One thing I love about working with kids is getting to revisit how exciting holidays are! Lately, holidays have just been another day on the calendar. I didn't even realize what day Christmas was (and yes, everyone's postcards are still sitting on my couch, waiting to be mailed). It wasn't until I started really becoming comfortable and getting into the rhythm of this job that I was able to start remembering how exciting holidays used to be, and started to explore how I can recreate that here!
I spent the WHOLE day today working on things to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day. Okay, except for a short break for some Minecraft (blame the seven year old, he's got me hooked!) The very first thing I did was make an origami box to hold the chocolate coin, gold marbles, and pirate treasure that I had picked up last week. I knew that was going to be the end result of my scavenger hunt... but how to get there?
Next, I traced these funky looking block letters to spell out the colours of the rainbow. I went the Roy G. Bp route to keep it simple.
On the backs of some of the letters, I wrote out words to make the question "Where can you always find a pot of gold?" when the words were put in the correct rainbow order. Once that was finished, I hid the letters all over the living room.
The housekeepers tend to look at me like I'm crazy whenever I'm running around the house setting things like this up (or dumping out the whole box of legos to dig through, or doing anything that involves paint, or playing any kind of game that requires gross motor skills), but I think they're getting used to it by now. Either that, or they don't want to put the energy into stringing together enough English, Turkish, and made-up sign language to ask me what I'm doing- which I'm grateful for, so I don't have to put the energy into coming up with my own combination of Turkish, English, and made-up sign language to be able to answer!
So I had a scavenger hunt, I had a question, and I had a pot of gold... now, how to connect them? Obviously, I needed a rainbow of some sort. I tossed around several ideas... making little rainbow cards saying "warmer" and "colder" that would send him in the right direction... coming up with some sort of string to follow around the house until it finally brought him to the treasure... each idea that came to mind sounded even more ridiculous than the last. I was just about to give up and just hand him the treasure when he finished spelling out the colours when I came up with my plan. I cut a sheet of paper in each colour of the rainbow into small strips and made each colour into it's own chain. I took the chains outside and his them in a corner of the yard, making a rainbow, and stuck the pot of gold underneath. Simple! The paper chains took absolutely ages, though, and tons of paper and staples... so I am totally open to suggestions on how to reuse them.
At the end of the rainbow, I also put a short book in which I wrote out the most common leprechaun legend. I got the text from this printable, and just wrote out each number on a different page. I had planned to illustrate it, but by this point I was running really low on time! Sadly, we didn't get a chance to read this today. I'm hoping to fit it in tomorrow, though! This was actually my third attempt at having a Saint Patrick's Day-related book. My first try was the Leprechaun Magic Treehouse book, which I bought for Kindle. Unfortunately, we have only read the very first Magic Treehouse book, and while we absolutely LOVED it, there are too many things we don't yet know about the characters in the series to be able to skip that far ahead. I had also gotten the Tomie Depaola book Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland from the WE public library (thank you, e-book lending!) but I didn't realize that it would be so history-based. I had been hoping for something more along the lines of Streganona!
I'm really quite proud of myself for my craft creation for today. I came up with it in approximately 30 seconds when I learned that Hakan would be home from school almost two hours earlier than normal, and I lost all my remaining prep time! (Okay, full disclosure: I parked him in front of a Youtube video while I finished up.) We each spent a few minutes covering a sheet of paper with clovers made from any green materials I had on hand- paper, glitter glue, pipe cleaners, and the usual assortment of crayons, pencils, markers, paint, and pens. We each kept track of how many four-leaf clovers there were on our sheet while we were drawing. When we had each finished creating our page of clovers, we traded, told each other how many four leaf clovers to look for, and started the hunt! It was simple, but a whole lot more fun than I had anticipated. I think I'm going to keep this activity on the back burner- it could be really easy to adapt to different themes!
