hannah-in-italy

[hannah-in-italy]

Was it hard to break into social circles in your school? Do you mostly hang out with other rotary kids?

I HAVE NO IDEA WHEN i got this message, since i've been distracted by uni lately. but i'll answer this anyhow.

for the first two months, i mostly hung out with my host brother and his friends or the other exchange students. i had difficulty connecting with my classmates and so after two months, i switched classes from section E to A (still fourth years) and in my new class, i made friends who legit changed my entire exchange. rotary exchangers are expected to go to school regularly, so it's very important to have friends at school. it's not necessary??? but it makes it so much better to.

without my new classmates of 4A, i really would've flown home in november. i was in a very bad place mentally and the first class made my anxiety go from tolerable to actually physically affecting me. so ... yeah. sorry, i don't know where this is going??? but yeah, it was hard to break into social circles for me. i'm very introverted and in italy, the classes stick together for all five years. these classmates have known each other for years already and then here comes this stranger, so it can be tough.

luckily, once i switched classes, i made some of the best friends i've ever had. my fellow exchangers are lovely, but having my classmates as my friends got me far more into the culture, taught me sicilian slang, made it easier to go to school each day, etc etc. honestly, it was about 50/50 for hanging out with rotary kids/native italians.

[hannah-in-italy]

Tues 1 April 2014. en route to Israele.

it hadn't hit me yet that I was going to Israele. school the day before passed in a daze and even the annoyed face of my prof couldn't faze me ("how long is she going to be missing school?") I tossed and turned and flipped and flopped all night until I finally konked out and awoke again mid-morning at which time my host father Ernesto and I drove to the airport, my leg bouncing with barely contained energy. so you have to know my host father has connections; (this was a thing I kept forgetting and remembering all over again) now, this isn't creepy mafia connections, it's just that my host father was a well-established businessman and Rotarian so he knew a lot of people. as it turned out, he knew a bunch of people of the airservice Alitalia and I checked in the priority line instead of waiting for nine hours in the regular line. I smiled goodbye, said a hearty thanks, and weaved my way through security. (one step closer.)

I slept on the flight to Rome FCO. nabbed a panino because I was hungry as nuts, twiddle daddled about until my flight from Rome to Amsterdam, then slept again. (sleeping is a running theme in all my journeying, just wait til EuroTour.) I was probably way too excited to get my passport stamped in Amsterdam, but I'd only gotten a single stamp in Rome, so why not be a bit peppy. plus, I realized, oh fuck, I was completely alone in this airport. I was only alone in JFK back in September for a half hour until I met Elizabeth, but this was Amsterdam. AMSTERDAM. ALRIGHT. AMSTERDAM. those Dutch with their civil engineering. so I twiddle fiddled about some more. bought two little red clog keychains as a joke for my mom, stared at the sheer amount of tulips in this airport, took a photo or nine, and then sat with this orange smoothie and waited for my gate to open.

now, since I was traveling to the Middle East, Israele in specific, the security measures to get there were intense, and this is coming from an American and all we do in airports is shove security measures at travelers. I hauled my butt over to the gate when it opened up and waited in line for my turn to get - you guessed it - interrogated and processed in.

when I was accepted to go to this peace conference, I was sent certain documents which I was told to hold onto at all times when traveling because otherwise I would not likely be able to enter the country. these documents were in English and Hebrew and came into play when I was being interrogated in Amsterdam and then passing through border patrol in Tel-Aviv. when passing the gate to go to my flight's boarding zone, each passenger was stopped by a border patrol officer (I think??) and asked a series of questions involving our reason for going to Israele, if we were traveling alone, (I don't remember the rest) ... it was no third degree, but it was intimidating I suppose. the papers mentioned before explained the conference I would be attending and noted my passport info, etc, basically making my visit legit and legal and etc. I finally passed through into the boarding zone and had to wait about an hour and a half til actually boarding, so I pulled out my lovely little laptop and bided my time. 

my seat was - as is my luck - at the very back of the plane, which I would've bitched about except for the fact that I was too focused on holy crap, I'm landing in Israele in a few hours. the flight was KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and dang, they gave us comfy little pillows, nice cozy blankets, and wonderful service. anywho. this boy sat down next to me, I guessed a university student, and then BAM, dude starts speaking English. even better, he speaks Texan. he asks me if I'm from Texas and says he saw my laptop while we were waiting to board and I have one of those nifty lil "Don't Mess With Texas" sticker that's so famous of our state. it just so freakin happens that this guy is from Houston and - boom - is going to the Rotary conference as well. how nutty, I thought. we chit-chatted for a long while and got to know each other before eventually dozing off. 

