, like it forms the person. but it's beautiful either way. we ate at a take out greek place in front of the mole, then went to the "royal gardens" that are full of mosquitoes and hung out there for a while. i said good bye to marti :( she's going to barcelona tomorrow.

yesterday i went to watch teh italy-australia game in piazza san carlo on the big screen with calò and marti, and then we got bored and walked around for a while. we won, and afterwards...i have never seen such a thing in my whole life. we were in piazza castello waiting for the tram, and there were masses of people with flags and whatnot, and tehre was this big group of guys who attacked every car that passed by. it didn't matter if it was one of their friends or some poor little old lady coming home from teh supermarket. they actually rocked the cars! and jumped on to the front of the trams, and banged on all the doors of the buses that went by. good thing i won't be here on july 9th, on teh off chance that italy makes it to the finals and wins.

sunday night i went to calò's for dinner--her mom made calzoni (5 special oliveless ones for me). i ate 3, since they were really good, and was more or less full...then i heard ehr say, "well, there's still the pizza." what?so then there was pizza, then fruit. and THEN...homemade tiramisù. she cut me an enormous piece, which i finished because it was great, and then said, "would you like some more? you sure?" ahh!! that's a real italian mom, lol. they're both pugliese. then she taught me how to use msn messenger, which i have now. between this and aim, i'll never leave teh computer. good thing there's a 6 hour time difference, ig uess.

albi got back from agape today...witha melted camcorder. apparently it fell in a sort of campfire that they had. smart guy, huh?

i don't know what i'll do when i get home. i always have my summers planned. here i haven't been bored these weeks because there was rome, plus i was sick that first week of vacation, and now because i'm leaving everyone wants to go out with m eand invite me over for dinner...vaffanculo. i was also here in february, y'know. but anyway, i have no camp, i have no job (well, i have a job, but as far as i know i ahve no transportation to and from that job), no plans, no nothing. we'll see.

a very kalos* weekend

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 11:05:47 GMT

*kalos is one of the nicknames of my classmate silvia calò, who i spent most of the weekend with, and also means good in greek.

so yes, it was a very kalos weekend. friday night paola invited me to go to the sea for the weekend with her and some of her friends, but in the end i decided not to go because i got nervous thinking about leaving again. this way i'm more calm. so friday night i went to piazza castello with calò and we saw our classmate sara dance--they're having some performances there this week for the festa di san giovanni, patron saint of torino (every italian city has a patron saint) (!!!). we also saw them burn the huge funeral pyre-like-thing, and saw the bull fall...but it fell towards porta susa, which brings bad luck :( it was like groundhog day. then we got frozen yogurt--they have these things called "granita" here which is like a cross between a smoothie and a snow cone, and on a hot day (or night) it's amazingly delicious. we got those.

saturday i went back and forth and back and forth from the center to home. i went to casa einaudi (we slept at augusto's house because alida went to the sea), and i went home, got my package and went to the post office (in between the 2 houses)...and it was closed. uffa. so i went back home, left the package, then went back to augusto's for lunch. afterwards i stopped by micaela's to get paola's present, bought some roasted nuts from a street vendor (there for san giovanni), and got home where it was all nice and cool (it was veryveryvery hot yesterday). i painted the background of paola's picture frame, and it started to rain incredibly hard and didn't let up for a couple of hours. at night i went to a pizzeria with marti, eli, simone and calò (all classmates), then we went ot piazza vittorio and watched teh fireworks, then went to get gelato.

today i slept in and then went to lunch with molly in piazza vittorio. we walked around for a while, then i came home and finished the picture frame. tonight i'm going to calò's for dinner. tuesday we're going to school to get our yearbooks, and i hafta get my copy of the report card, then we'll go to lunch because marti leaves for barcelona on wednesday. also on tuesday albi comes back. this week will be shopping and packing and saying goodbye.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 05:02:25 GMT

hey! back from rome! i had a great time. it's amazing. plus, i'm not nearly as sick now! yesterday i had a horrible headache on the train, and there's still a little cough, but much better in any case.