That was the end of our Saint Patrick's Day themed activities. I had hopes to also watch the Disney Channel Original Movie Luck of the Irish, but sadly, we didn't quite get there. We spent the rest of our time today watching some Youtube videos, playing Minecraft, and much to my delight, playing marbles! When my host mom returned home from work, she even joined us in a game, and reminded me of some rules that I had forgotten since the last time I played umpteen years ago. I think next, I am going to be on the lookout for jacks!
It's the most wonderful time of the... biennium? The olympics are here again! Everyone in this house thinks I'm nuts, but I absolutely LOVE the Olympics. I mean, the summer games are my favourite. But the winter games are still wonderful!
The day of the opening ceremony, I was bouncing-off-the-walls-crazy. I waited far too long [read: until the night before] to start planning Olympics-related activities, so it wasn't NEARLY as awesome a day as I would have liked, but I still had a few good ideas ready to go!
We started off by making laurel wreaths to wear around. Or for me to wear around, because someone decided it wasn't "cool" and refused to wear his for the rest of the day. But me? NO SHAME.
I actually forgot that I was wearing it after only a few minutes, and was confused by the weird stares I was getting from other family members as they came home. But WHATEVER, IT'S THE OLYMPICS!
It wasn't until after lunch that I came up with a decent winter-olympics related game. Not having snow to work with outside is tough! I set up a makeshift "mini-curling" court, and we flicked 1 TL coins at a shot glass. I mean, a "toothpick holder." Yeah, that. I painted the tail of half of the coins with a stripe of pink nail polish so they could be easily told apart. Not my best/most inventive creation ever... but hey, it turned out to be rather fun, and we've played it a few times since then!
Another craft was, of course, making gold medals! I would have MUCH preferred to go the whole salt-dough-and-gold-paint route, but lacking any other resources, we just mixed a few different colours of playdough. I made the ribbons using an old friendship bracelet braiding technique, and we were good to go- except for the small fact that it takes playdough FOREVER to dry. One of our medals got a little messed up because someone (hint: not me) decided he wanted to wear it before it had finished drying, and the ribbon ripped right through! Playdough definitely isn't the most successful medium to work with, but it was fun to mix the colours together and see what happened. I think mine ended up being a mix of yellow, light brown, and bright orange; Hakan's was the same plus a blueish-greenish colour to give it that darker shade.
One of the reasons I was up super late was trying to come up with something to do during the boring parts of the opening ceremony. You know, the speeches, or when they spend too long focusing on one country that has, say, 230 athletes participating and takes forever to get into the stadium... those times. I ended up spending FOREVER tracing colouring pages from Activity Village, cursing myself the entire time for not thinking of it sooner so I could actually use a printer.
When it came time for the opening ceremony to start, I pulled up the BBC live stream on my computer, brought out the globes (one in Turkish, one in English), and gave Hakan the colouring pages- I thought we were good to go! I knew the performance was going to be outstanding as always, I had reviewed my geography skills to make sure I could ID all of the countries on the globe... I was ready to go!
And then Hakan got bored 2 letters into the alphabet part of the intro.
"What's this?"
"I don't know, it's in Russian. Just watch, it's a performance you see, not something you have to listen to."
"But what are they saying?"
"I don't know, it's in Russian. Why don't you go ask Leila to translate?"
"No. I'm bored."
"Just wait, there will be more interesting things coming up. There's going to be dancers and acrobats and cool music and all sorts of things going on."
"I'm just going to play on my iPad. You watch."
Then the parade of athletes started. Yay, something interactive AND educational! My favourite! This time, we got 5 or 6 countries in before the boredom started. It was difficult to try and translate the country names, especially since they're abbreviated on the globe. I would know I was looking in the right general area (except for the time that I COMPLETELY blanked on Armenia, then kicked myself 20 minutes later when I remembered that it borders Turkey), but couldn't figure out which name it was- "Is that one a city or a country? Wait, is that the full name or an abbreviation? I can't tell if that "c" has a cedilla on it, so I don't really know how to pronounce this in Turkish..." Needless to say, that got old pretty quickly, and he wasn't too keen on using the English globe. Around then, we were called down to dinner, so I didn't have to worry about it too much anymore.