we landed at about 2AM Israeli time and Roshan and I hiked our way from landing to baggage claim. the Ben Gurion airport was, at 2AM, very deserted but very neat to walk through. it had quite a few murals that caught my eye on our walk through. we had to be processed by immigration/border patrol. funny thing, they didn't stamp our passports like most countries do? they scanned our passports and gave us these little entry cards that were valid for however long we said our stay was, but no stamps. Roshan was worried about this because he was going to visit a friend in Jordan after the conference and didn't want any trouble getting into the country just because he had been in Israele. I figure it has something to do with whether or not the international community recognized Israele as a nation, with the current conflicts about borders and etc. anywho. baggage claim itself was an affair. I found my neon orange suitcase quite easily, but then my Houston friend had some difficulty locating his luggage. we eventually found it, and at about 3AM, we finally met our hosts.

although the conference itself started April 4th, there was a "pre-conference hospitality program" in which we would stay with an Israeli Rotary family and experience the culture first hand. as an exchange student, I totally jumped on this opportunity and was super eager for it. I had some reservations only because I don't know a lick of Hebrew, much like I didn't know a lick of Italian when I arrived back in September. however, my host for the pre-program was very welcoming and speaks English incredibly well. it turns out Israelis speak English very well as a very rule, because they have to deal with international politics so much. I mentally slapped myself for assuming such before I even bothered to get to the country and the conference.

Mosh (my Israeli host) drove me to his house just a handful of minutes away from the airport and showed me around, told me we would be picking another student up from the airport tomorrow afternoon, and then wished me a good night. I sat on the host sister's bed and stared at my luggage for a good long time before I managed to throw my pyjamas on and crawl under the covers and crashing for the night. 

[hannah-in-italy]

a note on israele:

it's taken me a really, ridiculously long time to write out my experience in israele. it took me months to even journal about it, much less put something on the internet. israele was a very ... intense experience. it was one of two very life-defining moments for me (and my nineteen year old self), so i didn't want to put something online for the world to read that was ... wrong in some way, that didn't explain the conference or my time there right. the next few posts about israele are going to be very personal, one of them stemming from a project i did at rebound camp in august where i talked about the actual point where i felt my life change. so ... yeah. bear with me, this is going to get incredibly personal for a public blog.

[hannah-in-italy]

22 Mar 2014; Ragusa.

The weekend of March 22, we all traveled to the city of Ragusa to celebrate the festival of Saint Joseph, aka festival of fathers which is huge in this town. We went around the hill-filled town, going up and down and around and over and under looking at this church and that church and then this church and then that church. (Italians like their churches, even if they rarely go. They're pretty.) A note: a few years ago in marching band, I did something weird that I honestly don't even remember, and anyways, thus began my knee problems. The night before this trip to Ragusa, a few of us Catania girls went to a discoteca and danced a bunch. SO ... Normally, the pain is just a dull ache but just imagine having a kinda crappy knee in combination with basically walking all over San Francisco (Ragusa's hills = San Francisco's hills.) Needless to say, we went home for lunch, sat down for an hour to have a lovely lunch, and when I stood up again, I honest to god fell over. I tried to get up again twice, thinking maybe my knee popped weird or something, but everytime I tried to move, my knee would scream in disagreement. This led to that and I wound up sitting in the kitchen table crying while Monica's (my friend from Ohio who lives in Ragusa) host father examined my knee (conveniently, Monica's host dad is an orthopedist.) Just to my luck, it turns out that I had likely torn the meniscus in my right knee. Oh joy. He concluded that since I could put some weight on it and limp gimp around (while only crying a little), that is wasn't a terrible tear, just kinda terrible or a teeny bit terrible. I left Ragusa on the next bus, having decided that it would be useless to just sit around while the other girls explore the city, and returned home to Catania and my host fam with some prescription anti-inflammatory drugs and doctor's orders not to do anything for a few days.

(Well, I did nothing for a day, but then I hauled my limp gimp self to school to take class photos that Monday. Boy, do I regret that; it only served to make my knee hurt worse and also made all my clasmates worry about me and my limp gimp self. The two following days though, I was laid up in bed chilling with a brand new box of candy sent from my good friend Emily in Texas and the Italian version of Lord of the Rings. Thankfully, the magic hoodoo voodoo medicine the orthopedist gave me helped to ease the pain and I was back to school quickly, but more importantly, I was back to preparing for my departure to Israel on April 1st.)

