3 Weeks!!!

I can't believe it's been 3 weeks already since I've been in Bari, and a month since I left home. The time has flown by soooo fast. I've been so busy lately with school and friends and learning italian. Last night I went to a party for my friend's birthday/for Carnivale. It was so much fun. Everybody dressed up and had masks and we played a bunch of games. It's so weird how big carnivale is here. I had really never heard of it before I came here. And now my street is covered with confetti and masks from all the parades. It is so much fun. The past two weeks were probably the hardest weeks of my life. The "oh wow I'm in italy for 6 months" feeling was replaced by the "oh crap I'm in italy for 6 months" feeling. I was very homesick during my second week and it really sunk in how little italian I actually knew. It was so hard to communicate with everybody and I sort of closed myself off because I was afraid of saying something wrong. The 3rd week was a little better. I started speaking more and not caring that I said stuff wrong and that made things a lot easier! But the cultural differences caught up to me and yesterday even though it was no big deal, when my host parents said that I was rude when I did something, I just broke down. It was a relief to finally get it out of my system but it was also really embarrassing. My friend was there too and so I went to her house crying. It wasn't anything bad. It was just the stress and exhaustion and everything that made me crack. However, the good thing is that now that it's out of my system, I feel a lot better about being here and it made me a little closer to my host parents. My host brother, Alberto, (aka the only one in my house who speaks any english) went to Venice for 3 days with his friends so I am really struggling to communicate with my host parents. But if I just wak around the house with my dictionary  everything is fine. My italian is SOOO much better than in was when I got here. I can understand about 75% of what everybody says, but I can only reply to about 25% of what everyone says. Still it's better than nothing haha.Now I have to go to the train station to meet up with my friend to go to our Italian course. Then after we are having a party for some new AFSers from Canada! (I hope they are from the english speaking parts! haha)

1 Week In

I have officially been in Bari for 1 week! I just had school on a Saturday :( which wasn't very fun but it was alright. In school several good things happened that don't mean anything to anyone else. For instance, today a guy in my class moved me so I would be out of his way. That doesn't sound very good but everybody does that in my class when someone is in their way.For the first few days,everyone sort of moved around me at a distance, but now they don't. I think it's good because they aren't afraid of me for one thing, and they treat me like anyone else in the class. And today I also managed to stay awake!!!! That sounds sort of stupid but no one mentioned how tired you would be in your first week as a foriegn kid. I'm always trying to tanslate in my head and look through my dictionary and come up with a response and deal with jet lag and make new friends. IT'S A LOT! I never realized how much I took for granted the fact that I didn't have to think when something was said to me! But it's getting easier! YAY!

Also, I made plans with people from school today!!! It's my first time going out since I got here. My class invited me to have a coffee with them. In Italy you are with the same class all throughout secondary school, so everybody becomes great friends. This means that alot of the plans you make in school will involve your ENTIRE class. It's so different from America, but I really like it. So tonight my class and I will be going out for coffee! Ha, it's so Italian. Then I will meet up with the other AFSers in Bari to go out for PIZZA! Yum!

Clearly eating twice as much than I did in America has done nothing to stop me from eating all the delicious food! It's very strange that even though my family gives me sooo much food, I'm hungry by the next mealtime- And now I am going to have lunch. Haha.

Benvenuta Lexi

I can't beleive it! I have been in Bari for 3 days now. It was really sad saying goodbye to my parents last week in New York, but the orientation was wicked fun. Well, the orientation was very exciting but all the people were wicked nice. I roomed with a girl going to France. I met people who were going to France and Russia and Austria. Everyone was very excited!

There were 16 people going to Italy. 15 Girls. 1 Boy. All of them were very nice. We went to the airport on Friday in the evening for we had a 9:00 flight. Getting our bags through was a struggle. Everyone was moving stuff around into different bags in order to meet the weight limits. Then we had to wait 2 hours to board the plain that would take us to Zurich! The flight wasn't so bad. I slept though most of it. Then was the worst part of getting to Italy. We had an 11 hour layover in Zurich because our flight got cancelled due to a strike in Rome. It was SO boring the first few hours. Then it got to be more fun because we all decided to use that time to get to know eachother better. Finally at 9:00 p.m we got onto our plane to Rome! The really frustrating thing was that it was only an hour long flight!

Then we got our luggage and finally walked out into Rome! We rode a bus to our hotel where we were the last to arrive. The volunteers gave us a bag with food in it for dinner and sent us off to our hotel rooms. The next morning we got to meet all the students going to Italy around the world. There was 86 of us in total. There were people from Austrailia, Austria, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Brazil, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and Peru. It was so much fun meeting all the people even if we couldn't understand alot of what we said to eachother.

Then I got to take a tour of Rome on Saturday! It was molto bello! I took so many pictures. Rome is soooo beautiful. We walked from the Colosseum to a restaraunt near the old Jewish Ghetto where we had PIZZA! It was probably the best pizza I have ever tasted. I don't know how I could ever go back to american pizza!

The next day we all left for our host families. It was really sad because we had made alot of friends but exciting at the same time. I took a train with 7 others who are staying in the same area as me and soon it was my stop! I was so nervous coming off the train. I couldn't stop shaking but then I saw my host family running towards me holding an Italian flag that said "Benvenuta Lexi". It was a very overwhelming experience at the train station but it was very nice. I was smiling and hugging alot of people as they spoke to me in rapid Italian.

My host family is so nice. I've been in Bari for 3 days and already I feel at home. I still can't really understand anything but with alot of hand gestures I can get the general idea of what they are saying to me. It's so weird to think that I live in Bari. I am making friends in school and meeting my new family and creating a new life. It's so surreal but I love it here!!