so. rome. we ended up staying 3 1/2 days instead of 2 1/2 because paola's boyfriend couldn't go to the sea, so paola didn't have to leave again on thursday. we stayed at alida's friend (carla)'s house for two nights, in the awesome trastevere district, and then at her sister's house for the last night, in the center, really near the train station. it's awesome to actually stay in a house on vacation--you get a different feel for the city. it took almost 8 hours to get to rome, because we took an intercity train which makes lots of stops, and then we got there half an hour late. we picked up carla's keys and went home, dropped off the bags, then went straight to the vatican. the sistene chapel was closed when we got there, because we got there around 5:30 or 6, but we saw the church, and michelangelo's Pietà, then walked around and saw castel sant'angelo. by the time we got near home it was about 7:45 (which is early for dinner, coughkatiecough), but we were really hungry so we ate in a pizzeria right under carla's house, then hung out in the piazza by her house for a few minutes, went home and watched les choristes, which paola had never seen.

the next day, tuesday, we left around 9:45 in the morning, ate breakfast in a café, and headed off for the really touristy part of rome. we saw teh colloseum (€11 full price...i would have gotten in for free, but i'm not a member of the european union. they're crafty little jerks--every american and englishman, regardless of age, has to pay €11), and walked through all the roman remains. it's very strange that tehre's all these 2000 year old remains in a large city that's actually alive and has a life that you can see easily, unlike florence and venice--i'm sure they do have a life,b ut when you go for one day, you don't see it. we saw campidoglio, where the mayor is, and the huge monument ot vittorio emanuelle, and barely made it to the piazza with teh pantheon, whose name i forget (it was sooooo hot. and i got sunburned on my shoulder, because i obviously missed that part when i was putting on sunblock. plus i'm not used to wearing my hair in a ponytail), ate a really expensive lunch (when it's in a touristy part, they rip you off, but we were hot and hungry, so whatever), then went into the pantheon, which was beautiful and not hot inside. i saw one of my classmates there! a classmate who had always had a lot of absences, and missed basically the last 3 months of school--at the beginning they said she was sick, who knows if she really was, and then she just stopped coming because she had already lost the year. so that was kind of strange, seeing an acquaintance from torino in rome. then we saw piazza novana, with the 3 fountains, and the fountain of trevi, piazza di spagna, then we walked to paola's aunt micaela's house (beautiful and big) where we watched half of robin hood and then ate dinner with her, carla, the two little cousins (who are really annoying, just to put it out there), and their au-pair, a italian-looking finnish girl (her dad is italian) named anna-maria, who's very nice and also speaks really good english.

the next day we went to the vatican museums, waited in line for 45 minutes to get in, paid €8 (this time they have me the discount even if i was american--the ticket guy saw my drivers licence that i gave as id and knew ohio and asked about an amusement park there--i don't know if it was king's island or cedar point). it was huge and beautiful (i think those are the only 2 words you need to describe rome. you could also add "hot). we saw raphael's rooms adn a bazzlion old roman statues, some really cool old maps of italy on the walls that we had fun identifying, and then finally the sistene chapel. which was beautiful, but differnet than i expected. i thought it was actually a part of a church. then we came home, ate lunch and relaxed, then went to some of the streets carla told us with good shops, which was a lot of fun. i wanted to get a shirt for dad from a movie store, with a joke from young frankenstein in italian, but they only had small and medium :( we think we left carla's guidebook in one of the stores, too.whoops. then we went home and had micaela and the "cuginetti" over for dinner, and carla cooked spaghetti alle vongole and fish, then we did "roma by night," which was kind of a bust because we were all really really tired. we slept at micaela's house, which was very hot.

yesterday we went to villa borghese, a huge park in rome. we took one of the bike cars (risciò) for an hour, saw the beautiful panorama, then went home and watched harry potter 4, which paola wanted to watch because she'd only seen it once. gasp! then...we took the train home. which was a eurostar, and only made about 4 stops, and we got home in under 5 hours.