[hannah-in-italy]

22 March 2014; Ragusa.

[hannah-in-italy]

camp RYLA, D2110.

Fri 14 Mar 2014. so having already experienced the awesomeness of camp RYLA back home in Dallas, I was super psyched to be invited to Sicily's camp RYLA in March. at first I was really hopeful of this amazing experience like the week I had at RYLA D5810. --

(a note: when I went to camp RYLA in the summer of 2012, I entered the camp one girl and graduated an entirely different person. RYLA had such an impact on me and I honestly can't explain it without some magical memory transfers. people who knew me before that summer and after saw two different Hannahs and I'm proud of who I became after that camp. I am continually remembering lessons I learned in that short, short week spent in the Texas heat with a hundred other 17 year olds. I am continually seeing the wonderful things that my cabinmates are achieving at university and in their personal lives, I am continually influenced by just the force of this camp and how much it drove me to change myself, my life, and lives of people around me for the better. D5810's camp RYLA and Dallas Rotary changed me in the best way possible, so I can't even express my support and enthusiasm for this program.)

-- however, as reflected by past Sicilian Rotary events, we all slowly began to realize by looking at the timetable and just, well, this district's history in disappointments, that it would be nothing like the experience I had back in Texas. 

we exchange students all donned out exchange blazers and hauled it over to the city of Syracuse for the ninety millionth time for a Friday evening to meet and greet the RYLArians who were waiting there. little did we know that all these RYLArians, normally teenagers in the states, were University students here in Sicily! we were then asked after the meet and greet to give short speeches about how our exchange years have been thus far in the sunny land of Sicily. 

now, um. ... I don't know about you, but last time I checked, RYE wasn't available to Uni students, so at this, I was very confused. me and the other girls couldn't see the point of us pitching the program to dudes and dudettes who weren't even eligible. most of the exchangers just wound up telling nice stories about loving the food and loving everything and loving the beach and loving the people and love love love yay love, which, admittedly, frustrated the heck out of me. want to know why? because I knew a lot of that was bullcrap. I knew that we all had issues this year, and I knew that while they all said this year has been a dream, it's just been so perfect, I knew that wasn't true. personally, I haven't had the worst year of all the Sicilian girls, but it's been pretty crappy for reasons that I don't like to publicize. (mostly because then people complain at me to shut up and "you don't have it that bad, stop whining" (actual quote from a rotex/ex-exchanger to us sicilians) and also we get called ungrateful and bad exchange students if we don't smile and say everything is perfect, which makes us feel even worse about ourselves and about our situations. more on that at another time, I suppose)

when it was my turn to speak, I think if memory serves I was third to last, I stood up and told the group my mostly-honest truth. I wasn't about to unleash all my year onto these people, because wow can you say something about keepin' dirty laundry to yourself, but I told enough of my truth not to feel like I was lying. I owed it to these people not to lie and I owed it to myself and the other girls to validate our feelings out loud, not just in grumbled whispers or late-night texts. now, I feel like I owe it to future exchangers that they should know not every exchange is perfect, shiny, beautiful. sometimes, it's pretty crappy and sometimes you go home halfway through because it sucks so bad. sometimes that happens. to any future exchangers reading this, wow I really hope your exchanges are so much more awesome. we all deserve awesome exchanges, and I'm so sorry that some people get robbed of that experience. I hope future exchangers reading this really get to milk every opportunity and chase every adventure that comes their way, because y'all deserve that thrill and that joy.

... anyways. ... after our tiny five minute speeches, we went to dinner then to the hotel for sleep. then in the morning, we all headed back home. all in all, another typical Rotary weekend in Sicily. sigh.

[hannah-in-italy]

host fam #2!

alrighty then. well, I'd say it was far past time for this Texan to switch host families. in the middle of February, my host club told me "oh, hey - you're switching host families in two weeks." and uh ... yeah, that was kind of a shocker. in the beginning of January, there was some drama concerning host families with us Catania girls and I wound up getting the short stick in that I didn't change even though I wanted to. (I say this because another girl didn't change and didn't want to change, so yeah.) so anyhow.

