Christmas and New Years

I spent Christmas with a different family this year, it was weird but nice at the same time. I am back with my host family now after a week with the other family. Today is New Years Eve, I am going out tonight with some friends to celebrate. Lost the fantasy match, and yeah, that about sums up what has been going on.

Fantasy League

I had not been really paying attention to my Fantasy League, and somehow I ended up in the losers championship. I destroyed my competition last week, so now I am playing for 5th place. Not a good place, but still, better than 6th. Sean is going down

Christmas

This year I am spending Christmas with a temporary family because mine will be on vacation. This is not the first weird Christmas I will have had though. Last year my house burnt down around Christmas time and all of my presents went with the house. Christmas was not very merry last year. This will make two weird Christmases is a row.

Worst Day of the Week

Friday. Usually the best day of the week. After a long day of work or school you finally get a long break, the weekend, and hang out with friends. Things however are not so bright over here. Friday. The worst day of the week. Due to the fact that I have school on Saturday here Friday is now the worst day. Every week I think, "Oh, today is Friday, no school tomorrow". Only to then later realize that I was wrong again. You would think that I would have gotten used to school every Saturday, but I have not.  Friday is a disappointment and the longest school day. Literally the worst day of the week.

Penny Board

Oh how I love my penny board. It brings me to school and back every day. I can use it to get places faster when I am late. But sometimes... when other people use it.... it can be a problem. FOR AN EXAMPLE! Today, was an average day, wake up, breakfast, ride to school, have school, and then when I was leaving school I waited for a friend, One of my classmates had a great idea of using the board in the hallway. As you can imagine this did not go well, he slipped and the board went flying into another classrooms door. The teacher of that class comes out and takes the board. I of course am furious. I yell at my classmate to go and get my board back. After five minutes of laughter the classmates go and try to get it. But the teacher isn't having any of it. She says we have to wait for her to pack up and then after we go to the principal. I am overjoyed now. I yell at them some more and we wait together. Finally after another ten minutes the teacher is ready. We head down to the office while, meanwhile I am staring at my friend and mouthing words in English, he didn't understand, but it made me feel better. So we get to the principals office, and what do you know, she isn't there. SO, we wait again for about 15 minutes. She finally arrived and I thought we were all going to go in, nope. Only the teacher, which seems a little outlandish. Anyway, after waiting for the meeting to end, the principal calls us in. Talks to us in Italian, some of which I understood. Then we follow here to the front office place, where she calls over the secretary. She explains the situation and the secretly says in Italian, "In school, what is this? america?" and then the principal tells her I am american and she starts laughing. Like, bruh, that's not allowed in the US either. So every morning I am supposed to bring my board to the front office, leave it there, and pick it up at the end of the day. Thank you. I love this. Awesome. Even after my classmate explained it was his fault they still make me put it there. SWEEEEEEEET

Nothing Interesting

Just here to say nothing interesting has happened lately.

