Angels & Devils

I'm going to copy Taylor Martin's blogging strategy and just explain my camp though a series of stories/anecdotes.

1) On the first day, our classes named themselves.  Mine was extremely divided by gender, but they finally agreed on The Devils.  Later in the day, the afternoon Olympic teams named themselves.  My group couldn't decide on anything until someone suggested the devils again, and I thought, what about The Angels?  So in the morning I'm a Devil and in the afternoon I'm an Angel.  The Devils are pictured, with their placemats that they bring for lunch.

2) We went around and did an introductory song/game in my class last Monday, and part of it was saying your favorite singer/band.  I had been wondering if my kids this year would know Lady Gaga, because she was never mentioned last year even though Poker Face was the song of the summer.  No one said anything until my last three boys had their turn.  It went Gaga - Madonna - Gaga.

3) The first day, my kids were so happy to learn that in America, we really do have lockers and cheerleaders at our high schools.  This was the most exciting part of the get-to-know-you morning activities on the first day for them.  The least exciting for me?  Watching them spend 20 minutes deciding on what kind of block letters to use for our class poster only to paint outside the lines anyway.

4) On the second day, my best English speaker told me that she lived for a year in America.  Where?  St. Louis.  Why?  Her dad was a visiting professor at Saint Louis U.  "My sister went to Ladue Middle School!"  Coincidences abound here.

5) We went over foods and drinks last week before a class field trip to the local supermarket.  I had them brainstorm for a long time, and the asst. director came in to help translate.  I was asking about drinks and one girl said "Sangue!"  Sangue means blood.  The asst. director made a "drawing blood" motion, and the girl nodded.  "For vampires!" she added.

6) I have a camp girlfriend.  Hope (the one I traveled with) and I are dating, according to our campers.  The day they all decided this was the case, one of my campers (who's 12 but looks 16, and who will be mentioned later) asked me, "Do you want to smack Hope?" "What?!" I responded.  Then he made a kissing motion, and I asked, "Do I want to kiss Hope?" And he nodded.  They proceeded to chant "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" which is infinitely better than "Smack! Smack! Smack!" This romance has also boosted my standing with some of the boys in my group, especially the old-looking one.  One day when waiting in line to go to lunch, he told me: "Love is big." Oh, the wisdom.

7) There is a 7 or 8 year old camper who I'm pretty sure is gay.  Not just European, but gay.  He and his best friend are always all over each other, rolling around together, or actually kissing.  And when he's not with his best friend, his hands are all over other boys.  I'm not sure whether to stop them when they're doing this and not doing camp activities, because I might stop them if they were a boy/girl, but I don't want them to think that I'm stopping them because they're both boys... but that might not even register for them.

8) FOOD.  For lunch our directors brings us tutors food from a nearby restaurant, where they don't really have a menu, they just cook whatever is fresh that morning (+ french fries, annoyingly).  It's usually really good.  And the kids eat SO MUCH.  Many have a sandwich for snack. The old-looking one had four sandwiches for lunch today.  And some of their lunchboxes could pass for small suitcases.  But most of them are super skinny anyway.

Pompei, Pride, Pizza & Positano

The weekend began with sheep.  Our assistant director took Hope (my co-tutor) and I to the train station right after camp, and we got on our first of two trains up to Salerno (near Naples).  But a TrenItalia worker came up to us and told us that the train would be late, because they were waiting for sheep.  Apparently there was a car of sheep heading our way that had to join with our two-car train.  So, I called my heroic host family, who came and drove us 30 minutes to our transfer station (where I was stuck for a couple hours last weekend).  My host dad is a caribinieri (police-type organization), so he was driving about twice the speed limit.  But we made it with plenty of time to spare.

We made Salerno our base, more specifically a convent-turned-hostel that worked out well.  It's a pretty town, but we really only saw it when walking to/from the train station or port.

On Saturday morning we went to Pompei.  It was on my bucket list for the summer, mostly because when I took an art history class before Prague, I saw the bright red paintings from there.  But I was excited about the ruins, too.  I know the basic story of what happened at Pompei, why it's preserved, etc. but I still, for whatever reason, did not expect it to be a full city.  Until I got the map when we walked in.  And it's like, a real city.  With streets and neighborhoods.  Unreal.  This is a picture of one of the main streets.  We walked around for four hours and maybe saw a quarter of the city.

