Lago di Garda

Yesterday I went on an absolutely amazing day trip. I wish I could post my pictures but that'll have to wait until I have internet on my computer. So I'm posting a few that I found online of the area of the lake we saw.

We went to Lago di Garda (Lake Garda), which is about 40 minutes from where I'm staying, and it's the biggest lake in Italy. Sara and I left early in the morning and had really good luck with trains and buses, so we arrived at the northern tip of the lake just after 10 am (which is a 2 hour bus drive from the southwest corner).

It was unbelieveably beautiful. This part of the lake is in the Alps, or at least the foothills of the Alps, so it's surrounded by massive green and rocky mountains. It's also not that far from Austria, so we heard about half Italian and half German. And the restaurants served goulash!! But I stuck to pasta and pizza.

We walked along the beach for about an hour and found a great restaurant for lunch, and then went in the water. It was the perfect temperature. It was cold when I walked in but the sun was so strong that within a minute the water felt warm. And then I looked around and all I could see was this huge lake and towering, jagged mountains.

We had bad luck with buses back down to the bottom of the lake, so we walked for a bit and then saw a sign that said 'Panorma' and had an arrow. So we followed it. The path took us up into the hills, past some remote houses and vineyards, until we had a view of the lake with a vineyard in the foreground, then the small town of Torbole, then the water, and then the mountains. Sadly my camera didn't know what to do with the variation of lighting so I couldn't capture the scene, but it was amazing.

Today we're going to Vicenza, a city only about 15 minutes away with lots of stuff designed by Palladio. He was a Renaissance architect that I'd never heard of, but the whole city is a UNESCO site because of him, so I guess he's pretty important. And perhaps he is why the 'Palladium,' Prague's biggest mall, has it's name. I really have no idea.

Bees and Honey

I spent most of today at a bee farm (I have no idea what it's actually called). We skipped morning lessons and all walked about two minutes down the street after warm up to the bee farm (aka this woman's house). It was something my director did with her students during the year, so she was excited to do it again.

My director and Sara, my co-tutor, translated the whole story about honey production, as I was the only person there who doesn't speak Italian. After the whole explanation, we got to sample different honeys! They were all delicious, but acacia was definitely the best. The beekeeper also showed us how to make candles with the wax, which was too dangerous for the kids. But Sara and I asked if we could come back to make our own candles after camp, and she agreed. I also got to try on the beekeeper's costume that kind of makes me look like Neil Armstrong.

Camp today was reaaaaaaaally hot, around 95 Farenheit, so it was the perfect day for water games. And right after, Sara and I biked back to the bee farm. The beekeeper... I forget her name... was so nice. She got all of the candle-making equipment for us and explained in more detail the processes of wax and honey, which I mostly understood from gestures, but Sara translated the rest.

Among the things I learned...

Queen bees can choose the sex of their offspring
Bees work 24 hours a day for the approx. 45 days they live
When bees notice their queen slacking off, they elongate the eggs of her female offspring to make a new queen (aka. a coup)

So we got to make candles, and taste much more honey. She brought out fresh bread for us and I don't think she stopped talking for the hour and a half we were there. It was a lot of fun, and such a random experience.

This weekend I'm going to Lake Garda on Saturday, which should be beautiful and very touristy. It's the biggest lake in Italy and less than an hour from here.

Also, I'll be home in two and a half weeks!!

California Time!!

My first day at the mini camp was challenging. It is actually really nice to have a super small group for circle songs at the beginning and end of the day, because they all sing and they learn the songs much faster. But a five person class is difficult. Any activity we do takes about half as long as it does in a 10-12 person class, and most of the kids are staying two weeks, so I will have to think of tons of activities.

But the best part of the day was California Time! Our director asked Sara and I if we had any ideas for a camp theme. We'd never heard of such a thing, but Sara remembered that we're both Californians, so she suggested the best state in the union as our theme. After lunch, we spend an our and a half teaching something about our state and doing an arts and crafts activity related to the topic of the day.

Today, we started with geography. We taught them the major cities, valleys, and Lake Tahoe, and then they colored in the regions. After that, we painted a huge map to put on the wall. It was a lot of fun, and made both Sara and I so happy. Tomorrow we are going to talk about California sports, and we'll split into Giants and Dodgers and play baseball, teaching them lots of good vocab. On the agenda for later in the week... technology, the environment, cinema. Please let me know if you have other ideas!