When we returned from dinner, they were almost to the end of the parade. Maybe 6 or so countries remained. Of course, Hakan wasn't at all interested in watching, and despite my pleading with him to listen to the English-speaking announcers, colour the pages I made, and try to learn a bit of geography, he was back to the iPad. The actual performance started (shout-out to the bassoon player!), and he was still glued to the iPad screen. "Hakan... you're missing it..." "No, I'm playing a game. You watch." "Okay, but this looks really cool..." "No, I don't want to watch."
Ten minutes later, something cool happened in the arena, and I hear a very, very soft "woah" from behind me. Insert self-satisfied smirk here. Several minutes later- "Is that a TRAIN? That's so COOL! Woah, there are people INSIDE those wheels! HOW DO THEY DO THAT?"
MENTAL VICTORY DANCE.
Sadly, besides a few brief flashes like that, I never got his attention 100% focused on the astounding artistic display happening before us. To me, these performances are a fantastic way to learn a little bit about a different culture, of course, but even more basic than that, they're just cool to watch! I could be giving myself too much credit, but I recall finding this sort of thing so fascinating when I was his age. It really bummed me out that he wasn't willing to give it a chance. I had even made a mental list of questions to ask him about the performance- what his favourite part was, what he would make the performance if it were happening in Turkey, what role he would have wanted to play if he was one of the performers... but I couldn't have any sort of conversation about it since he just wouldn't watch. I'm still racking my brain - and Pinterest - trying to figure out what I could have done differently to get him more interested, but I've been coming up blank.
On another note, he is still 100% convinced that the Olympics are an American event. Despite me showing him all those countries on a map, showing him where Sochi is in relation to Istanbul (quite close, actually!), watching a British broadcast of the opening ceremony, and watching some of the sports on Turkish television (which he also got bored of quite quickly, unfortunately). So I don't know what that's about, and I can't think of another way to explain it!
Guys! I made up my own game, completely from scratch! No Pinterest, no Googling "how on earth am I going to entertain a seven year old for another 5 days without being able to go outside (though that happened as well)," no begging others for ideas- 100% me just standing in the middle of my room, looking through drawers, and grabbing/putting away random supplies until I had come up with a decent game and concrete rules. WINNER.
The Lego Game (That's Still in Need of a Name)!
2 or more players
Supplies:
-Crapload of legos. Yes, that's a technical measurement, where did you go to school?
-Dice
-Some way of coming up with a "random" number
1. My method for coming up with a random number was the M*A*S*H spiral trick. One person draws a spiral on a sheet of paper, and the other says when to stop drawing. When you stop, draw a straight line from the beginning to the end of the spiral. The number of times the lines intersect is your "random" number. (Random is in quotes because I'm pretty sure my old stats teacher would just die on the spot if she saw me using the word "random" in that context.) Regardless of your method, that should be step one!
2. Player 1 rolls the dice, and collects that number of legos from the pile. Each player does the same. Repeat this process to equal the "random" number you chose- we had one game where we each rolled twelve times, and another where we each rolled twice.
3. Make something out of your legos!
Some tips:
--> It's a good idea to have a general idea of what you want to build before you start digging through the pile, of course.
--> ...but make sure it's a pretty flexible idea. My first attempt was "tree." That way, I could just make a small brown base, and then start grabbing as many green as I could. So if I ended up rolling a 1 every single turn, I'd still have a passable end product!
--> Decide beforehand what you are going to count as "one" lego. I followed the rules very strictly myself, but let Hakan get away with a lot- he found a previously-built airplane in the pile and wanted to use it.
Those two photos are from our first attempt. The next round, we had only two turns each!
a zombie...
...and a ghost! Apparently we had an unspoken theme going on!
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard "what can we do now?" this past week, I'd be able to retire tomorrow.