And I did indeed find that red.  While most of the city was just stone, some was still covered in pieces of red wall, and many of the remaining buildings had red artwork inside.  Most of the surviving paintings are in a museum in Naples.

We then took a train into Naples (or Napoli as they call it here).  Naples has an interesting reputation.  I'd heard that it's industrial, dirty, and dangerous.  We got out of the train station and for the first 10 minutes all of that seemed completely accurate.  But then.  We noticed that the street was shut down and there were a bunch of caribinieri and other security personnel in the street.  I asked someone what was going on, but no one seemed to know.  So we kept walking.  Was Berlusconi in town?  Was it a parade?  Soon we heard a parade.  I thought... it's June... could it be?

It was Italy's National Pride Parade!!!!!  I'd missed it by one day in Rome last year, and had no idea where it would be this year.  But we went to the right city, at the right time, and were walking down the RIGHT STREET.  Crazy.  We watched/danced for an hour and collected all of the chachkas we could.  It was incredible.  Gay organizations from most of Italy's regions marched, and lots of random groups, too (including Young Democrats and Communists).

We wandered around the beautiful part of Naples for a couple hours.  I bought an shirt with English that made no sense (a goal of mine since last winter) and we found a really cute block of cafes where we sat and had wine and bruschetta (and sadly it started to rain).

And then there was pizza.  Naples is the epicenter of pizza, especially margherita (cheese) pizza.  And we ate at the birthplace of that.  It was pretty tasty.  To be 100% honest, I did find the dough to be a bit salty, but the tomato sauce was absolutely perfect.  And the mozzarella was damn good, too.  Every meal we ate during the weekend was some variation of bread, cheese, and tomatoes.

Sunday was the Amalfi Coast.  Also on my summer bucket list.  I'd seen pictures, and I had to go.  We took a ferry to Positano, which is in the middleish of the coast.  I had imagined that the famous towns were all right next to each other in one section of the coast, but they're actually really spread out.  We picked a good one.

The ride was absolutely beautiful.  This is a picture of us when we were docked in the town of Amalfi on our way to Positano.  Upon arrival, the entire top deck of our ferry was staring up at the beautiful buildings glued to the cliffs.  But not because they were beautiful buildings glued to cliffs.  There was a man showering in a home pretty far up the cliff, and he had a huge window facing the coast.  So everyone could see.  Pretty funny.

We just started walking up.  Every time we turned around we had to stop, because neither of us had been anywhere this beautiful before.  It looked like a Greek Islands town, but with a range of color instead of the blue/white. 

For lunch we had delicious gnocchi sorrentina (gnocchi, mozzarella, tomatoes) overlooking the beach, where we spent our last couple hours in the town.

There's not too much else I can say, so here's another picture from Positano.

I'll post soon about how the camp is going, I just couldn't put off writing about the weekend!

FOOD Camp

Last year, most of my camps had themes.  Convent Camp, Prison Camp, Mini Camp, Easy Camp.  This camp is most definitely Food Camp.

I am in the arch of the boot.  I headed down here on Saturday... and it was a pretty incredible train ride.  I've never been south of Rome, so it was all new to me.  Napoli looked as industrial as I'd heard, and the train went into the mountains too much around the Amalfi Coast so I didn't get to see it, but the entire second half of the trip was along the west coast of the country, sort of a Highway 1 of Italy, with the Pacific being the Mediterranean/Tyrrhenian.

I was stranded in my transfer station (where I wrote the beginning of my last post) for two hours.  I was having trouble figure out which substitute bus to take, but a random guy that was standing around the station offered to help.  He didn't speak a word of English but I was able to figure out exactly what he was saying, and he ran around asking bus drivers, TrenItalia employees, and other people to figure out what I should do.  It completely turned a frustrating time into a fun one.  But in the end my assistant director's sister-in-law came and rescued me.

