Madeleine Buck - NSW to Italy

Fri 25 Jan 2008

Madeleine Buck, from Kilbreda College in VIC, has just returned from her Summer Explorer Program to Italy. Here is her last email from Italy.

My time in Italy so far has been really enjoyable. I have loved every moment and I've had heaps of fun. My host family is really nice. Now that I've been here for a while I am starting to be able to have proper conversations with them and they've told me that they have noticed my Italian getting better. My host dad Luigi is the greatest guy, we get along really well and we joke around together. My host mum, Roberta, is really nice too, she's an excellent cook. My host sister Lucrezia has been really friendly and helpful; she can speak a bit of English so if I get stuck with my Italian we can generally work out what I'm trying to say in a mixture of Italian and English. Luigi and Roberta don't speak English at all although they have learnt a few words now.

The food is really delicious, Australian pizza's just won't be good enough anymore. We eat really typical Italian food like pizza and pasta every night and we go out to restaurants often. I had to get used to the change of meal times because it is really different here. They hardly eat anything for breakfast and then they don't eat until 2 o'clock. I was so hungry at around 10.30 for the first two weeks but I'm used to it now. My whole family eats lunch together. The parents come home from work for lunch which I knew happened in Italy but when you actually experience it, it seems a bit weird. Now when I come back, the Australian way is going to seem weird to me.

My coordinator is Antonella. I haven’t had any real problems that I needed her help with. She came out for pizza with us and another exchange student, Sarah, and her family last night. Every time she comes to our house she asks how I am and it is good because I can explain more to my host family because she can translate for me, the things I can’t say in Italian.

School has been okay. I go to the same school as Lucrezia and we catch the bus every morning. I found it extremely difficult at the start and even still now sometimes although it has become a bit easier to understand. I have been lucky because there is a girl in my class who can speak English quite well so she has helped me to understand basically what each lesson is about. Some of my teachers have been really interested in me and asked me a lot of questions and given me special tasks to do that are not as difficult as what the rest of the class is doing and some just treat me as if I was an Italian and I just try my best to understand what they say and to do what they ask. The classes that my class does are fairly different to what I do in Australia so and they run really different to my Australian school too. Subjects like Latin are incredibly difficult because I have never learnt Latin and now I'm trying to learn it in another language that I am also learning and at a high level but information technology is fun and I am pretty good at Geography/History. In English, I have to help everyone but the teacher makes me speak in Italian so I learn more Italian while everyone is learning English.

Lucrezia plays volleyball so I go to volleyball training with her twice a week and participate in the exercises, I am not very good but I am getting better and everyone there is really nice to me. On Saturday afternoons I watch the team play and support them. I also go swimming on Mondays with Lucrezia and her cousin Gabriele which has been fun.

Every weekend my family goes to Luigi's sisters' house and we chat and eat cakes. Sometimes we go out for dinner and sometimes we eat dinner at her house. It is really fun, my host cousins and I play soccer or playstation and recently it has been snowing so we had a snowball fight and built a snowman. That was really fun because I had never seen snow before I came here. My family also loves to go shopping so we go two or three times a week. For Christmas we went on holiday to Tuscany and they showed me all around the region. We went to heaps of beautiful little towns and everything was so pretty. I've been to Milan, Bologna, Florence and heaps of Tuscan towns while I have been here and they are all beautiful in their own way. Everything here is really old and it’s nice just to walk around and look at all the buildings.

I have made heaps of friends while I have been here. At school, on the school bus, coming here on the plane, walking home from the bus stop after school each day as well as my host family's friends, family and my host family themselves. I have heaps of people's email addresses and when I come back to Australia I will definitely keep in touch with them. I went to the movies with some friends the other day which was really fun, I understood most of the movie which was good and we had a great time. I don't really want to leave now because of all my friends here and I definitely want to come back in the future.

Anyways, I'm having a great time and everything is going well,

From Maddy