How I Became Harry Potter (And How Julia Became Ron Weasley)

On Wednesday, Hermione (Irene) told me she would not be at the final show.
On Thursday, Harry (Francesco D) told me he would not be at the final show.
On Friday, Ron (Francesco F) did not show up to camp.

What do you do when you lose your three main characters? I had enough time to remove Hermione from the script, but I ended up drawing a lightning bolt on my forehead and becoming Harry Potter, and Julia (my co-tutor) played the part of Ron Weasley. It was frustrating, but the show must go on.

Most importantly, this camp is over. I completed the camp evaluation form, and gave the directors the lowest marks I've ever given anyone on an evaluation, but it was a joke. There's just no way to completely express how disastrous this camp was. In the comment section at the end, I only wrote about things that happened yesterday, the last day of camp. These included:

1) The directors charging each camper 3 euros for each camp picture (these are always free), even though they cost 0.38. The reason? The directors want to help pay for the restoration of the school. So they are doing that by making kids pay for their pictures. Most of these kids don't even attend the school.

2) The directors not coordinating our transportation to the train station today, which is a requirement of their job.

3) At the beginning of the show, they both gave an introductory speech, which was great. Then, one of them left, and did not reappear until she was chatting in the back of the room with people, which echoed to the front and no one could hear the show. The other director stayed, but thought the show was over before we gave out the diplomas, so she told the parents they could leave, and started chatting with some of them. Many of the parents missed seeing their kids receive diplomas.

4) When we tried to get kids to stop talking during the performances, the director who was still there would just smile at them because she thought they were cute for misbehaving. One of these kids was her son.


Ok, this is the end of my complaining about this camp. But all that happened in one day, and every day this week was as bad or worse.

On a happier note, I mostly enjoyed preparing for the show with my class. They did an excellent job making the cardboard signs, and the girls put together a solid Mamma Mia dance which saved the show. These are the girls in my class, all of whom I really like, except for that girl on the right... she's a pain. The one in the back middle, her name is Irene Russo. I think she must be the Apple version of the actress.

After the show, we got to spend time with the good people from these two weeks. We said goodbye to Marco, Enza and Camilla, which was my saddest goodbye in Italy.

We went out for dinner with Anita, the amazing helper/director, in Parma. The dinner/gelato redeemed the city in my eyes... until we got stuck there for the THIRD time. The first was when we took the wrong #11 bus 2 weeks ago, then last week the Happy Bus never came, and this time we called the main and maybe only cab company in the cities, and they had NO taxis. So we walked to Anita's house and her mom woke up at 12:30 am and drove back to the school, cramming 8 of us into a 5-seater.

Now I'm off to a new and hopefully happier place, where I may or may not have Internet!

Montechiarugolo is finished!

Angels, Festivals, Prison Camp & Bologna

Angels
There are these absolutely wonderful people who can make camps so much better. At my first camp, it was Sister Gabriella, who is one of those people that even when you speak different languages, you can tell is just a really good person. But here, at a place in dire need of angels, there are 3.

One is Anita. She pretty much runs the camp. She keeps the kids in order, helps out when we're organizing games, comes around to check up on us, prints out notifications about shows and water games for kids to give their parents, and asks how we're doing in general. She is not a director, she is a helper – a volunteer who is at camp because she can speak English and probably has nothing else to do for the summer. She is sixteen.

The others are Marco and Enza. They are the groundskeepers at the school who live on our hall. We learned a few days ago that Marco's other job is designing concentrated juice factories, and he travels all around the world with three other guys building them. When we first arrived, he was very stern with us and told us the ground rules and was not too friendly. But as days went by, he talked to us more and more (especially to those who speak Italian). However, a couple days ago, he got angry.

Usually, for dinner, we eat the leftover lunch cafeteria food, frozen food, and smelly canned vegetables. When Marco found out about this, he and his wife, Enza, were extremely disgusted. On Sunday, they cooked us an amazing dinner with pasta, vegetables, cake, and wine. Then, last night, they improved upon that. Marco's boss recently went into the mountains looking for porcini mushrooms, and brought back about 600 euros worth of them, and gave some to Marco. He put them into a creamy pasta and served them to us. I cannot describe how delicious they were. But that was only the first course. He also cooked us kebabs with four kinds of meat, and vegetables.

