The Dream Diary of Italy

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I have officially been in Cremona, Italy for 1 month. Although hard to adapt to this way of life and with the homesickness, I believe i am finally getting used to it!! I have decided to write a more regular blog, thanks to inspiration from an email from my mother. It will be like a diary. Starting from today!! Right now!! This very second!!

Tuesday 4th December.

The lifestyle in small town Cremona, Italy is very different to that of Johannesburg, South Africa. There are only apartments in this town. Every wednesday and saturday they have a market in the main square where you can get things at slighty cheaper prices. They have stalls offering fresh fruit and vegetables daily, the shopes are closed on on a monday morning till 12:30. Shops are open from 9am untill 8pm but they close for lunch from12:30 untill 3:00. When I say shops i do not mean like fourways mall or northgate shopping centre, these shops line the roads and usually are on the ground floor of apartment buildings. so you walk along the street and pass shops all the time.

Tomorrow is my last Italian language course, If you had to ask me whether or not it has helped i could not tell you as they teach in italian so most of the time i have no idea what is going on. So i sit with my google translate on my phone and translate all the worksheets the teacher hands out, which helps me with my vocabulary. The classes are for adults who have been in Italy for a while already and want to apply for citizenship. They have to take this test on Italian as a language and culture to see if they qualify as a citizen. So I am kind of spare in the class.

The life with the host family i am staying with is good. I mostly only see them in the afternoons where i go fetch their kids and bring them home (all walking). They eat dinner alot later than i am used, around 8pm every evening. They eat pasta at least once a day. The kids are very fond of having a piadina (which is like a kind of flat bread used for wraps) with nutella as a snack and I have caught onto this craze of nutella. Never before in my life have i eaten so much chocolate in one day!! Chocolate croissants, paidina with nutella, nutella on biscuits, on bread etc. As a result i have decided to take up running in the mornings to keep of (or attempt) to keep of the extra kg's (I am not sure how long this idea will last). I also thaught it woould be a nice way of going to "sight-see" while doing something worthwhile.

The Italian homes do not have kettles so they boil water in small pots on the stove which i find really annoying as it takes a really long time! They also do not have toasters. The host mother uses a snackwhich machine (machine to make toasted sandwichs) in order to make the bread toasted and this is what she knows as a toaster. I have to find anorther way as i do not have a snackwich machine, so I have to put the oven on to grill and then put my bread in the oven which is just a pain so i don't eat toast.

As that is all the news i can think of for today, i will say keep posted so that you can hear what the life is like in small town Cremona!

Ciao

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Comments

[Lee]

The dream of Italy - Sweet or not?
Sweet as chocolate - I think that many times we think as tourists, that to live in another country is as we see in movies or in travel brochures. But it's great to see how the 'other side' actually live, and how our daily life compares to theirs. What we think is normal they might think think is weird. I love it. Keep the info coming