Okay, maybe that's a SLIGHT exaggeration. But winter break is hard, guys! Not being able to go outside makes finding things to do SO much harder than it would be in the summer. I've spent more time on Pinterest this week than any other website, just searching for ideas of games, activities, and art projects. My task is made harder by two phrases: "that's for babies" and "that's for girls." Yes, this English learning activity is designed for toddlers, but I've changed it up, and you need the language reinforcement at this level. No, Cat's Cradle is fun and good for fine motor skills. Yes, this word game app on my iPad is designed with light colours and big bubble letters, but I promise, it's just a word game. It's not for babies- anyone younger than 6 or 7 probably COULDN'T play it.
So here's what we HAVE been up to, at least for the first half of break. I decided this would be easier than trying to stretch out each individual craft or game into their own posts- maybe for some of the more complex ones I'll do better posts down the road. We'll see!
First, the "screen-time" activities:
- Minecraft. Minecraft, minecraft, minecraft. All day long, minecraft. However, I've started to be better about drawing the line- we can play minecraft for a short amount of time, IF we're going to use it to actually be creative. Let's do a "quick-build" challenge. Let's play Hunger Games. Let's go into a survival world for once so we actually have to gather our own resources. Lets build an airplane, or a boat. Let's NOT just run around lighting trees on fire and putting TNT everywhere.
-Playstation. This has actually gotten better with the purchase of a new Mickey Mouse game. FAR more appropriate for a 7 year old than GTA5. I had heard GTA was bad... I never imagined it was THAT bad. It got to the point that I wouldn't even stay in the room while he was playing it. I hated the nonchalant violence and dear lord, the LANGUAGE! No wonder there was such a huge movement against this game. But last week, he bought Epic Mickey: The Power of Two and we have been playing that quite a bit. It's hard to keep him focused on completing the set quests instead of running around beating up the townspeople- he IS used to GTA, after all- but if we keep it under 45 minutes or so of game time, the attention span stays on what it's supposed to.
-Youtube. And what do we do on Youtube? Watch minecraft play along videos, of course! We actually have a pretty good channel for that, though. Stampylonghead and iBallisticSquid are two friends from the UK who make videos both separately and together. They're really funny and entertaining, they stopped using any inappropriate language once they got a large following of young kids watching their channels, and what they build is relatively easy! We get a lot of inspiration for things to try to build in our own world from the two of them. Sometimes, they even make up stories with actual plot lines, like they were making a movie instead of just talking while playing minecraft. Right now, Stampy's pet cat was kidnapped by his arch enemy who wants to take over his world! Every once in a while, I find myself watching one of their videos on my own, before I even realize what I'm doing.
-Movies. Though the fight between watching in English and in Turkish is always a struggle. We've watched The Jungle Book, Toy Story 3, and part of The Emperor's New Groove so far this break. (sidenote- I've never seen Toy Story 3 before. RIGHT IN THE CHILDHOOD.) Toy Story was the only one in Turkish (we put on English subtitles for me) because there was someone else visiting and watching with us. The other two were in English, since we were watching on my computer (streaming sites are my favourite!) The Jungle Book was actually better-liked than I expected it to be, but he just wasn't into the Emperor's New Groove at ALL. Once I really started paying attention, though, I realized that they talk VERY quickly- so he was missing most of the jokes.
But even with the changes, those are still the activities I am trying to avoid as much as possible. So I try to dig back in my mind and come up with ANYTHING without a screen that will keep him occupied for another couple of minutes!
-Card Games. Speed, War, Slap Jack, Rat Slap (too complicated!), Go Fish, Old Maid, UNO. We are lacking a real deck of cards, so we're using UNO cards for everything. I just have to keep sorting them out so we have the right number of everything. The black cards serve pretty well as generic face cards for something like Slap Jack! I actually think the UNO cards make it easier sometimes- for a game like speed, you can just focus on the numbers 0-9 instead of worrying about what order J, Q, K, and A come in. I've also taught him Tiddlywinks, but I think Turkish coins are a lot heavier- it didn't work nearly as well as I remember.
