Our European Adventure

Hi guys!!!

Sorry I went AWOL for the summer, I've been teaching English Camps in Italy. And now that I'm here, I'm not sure exactly how to summarize the experience. I'll try to keep it brief:

My dear friend of 10 years, Ari, and I went to England for a few days before our week of orientation. While we were there we went to the British Museum and saw the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Greek statures. It was a good experience, but I'm not that into art objects and artifacts. My favorite by FAR was the National Gallery. There we explored the paintings of Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Degas, Rembrandt, Seurat, and many, many others. (Ari and I had an art history class together in college and she majored in it, so I couldn't possibly have had better company!)

Orientation in San Remo (about a half our from the French boarder) was a lot of fun, meeting and playing camp games and activities with English speakers from England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. It's amazing how we all speak the same language but how much we still have to translate what we are saying to each other. Slang, vocabulary, accents, and articulation all became huge topics of discussion. We learned that as US Americans, many of us turn our "t"s into "d"s...think about it: do you say "pretty" and "beautiful" or "pridy" and "beaudiful"? To give you an idea about vocab, in British English a "biscuit" is a "cookie" in American English, British "dummy" = American "pacifier", and British "pants" = American "underwear" (important difference, apparently). We learned songs and games and activities in a group of 150 college-aged kids. I know what you're thinking, and yes, it was awesome. :o)

After orientation, we spent one week each in Marcianise (Naples), Montecastello (Tuscany), and Pisa. We were then put on "hold" in Baiardo, which is a stone village in the mountains of San Remo where counselors are welcome to stay while waiting for more work to open up. (With hundreds of counselors in dozens of camps throughout Italy, everyone gets put in reserve sometime or another.) While staying in Baiardo, a group of us took trips out to see Monaco and Milan. Both very beautiful and incomprehensibly wealthy.

Next we were placed in a two-week camp near the Swiss boarder, and I absolutely fell in love with my family there. All of my homestays were incredible, but I think because I spent twice as long with this family and my "parents" were so young (31), I got very close to them. They also reminded me a lot of my family in upstate New York. I met all of their sisters, brothers, in-laws, parents' parents, and they own a restaurant right by the lake...it really felt like a little Trumansburg. Only you could see the Swiss Alps. :o) It was especially hard to say goodbye to them.

After that camp, Ari and I traveled to Milan, Venice, Florence, Cinque Terra, Nice (France), and then flew home from England. 22 hours after landing in SFO, I was back again to fly back to Honduras. There is soo much more I'd love to tell you about, like all the great conversations we had about faith and Jesus with coworkers and roommates in hostels, about how in Venice we wore Carnevale masks and ran through the streets at night pretending to be superheros, about the Uffizi and trying to go boho in Florence, about the INCREDIBLE pesto and seascapes in Cinque Terra, about hilarious Aussie roommates, about sleeping on row of metal chairs in Heathrow with armrests pressing in from all angles...but neither you nor I have the time for all that. And I still have to upload pictures.

So much for keeping in brief. Haha.

Thanks for reading! Ciao for now. :o)