and that's my trip to rome.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 09:18:09 GMT

hey. still sick...it's been kind of a yoyo sickeness. right now my sore throat is almost gone, but i have a sinus headache. today i went to fnac to ask about my ipod, and...rip. he said it would probably cost at least as much to replace the battery as it would to get a new one. and if i decide to get a new one, i won't get it here because they cost even more here. today is the torino gay pride celebration, which i made plans to go to but i might not, depending on how i feel. paola and i just looked at train tickets to rome--we'll go from monday to wednesday. today we went to see our grades at the school--7 in gym, italian and chem, 8 in french, math, history and art history, 9 in german. woot!

yesterday i went to olga's house (one of the afs volunteers) to eat lunch with molly, who's not extremely happy but doing better. olga once hosted a girl from rocky river! we went to the post office to mail some letters, then i walked around, did some errands, blah blah. yesterday night i went to elena's house to watch hook, but left after about an hour--i'll have to watch the rest of it soon.

thursday i stayed home all day to try to get better. i watched a very cute italian movie called "la scuola," and now i understand why albi calls everyone bedouins. wednesday night i went out to dinner, supposedly with marti, eli and ila (and an old classmate who changed schools in november), but we got to the restaurant...and the whole class was there (well, almost the whole class). marti organized the hwole thing--eli and ila didn't know about it either. so we all ate pizza, and they gave me a 5 foot long photo-holder, filled with photos and notes, which apparently is not the big gift. just to appall katie--that night, our pizzas arrived and we started eating at 10:15.

tomorrow's the big goodbye fest for afs (i'ma make jello!) and albi leaves for agape, monday we go to rome, come back wednesday...and then it's just 2 weeks.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 05:27:06 GMT

so. the thing about me being sick is that i only want to admit/accept it when it suits me. when it doesn't suit me, i don't take it that seriously. which would by why i still have a stuffy nose and sore throat today. and i swore that i would not go out today, until tonight because there's some sort of dinner with either 3 classmates or teh entire class (i get the feeling that the class, as always a bit disorganized, tried to organize some sort of surprise but not everyone knew it was supposed to be a surprise...i'll find out tonight, or sometime soon). so i'm still coughing up lungs (although i get teh feeling that when i was little, my coughs were even worse), and have used up goodness knows how many pocket packs of kleenex. and drank about 8 glasses of tea with honey.

so anyway. yesterday was our goodbye fest, which was fun, with lots of people...word of mouth works pretty darn well. at least half of my class came, plus all of the afs people except tom, including john (who we call john lennon for some unknown reason) from new mexico who lives pretty far away and we never ever see, and mari the finnish girl who lives outside torino but was in for a few days with her host sister. i copied everyone at gressoney and bought an italian flag (60 cents extra with a tv gossip magazine--there's flags everywhere becasue teh world cup is going on now) and had all my friends sign it. it turned out really well, i'm excited. around 6 all of us afs people left to get gelato at the gelateria where we always ate after italian lessons, and we ran into piera, ex president of afs torino, who bought us gelato...and then lectured us for 25 minutes about how we can't go anywhere without authorization from afs (becasue we were thinking about going to mari's goodbye party friday), and we need to ask fro everything, and don't drink too much here, they'll still send us home even 4 days early, and blah blah blah...we all would have rather paid 10 times the normal gelato price that have to be lectured by piera. oh well. mikkel brought me a beautiful pair of earrings as a gift, and some classmates brought me a gift from my private italian teacher and my favorite english teacher whose classes i talked with and who helped me out with my schedule and other school things--a book by primo levi that i had wanted to read, and everyone that i talked to had read it, but no one had it anymore, with a note in teh front that said (in italian) "to our delicious ("deliziosa") student and colleague (!)" che carini!

erm...i think that's it for now. check out the photos. there's a whole lotta new ones.

oh wait, kelsey shoutout: i love you too! i leave torino on teh 4th, and i'll be back in the us the 5th. i didn't forget about you, i even wrote you a letter a while ago, but there's no way i'm gonna get it and the cool kids package done in time, so you'll get it back in gaylord. there's 2 pics with me and gary ont eh photobucket site, and one more on my camera, but he's so small that usually you don't see him well.

