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.