Occupations of Schools

So, everything has been crazy for the past couple of weeks. I haven't posted about this before because I didn't know exactly how or when, but after what happened today I had to create a post. Palermo has many schools, and mine just so happens to be a very important one. Every year in Palermo the students take over the schools and call them "Occupations". It surprisingly is legal, but can easily be made illegal, it is a very hard thing for outsiders, like myself, to understand. My school, Liceo Scientifico Statale "Stanislao Cannizzaro", is always the first school to have an occupation and really motivates the other schools to do the same. The occupations usually occur in late October early November. Me and my classmates thought the occupations would not happen due to how late in the year is is. We were gladly surprised when last Thursday a group of students in fact occupied the school. I was very excited, these occupations supposedly last for weeks, no school. This occupation lasted for three days, until the last night all of the kids left the school and forgot to lock it back up.  This of course was a big mistake because the next morning the teachers were back inside and teaching once again.  The students were enraged.  Three days isn't enough. They wanted more and had many meetings this week about when and how we would occupy once more. In the beginning of this week other schools started occupying, leaving Cannizzaro in the dust. Yesterday the occupation was on, students were blocking all entrances and stopping teachers and other students from entering. But the problem was the doors were locked, the kids blocking the gates couldn't get in to occupy either. Eventually half an hour into the madness the doors opened and kids started flooding in screaming that the school had been occupied and how happy they were. Little did they know the principal was unlocking all the doors and letting the teachers back into the school. The occupation had failed and students were furious. They had an illegal meeting after lunch debating when and how again, but this time there was a problem. No one wanted to be the face of the occupation, and for it to be legal and correct there needs to be a student, over the age of 18, willing to take the responsibility for the occupation. No one stepped up, so we all headed home very disappointed. That night one of the other schools was dis-occupied, police came in and knocked the gates and doors down, kicking all of the students out. The next morning once again we were occupying. But the same thing happened as before, the principal snuck in and started opening everything, even tore down an occupation banner. But the students were not having it, they refused to enter the school. There was a mass of kids occupying the street. They were shouting and screaming chants for occupation, praying somehow it would work. This of course did not work and some kids eventually gave into the rules and went inside, but not all.   Most students stayed outside and waited for the lunch break to strike again. During the lunch there was of course another strike, this time bigger and better. Me and Franco found ourselves on the inside of the gate. The gates were locked with chains and the teachers were trying to break them. They brought out some bolt cutters and went to town on the chains, this was not enough. The kids were overjoyed when it did not work, then they came out with an electric saw, the  students and I were very sad. The electric saw was enough to cut the chains, the school was once again open. This occupation however was supposedly illegal and a police officer was going around video taping the faces of kids inside (good thing I was there huh?). The last door was guarded by kids wearing  hoods and covering their faces so the camera could not identify them. One of my friends was among the kids and was in the very front row. I do not know how but the last door opened, this caused a frenzy. The students were running due to the fear of the police catching them. The police indeed wanted to catch them and tackled some of the kids, others were grabbed strongly by their arms and legs. This started a riot. Kids everywhere screaming at police and backing them into a convenient store across the street. Civilian justice at its finest. The group was shouting and screaming at the police officers for about fifteen minutes until other higher up officer came to see what happened. The students yelled what happened and luckily the kids were released from the convenient store. You may be asking what happened to my friend in the front row, well its hilarious. All of the kids started running once the door opened, except for him, he slowly walked away. Still covering his head he  walked right by me with a smile on his face. One of the funniest things I have seen in a long time. After all this chaos of legal and illegal occupations, I am glad to say the school is occupied. I hope it is legal, but if not, eh, I'm not inside. It means no school and days to relax. The police who were video taped should be dealt with but I do not know the laws for that stuff here. Anyway occupations are ridiculous, but it is very fun. Also I met a lot of new people today while waiting outside. All in all pretty fun.

Gonna post later

Some crazy stuff happened today

It has been a week

Since my last blog post and I have to say this has been a fantastic week. I have moved in with the family and its great, I have been hanging out with my host brother a lot and have met tons of awesome people. This weekend alone I had more fun than the first half of the exchange. On friday I acompanied my host brother to his friends birthday party, it was at a club, needless to say I had fun. I made friends there and we planned to go out again the next night, and so we did. Saturday night we went to a lounge place and chilled there for about w hours and then walked around palermo while they tought me Sicilian slang. I have met so many people in this large city its impossible for me to go aroymd the city without running into someone I know. Tonight I went to a professional boxing match and had a ball, three nights of back to back fun. Can not wait until next weekend.

To top it off

To top of this "fantastic weekend" I am going to lose fantasy football

Forgot to say

It is like around halfway through my exchange, I think... I haven't done the exact calculations. But overall it has been pretty good and is going to get even better. This week I am moving in with a new family, I will have a host brother my age and two dogs, one is a husky 😆. This new family should be fantastic and I can not wait to move in.

