Febbraio

With only five days of febbraio remaining, it’s dawning on me ever more often how fast time is going this semester and how I’m almost half way through my year abroad. However, despite the lack of activities on offer in Parma usually, we’ve managed to do a few interesting things lately:

Firstly, the Erasmus ‘Flirt Party’…typical Valentine’s ‘traffic light party’ with possibly some of the most cringe secondary school style games, but a fun night nonetheless.

Valentine’s Aperitivo was our Monday night out, and lovely it was. Just a bunch of girls having fun on Valentine’s Day, exactly what I like to see, followed by sweets and smores evening the next night. Being a newbie to the concept of smores I was intrigued, until I found out they include marshmallows which I’m not too keen on, but melted chocolate, Haribo, wafers and apple slices were more than enough to satisfy.

Clearly after a few days of not being stuffed with chocolate and sweets we were ready for more, and lucky for us the Carnevale di Cioccolato was coming to Parma! Not so lucky were the extortionate prices of most of the produce – all we could afford were hot chocolates, but they were damn good – but so many of the things made of chocolate looked amazing, some people definitely have immense talent!

On a slightly more musical note – absolutely no pun intended – I have a new violin teacher who I’m getting on much better with so far than the last one. I also went to a little concerto di quartetti the other afternoon, a showcase/recording for assessment of some of the string students. One of the aspects of the Conservatorio that I love, and I guess of music colleges in Britain and all over the world, is that many modules are entirely performance based, and credit is given for learning to play in a quartet, with an accompanist and in orchestra, three of my favourite modules this year, and really valuable skills that I think students deserve merit for. 

I now have inspiration and motivation to practise, two rare and unpredictable things, but the Conservatorio is 'closed' for a week for exams - of course we weren't told until three days before - so I have nowhere to do said practise...as ever. The unorganisation and inefficiency of Italian administration never ceases to amaze me. But that's a rant for another time.

17.12.2010

 Today I have been in Italy exactly three months. Well, three months as in it is the 17^th December and I arrived on 17^th September, so actually 13 weeks. I can’t quite believe it. That’s the longest I’ve been away from home continuously in my life I think. And for it to be in a foreign country makes it feel like even more of an achievement. In the last week or so things here have got better, or rather I feel better about things. Seeing as it’s the last week now I’ve automatically started reflecting more on how everything has gone, and how much it has all been up and down, from brilliant to terrible in such short periods of time. It’s crazy how much things can change and how trying to get to know the Italian culture has both challenged and confirmed various stereotypes I had.

Being thrown into another society with completely new ways of doing things has meant that generalisations I made at the start have been ripped to shreds but now I make new generalisations about different things, some good and some not so good I think. One thing that I often wonder about is whether I would have felt any different if I had planned to move to Italy all along and it hadn’t been such a shockingly rushed thing but I’m glad of how things turned out; I’ve got to learn a language that I had no experience of at all, so being able to have a conversation is really good, with very little formal training.

Of course the other major advantage of being here is being able to spend time, get to know, and share things with Jenny and Lydia.

There are plenty of things I would often like to change about Italy, but I know that that will never happen and I wouldn’t really want to, I should learn to get used to things as they are more. Having quite a lot of time to sit and just be and think has been really great most of the time, and I’ve had great conversations about things that I wouldn’t have known or thought about if I hadn’t been here.

Having said all of that, I’m very much looking forward to going home tomorrow for three weeks. To Britain, to Whitby, to my house, to my family and friends, to complete familiarity, to the English language, to a lot of things! And hopefully by the end I’ll want to come back here. We’ll see.

Ciao, Parma