Hey everyone,
It's been quite some time since my last blog, I've been an extremely busy little bunny. I'm wrecked tired this evening and I've just spent an hour in a car with some decidedly unfriendly girls. A guy I work with offered me a lift which meant a one hour car ride instead of a 3 hour train ride... I'm very seriously considering learning to drive, maybe it's time. Anyway, I feel like I'm gonna crumble, this week has just been hectic beyond belief and I really need to get some sleep. I worked 2 camps this week, one is normally tiring enough! I did a camp from 9am - 1pm with a group of 18 and 19 year olds. It was so much fun! It's these jobs that remind me why I'm staying with this company, when they go well you leave work on the most incredible high. Of course, to bring me down again was the camp in the afternoon, in a place (situated in the arsehole of nowhere) called Bassano Romano, with little kids of 8 and 9. They had no interest whatsoever in learning English and I spent all my time yelling at them and prying them apart as they tried to kick the shit out of each other. I'm absolutely destroyed.
The camp with the guys in Civita was really good for me in that I really needed to do something with adult people and apart from that their English was very good which meant that we were able to do a lot more complicated stuff. I think they really enjoyed this week as well. Some of the guys had a detailed working knowledge of swearwords and expressions in English and we couldn't figure out how they'd learnt them. Then we found out that they're big fans of Blink 182 and they insisted on performing "I fucked your dog in the ass" complete with actions for us. For those of you unfamiliar with Blink 182, the song goes "I wanna fuck your dog in the ass, I wanna fuck you dog in the ass, I tried to fuck your mom in the ass, I tried to fuck your dad in the ass, but I found your dog, and his ass". They made good use of this knowledge later on when they had to compose a song for their group. We'd divided them into two teams, boys versus girls, the boys were "Italian Schools" and the girls were "American Schools" and the discussion was supposed to be comparing positive and negative aspects of the two school systems. We did get them to do the debate as it had been intended eventually but the initial focus was more a war of the sexes than anything else... still, they used English. The guys' song was pretty funny, they harmonised and everything, like a barbershop quartet, singing "American can suck our dicks, we always put it in your ass, and if you don't like it, we don't give a shit, Italy Italy Italy forever", the girls' was a little less foul-mouthed but a little worrying really "Italians only want to eat and drink, don't want get a job, we are strong and we will kill you, with our atomic bombs". We got them to produce brochures for a nightclub imagining that they were the events director of the club, what events would be on and when, how much you'd have to pay for entrance etc etc They had to make menus as well because you eat in Italian nightclubs. One group created a program for a strip/nightclub called Orgies where you can see a Full Monty show on mondays, eat off the waitresses on wednesdays, watch female mud-wrestling on tuesdays, and watch a demolition derby on fridays. Today they had to write and perform a short sketch and I have to say I was really really impressed. Anyway, it's been the best camp that I've done so far and it's nice to feel good about your job, so I thought I'd share some of the happy stuff with you.
Other than that I've been dedicating a large part of my time to translating a guide to the Museums in Viterbo. It's really difficult, partly because the structure of Italian is completely different from English which means that I have to turn every sentence inside out and back to front, but also because the language is very technical and I keep having to search for obscure words whch half the time aren't even in my dictionary. Another problem is the fact that it's not even written very well in Italian to begin with so I kind of have to find a better way of saying nearly every sentence.
Next friday my mum's coming to visit and we're gonna spend a couple of days in Rome. I'm really looking forward to a couple of days away from work and even if I've been living here for a year I haven't ever really taken the time to see Rome properly, it's always been a really rushed affair so it'll be nice to wander around without rushing.
I guess that's it for now. I can't think of anything else to add just now which is probably a good thing for all of you lot (my thousands of dedicated readers).
Take care of yourselves,
Lu xxx