-Movement Games. Mother May I and Red Light, Green Light were BIG hits! I also created a game based off something I found on Pinterest where I made 2 dice- one with an animal, and the other with an emotion. They had to try and dance like a "bored spider," or a "crazy giraffe," or a "sad crocodile," and then I just set the rest of the rules up like a freeze dance game. Really good for thinking about emotional expression! Twister is also a popular choice.
-I modified his Jenga game to make it a little more fun/interesting by writing on each block- silly things to do, like spelling your name backwards, doing 5 jumping jacks, or taking your next turn with your wrong hand. Pull a block, complete the task, then replace it!
-Obstacle Courses. Just about every day, we tear apart the downstairs and create a new obstacle course. We sacrificed a ball of my yarn to make cobwebs to climb through, we mark out hopscotch on the floor, we roll up carpets to make balance beams, jump across or over pillows and rugs, turn one side of a Rubik's cube, stack 3 small rocks in a pile, move stuffed animals from one spot to another... it all changes every time! It usually takes us about 3 minutes to complete an entire course. The cobwebs are so hard for me- I try to set them up so it's hard for a skinny 7 year old, which makes it near impossible for me to get through without touching anything!
-Colour matching/Bingo/Scavenger hunt game. I combined 3 or 4 ideas when I came up with this one. I guess it didn't have to be Bingo- I just had some blank bingo cards laying around from something I had planned on doing a while ago that we never got to. I outlined each square in a different colour marker, pen, or crayon, then hid all of those colours around the living room. The first person to find all the EXACT matching colours- no markers filling in where crayon was outlined!- won. It wasn't perfect- a bingo chart had way too many squares, and we had an issue with one kid playing being a lot more meticulous about matching the colours exactly where the other just filled in the closest one she could find, so it wasn't really an even race. But it was a good first try, and a definite foundation to create a better version from sometime in the future!
-We've actually spent a lot of time playing piano recently. Usually, the piano is avoided unless it's during his lesson, but recently I've been playing while we are brainstorming ideas of what to do, and after a few minutes I'm usually being pushed over to make room. Once, we manipulated his favourite exercise from his lesson, playing it in different octaves, faster, slower, crossing our hands over, switching the parts each hand was playing, playing it together or assigning different parts to play together- it's only a little 8 measure piece, but we did so many things with it! When his cousin was visiting, we spent even more time playing- she's a HUGE Adele fan, so I sight read Rolling in the Deep... if I had the piano skills I do now just from goofing around all the time a few years ago, I may have made it in the Music Therapy program! I'm getting so much better at creating accompaniments and just seeing chords and going for it!
-Crafts. I have a bag of random things that could possible be turned into craft supplies in my room, and I've been trying to put it to good use so it doesn't build up too badly like my craft supply collection at home! We made adorable little penguins out of toilet paper rolls the other day, and we made stand up cardboard t-rexes a while back. I sketched out a few minecraft-themed pictures for painting and colouring- and I made sure when I bought paints that I just did basic colours so we could practice mixing. Look at me, saving money AND encouraging artistic skills!
I'm sure there are a few more things that I'm missing, but this is getting pretty long so I'll stop here. Maybe at the end of next week I'll have a whole bunch of new things to write about- there is a whole week left of winter break, after all! Wish me luck!
One of my favourite things to do in Cremona was eat lunch next to Stradivari's tomb.
Is that creepy? It seems a little creepy now that I've actually written it.
It struck me as odd on my first day walking around the city center that so many people walk right by the tombstone without so much as a glance in its direction. This is the grave of one of the most influential people in the history of music, and I have never seen more than ONE other person stop to even look at it...