We feel guilty because they are paying for these dinners, but if the directors found out what he was doing, they would freak out. Apparently they did not even say "Hi" to Marco until a few months ago (he's been here a few years), and they assumed that he and Enza would not even allow us to use their kitchen to cook our own food. They've told us that the dinners make them really happy because it feels like home (they have a teenage daughter in Sardinia). So these are our "host parents," and definitely the most hospitable people we've met here.

Also, they feed their dog, Camilla, pasta. And I just found out... they both LOVE Ricky Martin. And, Enza's ringtone is Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music." Marco's is Beyonce's "To The Left."

Oh and one more thing about angels. Today my campers were working on a page about opposites. One fill-in-the-blank was: "The opposite of far is _____." So I walked around, checking everyone's work, and the best student in my class wrote: "The opposite of far is angel." I was completely confused and made a halo with my hands above my head and she nodded. I told her... "San Francisco is far, Parma is near. I don't know what angel is." So the next question was: "_____ is the opposite of high." She wrote, "Angel is the opposite of high." I have no idea what wires in her head could be crossed, so if you have any ideas, please let me know.

Festivals
I think I mentioned before how I went to a small village festival at my last camp, where they had a fireworks show afterward. On Friday night we went to another one in this town. The town is small, but the festival was huge. Literally the whole town was transformed into a market, and I think every resident was there. It was a much needed fun end to the week. We went there with Marco and Enza, and when we ran into them by the food tents, they insisted on buying us fried bread and Parma ham. Of course I didn't have the ham, but it was really nice to be offered. And the fried bread was delicious.

Prison Camp
A little update... For the most part, things haven't improved much. I don't want to go into detail because I've complained so much to a lot of people. We sent a letter to ACLE, and they sent one of their top people immediately and he stayed with us for a couple days. But really, we all just need to get out of here. We're fenced off from the world with hardly any way out, and the food is hardly edible.

But my kids, for the most part, are one thing that's going right. Last week I did a Pirates of the Caribbean show with most of the kids who were only staying for the first week, so it was a large cast. I was worried about arranging costumes for 16 kids, but their costumes were amazing! I needed 14 swords (for everyone but Elizabeth and the monkey), and my kids actually brought 14 plastic or wooden swords from home. I needed 7 or 8 eye patches, and 5 or 6 of them brought eye patches. I needed white sheets for the ghost pirates, and they brought them. I needed a monkey tail and a girl brought one. In the end, I had to make one eye patch. That's it. They brought every single other thing.

This week we're doing a show in which Harry Potter and Ron Weasley visit Fred and George's joke shop. They play with the trick wands, one of which causes all of the witches in the store to start dancing to "Mamma Mia." You gotta find a way to please everyone.

Bologna is my favorite city in Italy... Bologna is not my favorite city in Italy
We went on an overnight trip to Bologna last weekend, which is about an hour train ride from Parma. The city is beautiful. It's definitely my favorite city in Italy to walk around, maybe because of the colorful buildings, maybe because all of the sidewalks are covered by the buildings. We spent most of our time there walking in massive circles around the city.

One of the more memorable things about the city was the gelato. One place we ate at is "internationally recognized," according to my Lonely Planet, and they had a letter from some organization in New Jersey naming it the best ice cream store in the world for 2009. It was really, really good. I had one of their creations that combined caffe espresso, chocolate, stracciatella (chocolate chip), and mascarpone. It was really, really good. On Sunday we tried another gelato place that's known for serving gelato in focaccia. I was the only one bold/gross enough to try it, and I thought it was pretty good. The crema (vanilla-ish) worked really well, but the caffe... not so much. Also, the bread was too huge.

But there were problems with Bologna. We went to the main park, and its sketchiness is only comparable to some areas of Golden Gate Park. We couldn't believe how bad it was after walking around such a beautiful city, but we decided to sit down anyway. Bad call. About 10 minutes after we sat down, two guys about 20 feet in front of us started pushing each other. One lifted up his shirt and pulled a knife from his waist. We left.

It was also really difficult to find anything to do at night, which was especially disappointing since my co-tutor Julia and I were trying to celebrate our birthdays. But I'd gladly go back to Bologna when school is in session (they have the oldest university in Europe) and students are everywhere.


Well, I only have a couple more days at this camp, and then I'm going to a small town between Verona and Padua. It's northeast of here, about an hour west of Venice. I'll be at the camp for two weeks, and I'm going with one of my co-tutors from here. I'm really excited that I'll be with a host family, because I could use some hospitality after these two weeks. But... this camp has TEN campers. In the whole camp. And those 10 campers are at SIX different English levels. I will have 5 in my group and Sara will have five. We will each be teaching three different levels in class. The second week of camp... there will be 16 campers. It's going to be crazy. But I'm actually pretty excited about it.

