A Seinfeld Post

I don't really have much event-wise to talk about, but I figured I'd share more general experiences from my summer so far. 

Language is interesting.  Sometimes it matters that I've never studied Italian, sometimes it doesn't at all.  And this really has nothing to do with whether or not my host fam speaks any English.  So I've been thinking about what makes it matter.

In my new family, I find that it matters.  I can find ways to get across pretty much anything using basic words and gestures, but that doesn't seem to be enough.  Yesterday was one of my worst days at camp so far this summer, perhaps my worst.  My new kids were great, and too quiet if anything, and my tutor group works well together.  Even the director is amazing.  But the heat kept me awake, as did the fact that I forgot to shut the mosquito screen after shutting the blinds before I went to sleep. I woke up sneezing before my alarm went off and, frankly, I never recovered energy-wise during the day. 

So when my host mom came to pick me up she told me I looked so tired I was dead, and that's actually about how I felt. But then on the car ride home she did not stop talking, continuing to tell me things she'd already told me about how I should say if there are places I want to go after camp or if I want to spend more time with the other tutors.  And she kept reminding me of how tired I looked.  I was pretty aware of how tired I looked, and all I wanted was some silence in the car, but I have nowhere near the vocab necessary to get that across politely.  So I listened and continued to process the Italian, which is an excercise requiring much energy in its own right.  Needless to say I was even more unhappy by the time I got home.

My last family also spoke no/very very little English, so all the dialogue was in Italian.  But, although a bit tiring, that was fine.  They seemed to understand that there wasn't always something I needed.  I didn't need the gentle vocab that I would find useful here.

Aside from the language bit, everything else about this host family is really nice, and I had probably the best tomato pasta sauce I've ever had last night.  They have a beautiful garden in the backyard, which is where the tomatoes came from.

My camp group here is super small... only 5 kids for the two weeks.  They're 12-15, which is a fun age if they're well-behaved, and these kids are.  My challenge is to get them to be loud, much like my last group in Mussomeli.  I think they'll get a bit noisier every day, which is nice.  Four of them are about the same English level, but one of them is way beyond, and she's awesome.  We played a game today (one of my favorites with older groups) involving one person in the middle of a circle calling out to one person in the circle that goes like this:

Hey (name)!
Hey what?!
Hey (name)!
Hey what?!
Show me the way to get down!
No way!
Show me the way to get down!
Ok!
(While dancing) D-O-W-N That's the way to get down! (clap clap)
(Entire circle repeats the dance while singing ) D-O-W-N That's the way to get down! (clap clap)

And this one girl got reeeeeeally into it, sass and all, because she actually understood that one is meant to display attitude.  It was great.

And now I'm realizing, I don't think I've ever talked about camp songs on the blog?  My favorite one is about a penguin drinking tea, involving a whole range of body motions designed to make everyone look like penguins.  My specialty is called "The Jellyfish" and it goes something like this...

Arms up!
Wrists together!
And........ The Jellyfish! The Jellyfish! The Jellyfish!
(During the jellyfish part, you wiggle your fingers to look like a jellyfish - or medusa as they say here)

The song goes on so that at the end you've added a bunch of body parts to make it absolutely ridiculous.  Usually I'll have a few kids who run up to me around camp screaming "The Jellyfish! The Jellyfish!" and doing the hand gestures, or sometimes "The Jollyfish! The Jollyfish!"

But anyways.  There's a little taste of camp and language issues.  In case it went over a head or two, the title is because this was really a post about nothing, which is nice every now and then.