DSL!!!!

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:35:22 GMT

we finally got DSL today! woot!! so i'll be putting up lots of pictures on my photobucket.

in other news...still sick, today i have a fever. well, it's exactly 37, which according to the online converter i found, is exactly 98.6, but living in a stone house with high ceilings must have lowered my normal body temperature, because i've never ahd 37 before. plus, that's where teh thermometer turns yellow. and i still have a sore throat. and tehre's a gigantic good bye party in...three and a half hours. this should be fun.

Monday, June 12, 2006

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:16:39 GMT

hey. back from gressoney. still feeling a bit crappy (as micaela said, i've seen better moments), but i keep on truckin. for some reason. gressoney pretty much sucked. no one wanted to be there, because we were all missing other parties, etc, and the activities told us all things that we already knew. i wowed everyone with my singing again (meadowlark this time), and saturday was very fun (because we didn't do anything), my face got tan, saturday night i got 4 hours of sleep (more or less), for the talent show we also sang "the girl from ipanema" in portugese (garota de Ipanema). i saw a few people for the last time, which was sad, but more strange than sad.

the cils (italian test)...was really hard. and long. i got there at 8:30, and left at 5. poor celina didn't do the oral part until quarter to 7. the oral went really well, as did the written (i think), the reading and "metalinguistico" went well enough--i may have screwed up one of the exercises badly, but i did the others well enough to save me. i'm sort of unsure about the listening part. apparently it was really hard for everyone, but this isn't graded on a curve, so that doesn't matter. i got back and the germans were here (the germans that paola and albi met on their school exchange, who now come back every now and then), and we cooked dinner (one and a half kilos of pasta) and chatted. they're very nice. there was also albi's soon-to-be host brother.

the movie "radio america" is out here, which is the prarie home companion movie (i don't know if they changed the name here or not), but i refuse to go see a movie with garrison keillor if i can't hear his voice. ah, a proposito, with molly one time during the weekend, i was trying to say "the night is cloudy," but i said "the night is dark" instead, and molly goes, "a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions.....Guy Noir, Private Eye." i was so excited that she knew it too! i should choose one of the colleges in wisconsin or minnesota to be one of those college students who gets picked to do whaddya know or something.

today i went to micaela's house to work on the yearbook. something very weird is going on here, because i'm all of a sudden the one who's good at math and computers. ??? i stayed there with marina and ate lunch, and then i went to meet viki in piazza castello (a half an hour late). i forgot my cell phone at home and was completely lost--the only number i know by heart here is my own. i went to viki's house and met her cat, and we hung out there talking for a while, then some other classmates came over (they're planning their gift for albi), and then we went and got gelato and i left. tomorrow's the goodbye party for me, albi and elena. apparently there's 21 days left. not that anyone (coughmarinacough) is counting.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 10:41:12 GMT

madonna, basta. i don't want to study for this damn italian test anymore. or deal with molly anymore. not her, i mean the whole situation, the whole casino in general. we went out to dinner last night for paola's birthday, even though she was sick--she got sicker, augusto held firm in his view that we did the right thing by going out anyway, because obviously some really good fish can help your fever. so now paola's sick for her gigantic party, which is tonight, which i don't want to go to, and i'm getting sick too, then there's the test, then gressoney the next day, which i also don't really want to go to. school sucked today, i'm coughing and i have a stuff nose...in june. that's not right. hmph.

whoops

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:12:08 GMT

so that new email address i made? yeah, i abandoned it for gmail. katie better be right about gmail being worth all the trouble. so now y'all can email me at piccolalia@gmail.com sorry about the confusion. btw, piccola means little in italian, and "piccola lia" is the nickname that one of my classmates coined for me, and then it caught on with everyone else.

today really felt like the beginning of the end. the last monday at school. the last gym class. the last yadda yadda yadda. oy vey.

PS. there's a few more pictures on my photobucket. although i screwed up some captions--I'll try to fix them now. but it's obvious that they're screwed up. the picture of the big green field is obviously not of me, viki and sara. http://s30.photobucket.com/albums/c306/smittygal07/