The past two days have been absolutely incredible!
Yesterday I had school in the morning which ended an hour earlier than it usually does on weekdays – hurrah! From what I’ve gathered, it seems as though school in Italy is just generally a lot harder. While the aggregate amount of ‘school’ hours are the same (35 hours per week), the day runs continuously for 6 hours from 8:20am with only a 10 minute break in the middle. Haha surprisingly enough, I never thought I would say this but I do miss roll call, house time and even assembly!
In addition to that, the subjects you study solely depend on which liceo you attend. While you initially choose where you’d like to go, once the decision is made you can’t change schools or even classes. So even in such a linguistically dominated school, whether or not you enjoy chemistry for example, is completely irrelevant.
And then there’s the whole thing about marks (ranging from 1-10) and how they’re publicly available for everyone else to see…
So yesterday the first two hours of class were spent in an intense Latin exam, so that gave me a bit of downtime to do my own thing. Afterwards we went into the science labs to do an oxidation experiment which was pretty exciting, but just looking at the periodic table with all the elements in Italian was probably the highlight for me. Alright that sounded SO nerdy, but believe me it was actually true! Higher chemistry represent!
Philosophy to finish off the day was so confusing. I don’t think I understood anything the teacher was talking about at all, besides the names Socrates and Protagoras every now and then. But I was told afterwards that no one else seemed to understand any of it either, so it made me feel a little bit better.
In the evening, I went out with a group of about 12 of Valerio’s friends to the town centre of Genzano, another one of the neighbouring towns on the Alban Hills. It was really fun, we had dinner in a lovely restaurant aptly named ‘La Dolce Vita’ to celebrate one of his friend’s birthdays. I’m loving all of the people I meet each day, everyone’s so nice!
Just before we went home, it was so interesting that even at 12am there were still about 100 people outside crowded around two TVs watching the soccer. Just a slight taste of culture, but it’s things like this that remind me that I’m actually in Italy!
This morning, I slept in and woke up at 10am given it’s the only day off from school. Afterwards I was able to explore the local fruit shop, which are actually quite similar, yet different to the ones in Australia. Perhaps the thing I found most interesting was the fact that each type of fruit is numbered, and after you choose how much you want, you go to the scales and print out a sticker to label it (like the ones at the back of supermarkets) so when it comes to the check-out, all they have to do is scan the barcode.
The afternoon’s been pretty chillaxed, I was able to skype my whole family which was really enjoyable followed by re-listening to a Barneys sermon on Ezekiel from earlier this year, God is glorious!
xxxxxxx
Serena
[Back of the school from the classroom window]
[Local fruit shop adventures]
italia - la dolce vita 