The rest of the summer…
Since I last wrote….
I was in Battaglia Terme finishing my third camp with great tutors, a great director, and an amazing family that I was quite sad to leave.
I then went to Creazzo for a two week long camp and I did not have the Internet for a week! So I fell behind on the Blog until now! Creazzo was a small town but it was nice because there was one main square where all of the shops, ice cream, and the camp were. I had a great group of kids that week in my class that were all about eleven years old and were really excited about the camp. For the Friday show I told them that they only had to sing a song. Since they made their class name “The Strong Blue Sharks,” I planned to assign them the song “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid. They were happy with it and decided to also write an entire show to go with it. It was really great to just let them go to town on writing the script and they seemed to really enjoy it.
That week I stayed with a really nice family. The first Sunday they took me to a tiny village called Molina in the mountains where there is this park that you go hiking through and it is full of waterfalls and caves and cliffs and it was incredible! At the beginning I read a sign about the rules of the park and something about rides that I didn’t understand because it was in the middle of nowhere. I wondered what kinds of rides there could possibly be, why they were there, and if the sign was just a really bad translation. Sure enough, about an hour into the hike we came across a stream with a bridge that you walk over so you can get on a swing to go back to the other side. This was one of the rides that the sign spoke of and it was great! The whole family and all of their friends had a go at the swing and it was loads of fun! We continued hiking and eventually came across the other ride. This one was a swing that faced a 50-foot tall wall of rock that had a waterfall. So you get on the swing and then you swing straight into the waterfall. You get your feet wet, touch the wall, and do it all again! After the 4-hour hike we all went back to the parking lot for what I thought was a snack. My host family and the four others that we were with started pulling all of their picnic supplies out of the cars, setting up folding tables with table cloths, cheese platters, fresh fruit, wine, and coffee pots for later. That is standard of Italian snacking. It really is la bella vita in Italy! The whole week the family was really laid back but interested in taking me around the area to see neat things. There’s this one spot in Vicenza, which is the nearby city where we went one night. You go up a really long hill that has a building next to it with a covered sidewalk and diamond-like doorways that follow the entire walkway that is probably at least a quarter of a mile long.
When you get to the top of the hill there is a church and a lookout point where you can see all of the lights of the surrounding villages at night. Along the balcony part of this area, there are areas that point in all directions and say what city you can see and how far away it is. Although you can’t actually see the cities, it is neat to know what you are looking at way out there in the distance.
The next week I stayed with a different family even though it was at the same camp. The new family took me to the same spot way up on the hill in Vicenza. It was nice to see it during the day but it was much cooler at night. That Sunday we went somewhere in the mountains, sort of near Lake Garda, where we made a pit stop. This family had two sons and the older one was at boy scout camp and they had a family day so we went. Lake Garda was beautiful for the ten minutes on the rainy day that I was able to see it and the mountains were amazing as well.
When we got to the scout camp in the morning I could see my breath it was so cold! It was a nice change for the hot, sticky weather that we’ve had most of the summer though. It warmed up as the day went on and again, all of the families set up their serious picnics, some of them even cooking their lunch meat on the open fire pit. It was quite beautiful there and we are at a pretty high altitude, almost in the clouds!
That family was the first of all of my host families to actually speak English to me and I didn’t like it! I felt like they didn’t want me to speak Italian so the whole week was a bit of a bummer for me but even still, it wasn’t that bad. On Saturday morning before I left they took me to a villa nearby that the host dad’s uncle owns. The villa was humungous! There is a little church inside that they showed me that had incredible frescoes on the ceilings. Then I was able to see a private room off of the church where they still keep all of the original robes of the priest and flags for holidays and everything. It was so cool to see things like that that are so old and still well kept. There are a few offices on the main floor of the villa now and the uncle and aunt live upstairs, which I was able to see part of. It was gorgeous. Huge open windows through which you can see surrounding hills and vineyards, marble floors and everything. It’s unreal to me that people actually live there! I apparently got the tour of the place that most people who pay to see the villa will never see or even know about. These families sure know how to take care of me!
The camp that week had most of the same students but a few left from the week before and a few new ones came so we had to do all different activities so the old kids would not be bored. On Friday we had a carnival so the kids went around to different stations spending the fake money that they earned for good behavior. There was face painting, nail painting, finger puppet making, English games for candy, the kids could buy fake tattoos and stickers, water balloons, and finally, the kids could pay their fake money to tape me to a tree. Kids paid $3 for unlimited tape to stick me to the tree. I sure was stuck! They used eight rolls of packing tape!! It was fun until they tickled me and I couldn’t do anything about it at all, but even then it was fun.
That is a whole lot of tape!
Crema was the next city and it was wonderful. Just around the corner from where the camp is, there is an ice cream shop that received an award for the best ice cream shop in all of Italy for 2010.
My family that week had three girls who are six and a half and one boy who is five and a half. Two of the girls are twins and the other two are adopted and they all have a lot of energy. They also have a German Shepard that is really old but he’s cool too. I had a 30-minute bike ride to and from the camp, which as hot as it is and as tired as I am at the end of the day, I really enjoy. It’s all flat land and bike paths so it’s easy and pretty and just nice to be outside. There is this really cool church that I pass too!
After Crema I went to Baiardo for three weeks because there were not any camps. Baiardo is a tiny village on a mountaintop about an hour into the mountains from Sanremo. From the top you can see the sea far off in the distance on a clear day and all of the surrounding mountains. The furthest mountain peaks that you can see are in France! Since there was not very much entertainment, the days were passed cleaning houses that seemed like they were made for giants or hobbits and the nights were passed drinking wine, playing cards, chasing bats and other creepy crawly creatures out of the house, and stargazing. There was one night when we met a German guy who was playing classical guitar outside of his house, which was really cool. 
One day I went to Nice, France for a day trip. It was really relaxed but fun. We went out to lunch and I couldn’t even read the menu so I pointed to something and got this salad with prosciutto, apples, hazelnuts, raisins, and a ball of fried cheese. It was delicious. We spent the rest of the day at the beach seeing people parasailing and swimming in the cleanest natural water I’ve ever seen. I also got to try a Segway because the guy on the boardwalk was trying to sell us the tour!
The last camp that I went to was in Paese, which is just outside of Treviso. The family that I stayed with was wonderful and I was with them for two weeks, which was fantastic. During the full weekend that we were there a few of the tutors took a day trip to Venice and from there, a few of us went to the island of Burano. Burano is such a neat little town. Every house is a totally different color and the colors are BRIGHT! A lot of the houses had sheets hanging out the window to dry that were the same color as the house as if it was planned. Canals run through the town so instead of a car, bicycle, or scooter, there is a boat docked in front of many of the houses.
The last camp finished before I knew it. Three months of moving nearly every week was absolutely exhausting but absolutely worth it, every single time. I met some amazing people who I look forward to seeing again and I’ve seen new cities in Italy. Now I’m getting ready for my move to Modena, where I will stay for a year teaching English at a language school and to companies in the area that hire the school for English courses. I can’t wait for the next great story and to stop living out of a suitcase!