But then I look around the rest of the park. People walked right by the grave because it was familiar- nothing new to look at or experience. They found joy in the things that weren't there all the time. Some school children's artwork is tied to the gazebo. There are a few high school and college age kids clustered around benches, sometimes with a guitar or two in their company. Sure, there are the people just passing through the park on their way to work or a meeting, but they're looking up. Admiring the trees, or the way the falling leaves are blowing in the wind. Stopping to watch the young children running around, and taking a moment to laugh before continuing on their way. There's always the group of septuagenarian men playing dominoes on a bench next to the gazebo- every day, without fail. When it was raining, they just moved under the shelter of the gazebo. The group size was always different, but it was always there. One day I even saw a single gentleman there, with the dominoes laid out in front of him, reading the newspaper to pass the time until another showed up. I was very tempted to go over and ask him to teach me to play, but at the time I had absolutely no confidence in my spoken Italian, so I chickened out. Sitting next to the grave gave me the perfect vantage point to see all of these things occurring before me, and until the day I left, I could not help but think "this is all so... Italian!"
Plus, there's a gelato place right across the street, so... that's a nice bonus.
What did I learn in Italy? Looking back, it was a lot more than I had originally anticipated, or even understood at the time.
One of my first days, someone told me, "when you leave here, you will take with you the culture of wine." I didn't know what that meant at the time, so I took it at face value- I never liked wine before, so Italy is a good place to start, right?
Now, when I reflect on my months in Cremona, I think I understand what he was saying.
This "culture of wine" isn't about the drink. In fact, I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with the wine itself, though that certainly is a welcome bonus.
The culture of wine is time.
Taking the time during a meal to be with the people around you. No phones, no instagramming your plate (which is why I don't have an Italian food post for you), and all the friends you can find. Meals are meant to be enjoyed- food is delicious!
Taking the time while out of the house to notice the people around you- stopping to say hi to a friend and catch up on each others' lives instead of nodding at them from across the street and continuing on your way. Riding a bike or walking instead of driving, to be able to take in more of your surroundings.
Speed is stressful. Yes, sometimes it is necessary. But what have I missed in my life because I was so focused on efficiency and productivity? Have I missed a beautiful sunset, or the changing of leaves? Could I have seen a wonderful street musician perform when instead I ran by because of my desperation to accomplish an impossible amount in a short time? What time could I have spent among friends when I instead gave myself anxiety attacks by taking on more than I could handle?
I want to live my life in a way that I can appreciate the small happinesses around me. I want to recognize happiness in a strangers' eyes. I want to see people stare in wonder at something they have never seen before. I want to play dominoes in the park in the middle of the town (I should probably learn to play dominoes first, though...) I want to spend a whole day watching ducks swim around a pond, and I want to see children's eyes light up when the ducks eat the bread they are throwing.
I even want to see heartbreak and sadness. Just being able to recognize it on someone's face, even if there is nothing I can do about it. I want to be able to send positive energy their way, even for a moment.
Right before I left Italy, my host family asked why I hadn't taken more time to travel and go to Brescia, or Venice, or Florence, or other places that would have been only a train ride away. What I told them was the truth- I wanted to originally, but when I realized that I wasn't ready to go back to the US yet I started budgeting my money to last a long time, and I hoped that I would be lucky enough for my travels to bring me to these places in the future. That was the truth, but it isn't the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I feel as though I travelled thousands of miles without even leaving Cremona. Every day, I strove to learn something new. Sometimes it was a new Italian word, sometimes it was a new knitting stitch, sometimes it was a new face, sometimes it was a realization about myself and my life experiences. I didn't need to go back to Florence, even though I've been waiting my whole life to spend time in that town. I didn't need the tourist experience. I was able to find everything I needed with my host family, with their - and now my - friends, and within myself.
I am a completely different person coming out of my experience in Italy. And I have already changed from my short time in Turkey. I will continue to change.
And for the first time in my life, I'm not afraid.
Here are some thoughts and stories from my first week or so. Warning: I make NO promises on them being in a sensical order, or more than just fragments of thoughts.
The first few days were REALLY rough on my sleep cycle. I only moved over one time zone, but that small change, on top of the fact that I hadn't been sleeping due to nerves and excitement, plus getting sick on my second night, I was completely messed up. One day, I'd wake as late as 10, the next, 5 in the morning. I was taking naps at random points during the day. It was just completely screwed up! Luckily, I managed to get that under control after... maybe about three days.. and now I'm back to a pretty good cycle of being in bed reading by about 10, and generally waking up between 7:30 and 8. Without an alarm, which makes me REALLY happy. Well, that's a lie- the night I stayed up WAY too late finishing a book, I set an alarm so it wouldn't screw up my pattern again. That was a long, tired day on four hours of sleep!