SO ANYHOW. at the beginning beginning of March, I packed up all my things from my first host fam's house (my original huge suitcase, original carry on suit case, original backpack, plus a huge ikea bag, and another huge bag of crap) and might've cried a little saying goodbye to them before my second host family packed my things in the trunk and we wove our way to center Catania where my new house would be. now, after living in the suburbs for six months, changing to the city was definitely exciting. living in the city for Italian exchangers means a lot, means more freedom to go out and hang out (especially since most of the other girls also live in the city). it means a lot more possibilities of things to do instead of just sitting about the house twiddling my thumbs. most everything, in Catania's case, happens within the city, so it's vital to live in the center if you don't want to get cabin fever. (or, well, it's not so vital if you don't mind missing out on the city life. one of the Catania girls says she wishes she lived in a smaller city like Caltanissetta or Corleone.) 

anyway, to the actual story about my new host family. might maybe be kind of important and the actual point of this post.

my first host family had four peeps at the house, five in total. my host mother Francesca, my host father Giuseppe, my host granma Anna ("nonna"), my older host brother Matteo, and the host kitten Klaus. this second host family had four peeps at the house. host mother Carmela, host step-father Ernesto, older host brother Alfredo, and little host brother Enrico.

at first, this second family was very nervous about hosting someone, a girl in particular. they were originally supposed to host a New York boy for the entire year since they were a family of only boys and this New Yorker was to be the only boy in Sicily's district. I wound up kind of not quite laughing at my to-be host dad (who was last year's president) and said that with my two older brothers, me, and my dad, my mom basically raised four hooligan boys. I was pretty confident I could handle it, and (having written this post two months later) I was right.

my new room is very tiny! it's orange and yellow and, in truth, it's the room of their brother Andrea who is living in California with Rotary for this year. it's about the same size of a basic American dorm room and the flat we live in isn't too big either. it's all pretty comfortable though, we all have our own spaces. the tiny host brother loves to talk and talk and talk. he randomly appears whenever I'm journaling or trying to take naps and starts conversations out of the blue. it can be annoying, but it's the first time I've had a younger sibling, so it's a learning process yknow. the other brother is very similar to my middle brother in that he's quieter and more introverted, we can talk for a long long while, and sometimes he's incredibly silly. Alfredo's English is not as good as Matteo's, so a lot of our conversation consist of his English and my Italian (you can't imagine the number of grammatical errors we rack up between us two.) the host mom is kind of controlling, but very quickly, she became affectionate of me to which I'm glad. (exchange student tip: suck up to the host mom! appreciate the host mom, be nice to the host mommm. if the host mom is your enemy, your life will be hell. no joke.) and then the host father is a joker to the maximum. he teaches odd sicilian phrases and cracks jokes left and right with the added benefit of having lots of Rotary connections. 

I miss my first host family a lot. they saw what I can definitely call the worst of me and my year. they saw the beginning, when I was fresh and new, confused and lost with no intelligible Italian. they saw the worst struggles and had to face the same languages barriers that I did. when I considered going home for a month straight, they saw that and helped me through it. the first host family is a memorable one in my opinion, whether the exchanger's experience is good or bad, whether it last for two months or the full year. the first host family sees you at your rawest, most vulnerable. you are nothing but a bundle of embarrassment and energy, homesickness and hope. it's such a vital time for your exchange, when you really get your biggest impression of "how is my year going to be?" and that's why I consider the first host family so important. for me, I miss my first fam, but at the same time, I'm eager for a new start with a new family here in the city.

[hannah-in-italy]

WOW OK. so from the days of February 25th to March 1st, I got so incredibly horribly sick. WOW. OK. it was probably one of the worst times I've ever been sick in my life. it progressed from these weird stomach pains to a sore throat like every inch of me was sandpaper and then a 103° fever and then chills and then UGH. it was so extraordinarily terrible. I stayed at home for four freakin days of school and cried a bit from the inability to breathe easy or swallow water at all or move without my stomach screaming in pain.

let me tell you - being sick in a foreign country is the absolute worst. your mother is not there to take care of you and you have no idea what medicines you're taking because when in the world would you think to learn pharmaceutical lingo in your host language, yknow. if anybody else is reading this, make sure to eat lots of fruit and citrus on exchange and holy butts do not let yourself get sick. it freakin sucks.

