Mid March - Mid April

Every month I spend a period of time to reflect on my month and my experience and tada! It has arrived yet again. It's uncanny at how quickly the time goes by! In less than 3 months now I will be back in my own bed, and just that idea seems so weird. After not sleeping in it, or even seeing it for seven months, it's really an odd thought. And that is basically how I feel about every part of my American life. When I will be spending hours doing all my English homework next year after 10 months of "glancing" at the work and being done, it will seem so different. And now that I do math in Italian almost completely, when I get back to class and everyone is speaking English I will have no idea what they are talking about. It's all going to be so different, but I'm excited.

During this particular month, I had the pleasure of celebrating Easter in Italy. It's pretty different than they Easter I'm used to. Granted, my family and I are not religious so I've never before in my life had a religious version of Easter, but we have always made eggs and we have always had visits from the Easter Bunny and then we always have the famous Easter Eggs Hunts. (Yes, I had one last year at age 16 and I still enjoyed it just as much.) Italian Easter was pretty different. For one, it meant a TON of great food. It's no secret why Italians eat so much, the food is amazing pretty much always, but I've been attempting to reduce the stomach I've gained here and the days and days of eating didn't help. Though I must say, I really didn't mind. Another thing is that they don't decorate eggs or have an Easter Bunny or even go on hunts. But they LOVE chocolate! They have these giant chocolate eggs with surprises inside and everyone eats them. (about as common as the famous Peeps) I received a total of 3 of these giant eggs (most people get one or so) and as much as i enjoyed them, my jeans did not. Most get the basic eggs, just a giant ball of chocolate in egg form but for those of you who like things to get elaborate, Naples before Easter is the place to be. A single giant chocolate egg can cost over 1,000 Euros! (thats currently about $1,350!) Yes, they are beautiful, but they are CHOCOLATE! But besides that, Easter is a wonderful time in Italy. I had a friend once tell me that while Christmas is a very important family time for Italians, Easter is a time typical for travel around the country or Europe and while my host family and I didn't travel, we had been planning on it and a huge portions of Italians did. But for the teenagers who stayed in town, the school had it's annual "Mac π 100" which is more or less the equivalent of an American high school dance at about the level of Homecoming. The difference is, it STARTS at midnight rather than ending like in America. But I had fun with some of my friends and I always enjoy places with music because there is usually a lot of (if not all of) music in English.

As the days pass, I think more and more about my return and so I've been working gradually harder to learn the Italian language and I've been working on learning verbs. They seem so impossible! They have the present the past, the future and a bazillion other tenses. But then they also have four more tenses just express that that particular verb is a thought or feeling but not a fact. So if you wanted to say, "I think that she works in this store," you would have to conjugate the verb in a special manner to use it. So right now I am working on learning that, but because it doesn't really exist in English, it's not easy. Next is the special conjugation for conditional statements. Wish me luck!

Thats really all for now. I hope everyone had a good Easter and I can't wait to see everyone!