My family picked me up and took me straight to their son's friend's birthday party.  It was outside his house, near the beach, and it was great.  Within 30 minutes, my host dad Luigi gave me:

2 slices of pizza
10 pieces of cheese
A few pieces of bread
Several refills of Fanta
2 huge pieces of cake
2 long rolls of something ricotta-ish
Spumante wine
Chocolate and limoncello liquor

That was my welcome.  Sunday we went to the grandma's house for lunch and to watch the Italy vs. New Zealand game.  I met most of the extended family, and they all had a lot of questions for me, some in easy-to-understand Italian and others that my host mom translated.  I showed them my house on google streetview and I think the now know more about me/my family that any of my host families last year.  Oh and the first course there was a plate of pasta, I was the only person who didn't have a full second plate.  There was the meat course afterward.  I don't know how they do it. (This is a pic from my house the next night, but it's pretty much the same group.)

We picked up two of my co-tutors to bring them over for the game.  They're New Zealanders.  We walked in a minute after NZ scored their goal, to everyone's tremendous surprise.  The game was pretty frustrating.  But the Kiwis loved it.  One even knew some of the players from high school and recognized friends in the stands.  Small country.

I'm also including a picture of a bridge to Catanzaro.  They're really proud of it, and it is pretty impressive.  Apparently it's the second biggest single-arch bridge in Europe.

I could post about camp, but I'll leave that for tomorrow or the next day.  But the kids are great and the camp is super super organized, which is good but stressful.

Back in the Habit

As I write this post from a train station in the south, I am waiting to be rescued. I took a train for 5+ hours to get down here only to have the short local train cancelled because of work on the tracks. But my new director’s brother is driving over to pick me up. The ride and my adventure at this station will probably be the subject of my next post, because I have so much to tell about my brief time in Rome.

I’ll start where I left off, on my first night (Thursday).
Camps are all over this country, from the Austrian border, to Sardinia, to Sicily. There are over 400 tutors this summer. Yet, one of my closest friends from last summer is working at a camp TWO BLOCKS from my director’s apartment in the periphery of Rome. I was lucky enough to meet up with her on Thursday (and again on Friday).

Oh and a funny exchange happened during Thursday dinner at Angela’s.  I told her that my brother works in politics and she asked if he's a Republican.  I told her that he's a Democrat, and she told me that she knows about Republicans because of Rob Lowe's character on Brothers & Sisters.  I explained that Obama is a Democrat and that I like him, and Nino then asked me if Hillary Clinton was a Republican.  He was confused when I told him that she's also a Dem, and that John McCain is a Republican (he'd forgotten about him).

Nino also greeted me on Friday by saying 'Good Morning, Vietnam.' He learned pretty much all of his English from movies and tv.

Friday was a pretty miraculous day. Mostly because it’s rare for a tutor to return to a camp he or she has previously worked at, especially when that tutor is not even in the country for the entire duration of the camp. But, because I was staying with Angela, I got to go back to the convent camp for a day. Of course it was weird being there and seeing six different tutors working with those kids in the same location, but it was so, so nice to see the kids again. Almost all of them were back, and there were 30ish new campers, too.

It was also wonderful to see Sister Gabriella again, who is even more amazing than I remembered. Last year I communicated with her in Spanish (she’s from Guatemala), but this year I’m proud to say that each of my sentences was a mix of Spanish and Italian, I just said each word in whichever came to mind first.

We spent the morning at a pool behind the convent which I didn't know about last year.  It was beautiful, but a little chilly.

A few weeks ago I bought an Italian learning and activity book, and I brought it to camp with me for the afternoon when kids were with their tutors.  But every time a camper passed me, he or she stopped to help me for a little bit.  They LOVED hearing and seeing me mess up and correcting me.  As soon as camp ended, a circle of kids gathered around me as I read the articles of clothing aloud and they judged my pronounciation.  The group grew to 15 campers, and they kept telling me to repeat the list until their parents made them leave.  It was too much fun.

Although by now I am in Calabria, and I will write about it soon, I want to share some quotes from my Lonely Planet book about the region...

Tell a non-Calabrese Italian that you're going to Calabria, and you will probably elicit some surprise, inevitably followed by stories of the Calabrian Mafia, notorious for smugglign and kidnapping wealthy northerners and keeping them hidden in the mountains.

Its towns, destroyed by repeated earthquakes, are often surrounded by brutal breeze-block suburbs.

So... an interesting place.  Oh and Nino made bruschetta on Friday, he gave me 3 huge pieces to start and I couldn't eat more because of all the other food.  Fresh tomatoes, homemade olive oil, and basil from their balcony.