[hannah-in-italy]

excerpt from a journal entry of 25 Feb 2014; (concerning a class discussion about lgbt matters, specifically gay marriage)

"...had a class discussion during the last hour and wow, to say that I hate Italians' opinions about lgbt shit is an understatement. I think, of thirty kids, maybe three were okay with gay marriages. the rest of them said such incredibly terrible things. ... why can such wonderful people say and think and feel truly in their hearts these horrible, just awful things? how? i don't get it. i wound up sitting in the hall crying my eyes out. ... they're just seventeen, but it's already the time to change. it's past the crucial time when imprints are made on us by our parents, our society. Francesca said some comforting things as well, so at least my mother and mother figures are chill, even if my classmates were so horrible today. it's just. this is an issue that I really give a shit about and the fact that my friends who I love so dearly could be so vehemently opposed to it is appalling. I'm heartbroken, horrified. ... I never thought Texas could be considered more progressive about something - anything - but then I came to Sicily. ... I miss Dallas and I miss the understanding there, not the blatant hatred here. ..."

[hannah-in-italy]

22 Feb 2014.

Lindsey and I went to the not so far off (but far enough to be an annoying drive) Caltanissetta for the birthday of my dear darling best friend Elizabeth who turned eighteen. I was so glad to be able to go to Elizabeth's party. considering that we live in separate towns, it's difficult for us to see each other a lot except for Rotary occasions and if we manage to convince our host families to allow us to visit each other. Liz is just my most wonderful best friend and I love her to death. from Washington and Texas all the way here to Sicily, I can't imagine being without her. ♥

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 16 2014; West Sicily tour.

the Garden of Kolymbetra lies a wide basin of enchanting nature among the ancient temples and broken ruins. the garden is filled to the bring with not only ancient olive trees and stilled ponds, but thrives with an enormous orchard of oranges and lemons. there grows even wheat and java, palm and olive. Kolymbetra was originally a man-made lake, but after years of failed maintenance, the lake dried up and left the area to cultivate itself into a green space where, when the Arabs took control of west Sicily, it was then made into a splendid garden thanks to their planting and irrigation techniques. we took a long and lovely winding walk through the gardens, crossing trickling streams and a canyon of citrus to arrive at the quaint eating area where lunch awaited us. nowadays, the garden is quiet save for the occasional footsteps against fallen leaves and the twittering of nearby birds. lunch was a delicious meal served in the shade of blood orange trees, of which we plucked the fruit for dessert. after we finished our walk around the garden, we dilly-dallied around the souvenir shops and then headed back home to Catania, thus concluding our West Sicily trip.

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 16 2014; West Sicily tour.

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 16 2014; West Sicily tour.

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 16 2014; West Sicily tour.

our last stop for the western tour was the "Valley of Temples" (which was on a cliff, not in a valley - just by the way) which was five kinds of rad. the Valley consists of various ruined Greek temples. the complete temple shown in two of these photos is the Temple of Concordia, the second best preserved temple in the Greek world except for the Parthenon itself. Agrigento (or "Akragas" in Greek), before it's fall, was rivals with the city of Syracuse and reached a great period of prosperity before the Carthaginians under Hannibal burned most of the city under siege. today, Agrigento stands as one of the most well-preserved places to view Greek architecture.

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 16 2014; West Sicily tour.

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 15 2014; West Sicily tour.

our last stop for the day of February 15th was the historic city of Trapani (every city in Sicily is historic, so it's a bit redundant, sorry.) legend goes that the city was formed by the god Saturn's fallen sickle, hence the city's terrain jutting into the ocean in a sickle-shape. we didn't get a lot of time in Trapani since the Rotarians were saying "we're on a schedule, we're on a schedule" (which is hilarious because we're in Sicily and I don't think they even know what the word "punctual" means) so we went to this pretty piece of harbor, took photos, goofed around for like 15 minutes and then drove back to our hotel in Palermo, thus concluding our second day of the western tour.

p.s. yes that is my Ohioan friend Monica.

[hannah-in-italy]

Feb 15 2014; West Sicily tour.

etc junk from Marsala. the last photo is this rad photo I took using an iPhone and an ... I don't know. bird-watching telescope? none of our cameras had the power to zoom in an see the birds from so far away, but if we got closer, we'd scare them all away. so I managed to snap a few photos by positioning the iPhone over the eye of the telescope and very very carefully aligning them. nobody else managed it, so I felt pretty cool. (also in writing this post, two months later and almost eight months into my exchange, I want you all to know that I forgot how to call these birds so I had to google "pink bird long legs eat shrimp" before google kindly reminded me that they're called flamingoes.)