This time has been all about getting used to the family's schedule and lifestyle, and seeing where I will fit into everything.
I spend a lot of time with the 7 year old son, Hakan. We've spent HOURS building lego sets! We have a pretty good system going, where as he's working on putting together one step, I'll be finding the pieces for the next. He really likes Star Wars legos, which I saw as a really good sign, until I realized that he didn't know anything about the movies. He said they were too confusing, and couldn't even tell me which trilogy he watched first! This kid was trying to convince me the Ewoks were the bad guys. I mean really. I suppose for someone who doesn't know the movies, his logic was decent, though- he remembered the clones being with the Jedi in II and III, and therefore thought the stormtroopers were the good guys, at least in that set of Legos.
He and I are also supposed to work together on his English homework, of course. He gets one worksheet every weekend, and is supposed to read every night. He brings a picture book home from school with him. The one he is working on now is really difficult, and we can only read three or four pages at a time. And he HATES doing it. So I am hard at work brainstorming some external motivators and other ideas to not make reading such a chore for him, as well as activities that help with reading comprehension.
Ipek, the daughter who lives at home right now, is 16 and while we get along really well, the difference in our age shows when we talk about high school. My high school experience centered around marching band, decathlon, and not much else. An Island birthday party here and there. But I have heard stories that would rival 110 gossip, and I cannot get over the fact that this is happening while these girls are in high school! When they asked what the drama in my life was right now, they couldn't believe I didn't have any. After a few minutes of "really? NOTHING?" I begrudgingly reached back a few years and covered the VERY basics of drama from freshman, sophomore, and junior year in a total of 5 or 6 sentences.
Another time the age different showed was when we were picking out a movie to watch. Everyone knows I haven't seen many movies, but she and her friend picked up "Project X" as an option and could not BELIEVE I had never seen it- "Have you EVER been a teenager?" First of all, no, not really. Not in the way that movie seems to think teenagers behave. Second of all, I was probably 22 when that movie came out...
On Friday, the kids were off school, so I went with Hakan and 2 people who work for the family to one of the palaces in the city. It was beautiful, of course, though I was outvoted in the language of the (compulsory) tour so I had no idea what anything was. Hakan was supposed to be translating for me, but that didn't last very long.
So now, I'll really be trying to dive in and fit myself into how everything works around here. It's a big adjustment for everyone, since they've never had an au pair before, and it will take some time until everything is running smoothly, but I am very confident that this is a wonderful place and family for me to be with right now!
My adventure for the day included a car, a train, another train, a bus, an airplane, and a van.
A car: Gianluca dropped me off at the train station, for which I was VERY grateful considering how much my suitcase weighed (26 kg... ugh). It was so hard to say goodbye, but I'm glad it was only him and the kids were already at school!
A train: There aren't trains directly to Bergamo, where the airport was, so I had to go first to Treviglio. I was SO worried about making the connection- trains in Italy aren't the most trustworthy timing-wise. I ended up in a backwards seat, which I wasn't terribly pleased about, but I had myself so boxed in with my suitcase and carry-on that it would have been a HUGE production to get everything moved around. Luckily, everything went on time, and I arrived in Treviglio with no issues.
Another train: Then, I just had to drag my bags across about 9 platforms (down stairs and back up) to get the the next train. In a span of about ten minutes. But I made it, and I was off to Bergamo! I was really worried about the stops- on every subway I've been on, there's a screen saying what stop is next, but not on the train- you just have to hope you see the platform name out the window, which didn't always happen. So I was a little worried! But again, I made it to the right place with no problems. The pages in my journal from that part of the trip are filled with the words "STOP WORRYING" every sentence or two. I was pretty nervous.