A Home & A Destination

After three flights and a wonderful 24 hours in New York, I'm in Rome!!  I publicly transported myself to my first camp director from last year's apartment, where her husband, Nino, was waiting for me.  My goal had been to learn enough Italian in the last few weeks to be able to converse with him well, since he speaks very little English, and I don't really know if I succeeded, but I'm at least back to where I was Italian-wise at the end of last summer, if not a bit better.

Within 15 minutes of my arrival, Nino had pasta ready and we were immersed in the South Korea vs. Argentina game.  I was amused to realize that he and I use the same illegal website for watching tv online.  By the time I'd reached the halfway point in eating my plate of pasta, he'd finished, and handed me a second plate.  Of course this came with 'Mangia!'  One of the most commonly used words in this country.  He then offered me salad (just lettuce and olive oil, it was interesting), bread, and artichoke hearts.  But most exciting... he told me he would be making bruschetta tomorrow!  For those who tried my bruschetta over the last year, I learned from watching Nino, and mine is not nearly half as good.  So... I'm looking forward to dinner tomorrow.

Angela, my former director, returned from camp with her daughters, and it was really nice to see them all again.  And I'm going with them to camp tomorrow (the convent camp) where most of my campers from that camp last year have returned.  I'm really excited to see them again.  (I just had to stop typing because Angela handed me a taste of my lunch tomorrow, which I can best describe as a giant latke consisting only of spaghetti and eggs, it really just tasted like eggs, which is good).  And my favorite nun, Gabriella, will be there as well.

But in other news, I JUST found out where I'll be going on Saturday!!  Catanzaro Lido.  2 weeks.  Beach town.  About 50 miles north of Sicily.  Staying with a family.  So I'm super giddy right now.  The director of the camp already emailed me and the other tutors introducing herself and saying how excited she is, which is usually a good sign.  I really wanted to go South (although it will be unbelievably hot) becuase I've never been south of Rome and because I've heard such great things about the camps in general down there.  And because it's 2 weeks I'll have the weekend to go on a day or overnight trip, perhaps to Sicily.  Yeah... I'm excited.

Well I should go be more conversational with Angela and fam, so that's all for now.  And I don't know if I'll have Internet at the camp.  Hopefully!!

Dreaming of Gelato and Buffalo Mozzarella

It still does not feel right to blog from home, but I'll be in Rome by the end of the week!  I'm heading back to teach English at ACLE camps again for 6 weeks. 

Very early tomorrow morning I fly to New York.  I'm getting my last dose of the USA at the Phillies/Yankees game with a whole bunch of good people before flying on Wednesday to Dublin and then on to Rome.

I'll be staying with my first camp director from last summer and her family on the outskirts of Rome until I head to my first camp on Saturday.  I will spend my Roman time trying to see friends from last year who are working camps there now, and stuffing my face with pizza and gelato. 

I have no idea what this summer will bring, because the experience depends on the camp (I'll probably work 4-5 of them).  But I will have about 10 days after I finish working to wander around, and I'm intentionally leaving that time unplanned.

One thing that will be different this year is the WORLD CUP.  I can only imagine sitting in a village square watching the Azzurri (the nickname of the Italian team) with all the locals screaming.  Hopefully that becomes reality.

Also, a brief life update... I'll be working for a year in Chicago beginning at the end of August.  I'll be working at a low-income housing non-profit through a Jewish affiliate of Americorps (called Avodah).  I'm really excited about it, although my mind is pretty focused on New York/Italy at the moment.

I hope to update the blog as regularly as last year, and with pictures even more regularly than last year, but that all depends on my internet access at each camp.

I did change the layout and title of the blog to Italianize it, but I left the url the same.  I felt a bit funny writing about Italy on a blog with a Czech name, so I changed the Czech word for school (Skolska, also my street name) to the Italian word for school (scuola).  The new picture at the top is just a house that was next to the agriturismo (agricultural tourism park) where we held camp one day last year when there was a wedding at the convent.  I tried putting a picture of some famous Italian thing there but it didn't work... this looks and feels much better.

The next post will come from Rome!  And hopefully by then I'll know where in the country they'll be sending me on Saturday for my first camp!