Just Over a Month to Go

Time has gone by so fast and it's so strange for me to be saying that I have only a month left here in Italy, my new home. Quite a lot has happened since my last post but I also just wanted to give a general update on everything and try and explain how it feels to have been here for what is now quite a substantial amount of time.

As I said in my last blog post I was away on a school trip on my actual birthday so I didn't get to see my closest friends who I'd made here in Italy which I was quite sad about to be honest, especially seeing as it was my 18th. On the following Tuesday my host Mum and sister picked me up from school and said we were going for Pizza at one of our favourite pizzerias. It turned out that this was a Surprise Birthday Celebration that they had organised for me and they had invited my closest group of friends to come along! It was such a special surprise and I couldn't believe they had done it for me. Some of my friends had to travel 2 hours on the train to get there just for the afternoon so it was honestly just amazing. The best surprise ever! After lunch we went back to my house and just all hung out. Hanging out with your friends in your own house may sound like a little thing, but when you're living in a host family you can't really invite round a whole group of friends very often so it was incredible to just all be together like that. It made me realise how lucky I am to have this amazing group of friends, and I really can't bare the thought of leaving them in a months time.

In May it was also my friend Ecmel's 18th birthday and we celebrated by staying at her house in Ravenna for the weekend. Her parents weren't home so it was just our small group of close friends which made it so special and so much fun. Her house is in the city centre so we had so much freedom to come and go from the house as we wanted and even went for a walk at 2am around the streets of Ravenna. When it came to Ecmel's cake Antonio (Mexico) and Alejandra (Honduras) told us that in their cultures the birthday girl/boy gets their face put in the cake so Ecmel even get a slice of their cultures in the form of a slice of cake in the face hahaha.

This time of the year also means the beginning of summery weather! After such a long winter and one much colder than what I'm used to in New Zealand I'm so excited to see what summer has to offer. We finish school in June and don't leave Italy until the beginning of July so there'll hopefully be time to enjoy the weather and spend time all together before this experience has to come to an end. 

My life here obviously is my life but I don't know how else to explain how I'm feeling other than saying I now feel like this is my life. I don't know when it happened but I had been feeling like I was here living this 'experience' it's no longer just an 'experience' though - it's my actual life. My day to day life here is so normal to me now that my life in New Zealand seems like another book in my series of life books if that makes sense. I can't go back and alter it, it's as it is, whereas my life here in Italy I'm living everyday; I can change things here, it's interactive. I feel like I've only read the book of my New Zealand life but someone else wrote it, it's so strange. One thing that scares me about feeling like this is that I'm sure that when I go back to New Zealand I'll feel the same but the other way around; I'll start to forget bits of my life here and close the book of my life in Italy. I want to try my best to keep both books open and even though juggling two at once will be hard, I never want to close the book of my life here in Italy.

Torino and my 18th Birthday

I found out earlier on in the year that my class' trip (or 'gita' as it's called in Italian which each class normally does once a year, often to somewhere abroad) would be an overnight trip to Torino, a city in the north of Italy. It had originally been planned as a 3-4 day trip but it had to be cut short due to unavailability of the teachers. It just so happened that the second and last day of the trip was my 18th birthday as well!

We had a super jam-packed program while we were in Torino. We visited the Salone Internazionale Del Libro which is the second biggest book event in Europe and attracts around 300,000 visitors each year since it started in 1988. It was absolutely massive and was filled with different book stalls - both independent authors and publishers, as well as the big names in the business. There were also talks by different authors including one American who made me feel super special being one of the only people in the audience who completely understood what she was saying before the translator got in hahaha. Although the book fair was great to see, it definitely wasn't my favourite thing about the trip because after all it was just a huge book shop with some special guests...

Other than the book fair we managed to fit into our short trip visits to many of the city's icons such as; Piazza San Carlo, Cesare Lombroso Museum, The National Cinema Museum and Palazzo Reale. The National Cinema Museum was a real standout for me because it definitely wasn't your average museum. It was super interactive and although we only had about 1/5 of the required time needed to get around the whole thing it made such an impact on me. Inside was quite dark and most of the corridors were super narrow which you'd think would just be annoying but it honestly just added to the atmosphere of it and made it even more unique. There were sections which explained the history of cinema, how old and modern day cameras work, different genres of film and even history of the cinema itself. In the centre of the museum was a huge room where a movie was playing which you could watch from one of many chairs with built-in speakers, surrounding this was case after case of movie memorabilia and movie sets - it was honestly amazing! Palazzo Reale, or the Royal Palace of Turin, is a 16th century palace in the centre of the city. We went on a guided tour around it and each and every room brought new surprises because the decorations were so incredibly extreme. Sadly we weren't allowed to take photos while inside but believe me it was breathtaking, and I can safely say that after the amount of AFS and school trips I've had this year to places which you're told are "STUPENDO!" The Cesare Lombroso Museum was probably one of the most interesting museums I've ever been to (it was also super compact so by the time you started getting bored it was over which is pretty handy haha), as I'm pretty interested in anthropology and Lombroso himself was a criminal anthropologist.

As I said before the Sunday was my birthday, and 18th at that! To be honest I had extreme mixed feelings about this. My class at school is so lovely and I've made some great friends in it but they are and just seem a lot younger than me and I'm not particularly close to any of them so I was pretty disappointed that I would be spending my birthday with them and not my close friends who I'd made outside of school. However on Saturday night just before midnight my classmates took me into one of the hotel rooms where they had organised a little surprise party for me! It was the cutest thing ever complete with presents, balloons and even a cake! I honestly couldn't believe they'd done all of that for me, it was so lovely of them and really put my birthday off to a great start.

I would love to revisit Torino one day with more time and freedom to explore. Even from our overnight visit I could see how beautiful and unique it was with so many different things to see. You'll definitely be seeing me again one day Torino <3