This post seems to be waaaaaaaaaay too long, so I congratulate you for reading it all! Thanks!

This is NOT a Good Camp

I am trying to stay positive. It is really difficult. The 2-week camp I am at now is kind of a nightmare. I could go on and on about what is wrong, but I’ve already done a lot of that with this list I made about things that went wrong during our first two days here. Here are some of the highlights. Keep in mind this is only about half of the list.

You know something is wrong…

When your camp director assigns you a parking space to sit in for an hour until the other tutors arrive.

When your camp directors disagree on the number of campers.

When your camp directors disagree on the length of the camp.

When your camp directors bring you to a specific place for lunch on Saturday that does not make food on weekends, and then force you to eat their old food anyway.

When your camp director is not willing to look up a taxi number after you take the wrong bus and you’re stranded on the side of a road on a Sunday evening. (Thank You, Dad, for looking up taxi numbers on your Blackberry)

When your camp director gives you your list of campers and the color of book you’ll be using less than 15 minutes before camp begins, and many of the book assignments are incorrect.

When the bus carrying half the campers arrives at 9:20.

When there is another camp you were not told about using the camp space.

When your camp directors adjust group assignments while you are calling your group for the first time.

When your camp directors create groups based on friendships and not on English level.

When other guests in the school are allowed to eat food made specifically for us.

When your camp directors do not know how long the kids plan to stay at camp.

When your camp director interrupts your class to tell you what she expects her son (who is in my class) to learn so that he has sufficient English to travel to the US, regardless of whether or not that information is in the book.


Aside from these things, we are about 15 miles from Parma, which is a very nice city. It is known for food (Parma as in Parmesan), and it has amazing gelato, which we enjoyed on Sunday. However, we are on the side of a road, about a 20 minute walk from civilization to the left and a 45 minute walk to a decent-sized town on the right. There is a bus that runs occasionally, but it is hard to catch, and on the way back from Parma on Sunday we took the wrong #11 bus. Apparently there are multiple #11 buses, and they run different routes. Who knew?

All that being said, my class here is actually a lot of fun... most of the time. They enjoy the games we play and songs we sing much more than my last group. Also, they speak to me in English! I can’t say how much I appreciate this. Part of it is that they are 11-12 instead of 10ish, which makes a HUGE difference in terms of English level.

Funny story… we were playing the game where you write the name of a famous person on a piece of paper and stick it to someone’s forehead, and they have to ask the class questions to figure out who they are. Well, one of them was Madonna (I always give this one to the sporty boys). It’s pretty hard to get though, because they don’t really know any of her songs, and she’s not in the news too much now. So they got creative. Just when I was going to jump in and give some major hints, one girl shouted, “The mother of Jesus!” Soon after I recovered from laughing reeeeeeeally hard, a boy shouted, “Two kids from Africa!” But the poor kid still didn’t get it, oh well. The next name was Hilary Duff. Martino shouted, “Beer surname!” It took me a second to understand, and the girl who had Hilary Duff on her forehead did not understand at all, even when he shouted, “Simpsons Beer!”

Here are some things that have gone well, just to balance out this post:

The Happy Bus — The bus we took into Parma on Saturday was the #11 bus, but it was actually a large van labeled “The Happy Bus.” We were pretty skeptical, but the driver said it was the #11, and that it went to Parma, and he was right. On board, we heard such hits as “Mamma Mia” and “The Reason” (the later of which made it seem more like an Emo Bus than a Happy Bus).

Trampolines — There is a fenced area with six trampolines that are SO much fun. We spent about an hour on them each of our first few days here. We might have a choreographed routine down by the end of the two weeks.

The Hurricane/Tornado Today — It was sunny and hot around 11 am. It was sunny and cool around 2 pm. In between, there was a hurricane/tornado. I thought the 50-foot tall trees were going to fall over, and the rain was so intense. But our reward… the first cool afternoon in weeks.

Lastly, here are some pictures that I should have posted a while ago.

In no particular order...

Sister Gabriella, the best nun in the world.
My group in Frattocchie, right before the show
We were celebrities in Frattocchie. I really miss being a part of a community, even though I couldn't speak the language.
Bergamo, the beautiful city near my second camp.