A bus: As soon as I got off the train in Bergamo, I had to find the bus to the airport. Of course, my italian skills chose that moment to completely fail me, so I could barely get out the sentence asking where to buy a ticket. And I'm pretty sure I used terrible grammar and an American accent. Thank goodness the woman behind the counter spoke English- and that was the right place. After asking her where to catch the bus, I was on my way.
A bus: Well, I was sort of on my way. She told me to catch the bus at McDonalds, but there was CLEARLY a large group of people waiting with suitcases a couple of buildings over. So that's where I headed, and asked there if it was the right place. It was. Soon, someone else came up to me and asked (in Italian) the same question, and where to buy a ticket. I pulled my brain together and was able to answer her, thank goodness. When the bus came we ended up sitting near each other and talked briefly (mostly about how terrible/insane the driver was) in a mixture of Italian and English.
An airplane: I actually ended up getting to the airport about 3 hours before my flight, just because of when the trains were running. Better early than late! Check in was fine, though it took me far too long to figure out why all the check-in and security people automatically spoke English to me (I gave them my US Passport, duh). I was shocked again by the way airport security looks when the US isn't involved in some way. The Bergamo airport wasn't the MOST efficient/nice/clean security I've ever been through (that was definitely Dublin!) but still LOADS better than anything at home. I didn't even realize that I hadn't needed to remove my shoes until I was already through and saw that no one else was hopping around on one foot trying to put them back on. And I didn't have my liquids in a baggie- even though there were only 2 things, that NEVER would have been okay in the US. From security, I grabbed McDonalds before going through passport control to the international gates. I had the strange experience of someone speaking English to me and me not catching it- it was loud and I just wasn't paying attention. But for some reason, "Come, scusa?" came out of my mouth instead of "Sorry, what?" and when they repeated it in Italian, I understood. They probably thought I was a crazy person.
I have to say, budget airlines are AWESOME. There are so many terrible reviews online, about long lines and baggage fees and leg room, and I just read them and think "but... you KNEW you were flying on a budget airline. I feel like this gives you ZERO room to complain." I can completely understand why band people stuck on RyanAir or EasyJet were thrown off- you weren't told what the situation was. But I was determined to go in as a passive observer, and that made everything SO entertaining. Like the fact that as soon as the gate workers came, every single person waiting BOLTED for the line. And they didn't even make a straight line! It was just a giant mob! And their safety video was adorable. It was in Turkish, so I had to read the subtitles, but it was all little kids giving the safety instructions and showing the examples. Adorable. I was kind of sad that I couldn't even get water without having to pay, but whatever, it was only a 2 and a half hour flight. And I had a window seat! But it was really cloudy, so there wasn't much to see. We flew over Italy, a sea, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegonia, Serbia, and Bulgaria before making our way to Istanbul. Yes, I had to look that up later after drawing the map that was on the screen in my journal.
And a van: When we landed, I had to buy a visa to get into the country, and then go through passport control. After I got through there and collected my suitcase, I found the driver who was meant to take me to my host family's house. He had a sign with my name and everything! I felt super special. He didn't speak any English, so we had a pretty quiet hour+ ride across Istanbul. It was dark, but there was still a lot to see! The traffic was CRAZY - apparently lanes are meaningless here - and at the slowest points (it was rush hour, so the traffic was REALLY bad on the Asian side) there were people walking between the lanes selling things. Roses and what I'm guessing was some kind of food. And I think I may have seen someone with water bottles at one point. But they were just walking on the freeway, between the lines of cars!
When I arrived at the house, I got a tour, had some time to chill, and then ate dinner with most of my host family. We spent a long time talking, but I was so tired, I went back to my room to get myself organized pretty soon.
So that was my travel day!
It seems I'm not terribly fantastic at keeping this updated. My bad. My goal right now is to update once a week- probably on Saturday or Sunday. Whether it's an old story from Italy that I never finished editing, a craft project or other activity, or a new story from Istanbul, I hope to keep this more active in the coming weeks and months!
