Ok, lets recap. First, training last week was in Armi di Taggia, near SanRemo and it was AMAZING. First off, we were RIGHT on the beach. Literally, I walked out of my bungalow door and there it was. It was so fabulous. My two roommates there, Kelley and Niemh, were amazing as well. We got along so great and had tons of fun. Niemh is Irish and she pronounces her name all crazy and Kelley is from New York and she is just crazy in general. And the rest of the people in my program are great as well. It was one of the least stressful and productive trainings I have ever been involved in. There were 14 of us this week, and then next week 150 tutors come. I am really glad I was in the smaller group because I don't really like training with a huge group of people. So anyways, we basically sang songs and learned random things all day and then hung out at the beach, drank wine, and ate cheese and bread. We got three free meals a day at this restaurant close by. Which was actually kind of a disappointment because the food there was not so good. The first meal started off good with this amazing lasagne...but then we got some sort of mystery meat with mystery gravy for the second dish (secondi piatti) and things just went downhill from there. I wish I had taken pictures. One dish was some sort of ham ring filled with green mush. It was not tasty. But no worries, I didn't starve, we found a grocery store nearby. And, they usually had a good dessert for us, so it wasn't all bad. And, the 14 of us always had a good time so it was always fun to show up for a meal and guess what we were eating. I seriously cannot say enough good things about my group. We all got along great and I was sad to see everyone leave.
We are split up into different groups because we all go to different camps. So I am working with 2 other tutors and we are in the city of Carpi. Everyone else is in a nearby town and we all stay with a different host family. Hopefully we'll get to see each other some. But after these two weeks, we all go to completely different camps. We had to take 3 trains to get to Carpi yesterday, which was kind of a challenge after our last night celebration in Armi di Taggia. But, I managed.
My host family, the Lugli family, is super nice! They sent me a facebook message before I came, which I thought was so cute! Last night they took me out to dinner and we had some local cuisine, which I have already forgotten the name of. But was basically a bunch of meat and cheese and you made your own sandwich type thing with this really yummy bread. There were also veggies you dipped in oil, but they were eating like, entire onions and I couldn't handle that...way to strong for me. And of coures we had dessert! I had some sort of ice cream thing..it was fab. Anyways, the family has three sons, Ricardo-21, Michael-17, and Eros-13, who is going to the camp with me. I actually haven't met Eros yet because he is away at a hockey tournament for the weekend.
Ok, well just wanted to give everyone an update! Things are going so fabulous...much better than I ever imagined! I am looking forward to camp starting on Tuesday and seeing what these crazy Italian children are all about it. More later! Oh! And I got a phone with free incoming calls, so shoot me an email if you want the number. Here are some pictures from last week....the rest are on facebook.
My fabulous group!
The roomies!
View from the restaurant where we ate every meal
Wow! Looks/sounds amazing! It is sort of weird to hear of a single bad or so-so meal eaten in Italy though; I have it so built up in my mind! ha. That is funny.
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