Halloween Part 2

This will most likely go down as the worst halloween ever. I had to stay at my area reps house for the night, but she was not getting home until 8:30. I had plans to watch some horror movies and eat candy with some friends, but after hours of comverasation those plan fell through. So Franco and I had nothing to do and nowhere to go for about 8 hours. We walked around for a long time and then got so bored we walked into a library, on purpose, we were actually just looking for a place to sit down. So after 3 hours pf walking we had found some comfortable chairs in the library. After an hour and a half there we decided to leave, having no plans as to where we were going. We ended up just walking to the area reps house and waiting outside for the remaining two hours. Then after all the walking I fell asleep around 9:30. Literally the most uneventfull halloween in Distefano history. To top it all off I had a pretty cool costume that at the end of the day was only seen by like 6 people.

Halloween

Halloween, a sacred time of the year for everyone I know. We dress up in costumes, go to school in them, mess around all day and night. Here in Italy however Halloween is not that big of a thing, some kids dress up, no one dresses up to school either. A little disapointing but, what was I expecting right?

U.S.A

One thing that upsets me is the fact that everyone thinks the United States is full of itself. People think that people in the U.S.A believe their country is the best, and yeah it is true. Most of us think our country is the best country in the world. But stop being hypocritical, everyone thinks their own country is the best. People here in Italy looove Italy, they think their country is the best. I also asked my Argentinian friend if he thinks Argentina is the best country and he answered, surprisingly, yes. It's not just an american thing people, jeez. People wear more U.S flags here than in america. Another quick piece of info is that I saw a stray dog use a crosswalk perfectly and walk on the sidewalk like any other guy it was awesome.

Sour Skittles

I have found out that people from other countries do not know about sour skittles. And of course offered the killer candy to these people and their faces wrinkled up. It was one of the funniest things I have seen in a while. So anyway thinfs are going well, been just chilling at home for the past week after school due to oitlandish amount of rain. I found out I am changing families around the middle of november, this is a curse and a blessing. I have to pack up all of my stuff again, but I also get to get away from some of this families rules. The whole thing should go pretty smoothly.

First Package

Yesterday I got my first package from my family. I was expecting a medium sized package, instead it was large. At first I was confused, "What the heck could be in there". Then I remembered my dad saying he was gonna send a halloween surprise, oh no. It was basically full of american candy. Ridiculous. It is a nice package though, can't wait to eat some skittles.

Captains Log

I have been in Italian territory for a while now observing and studying their strange ways. They teach their young a lot of Philosophy and Latin. I have also observed their obscure math, I am not sure if the math is insane here or if the teacher herself is just writing like a mad man on the blackboard. Back in my home territory I have taken the second hardest math offered to me...but this... it is just weird. I have also noticed strange eating habits. There is not a lot of snacking in this culture, they wait until their lunch and dinner to fill themselves. They also seem to love dressing in clothes and accessories that represent the United States or Britain. I will continue to study these people and take notes along the way. Captain Noah signing off.

1 Month

Two days ago marked 1 month that I have been in Italy. It has been fun so far, I meet new people every day and most people are really nice. If the rest of the months go as well as this first one I'm gonna have a blast. Another quick note is my fantasy football league just started, so if any of you guys are reading this.... You are gonna get wrecked.

Don't get me wrong

Had a very fun weekend in Caltavuturo. I stayed with my host mothers family, which means big Italian meals every day. I met my host brothers cousin, Filippo, who was very cool and fun to hang out with. The first day was mostly just showing me around, the second day I walked around with Alissandro (host brother) and Filippo. We walked around the town, got some gelato and just talked. Later that night the family went out for pizza and one of the uncles brought friends of his from Palermo. Of course since I am staying in Palermo they had many questions for me and about me. The pizza here is good, but I think the hype was unreal. Don't get me wrong, it's great, but I have been to New York City... pretty much the same if not better. Another weird thing is how much Italians eat. They almost never snack throughout the day so they save their hunger for the meals. Except breakfast, they seem to hate it. When you go to a pizzeria with people and order pizza everyone gets their own pizza. Not too bad right. Except for the fact that everyone gets like a medium size all to themselves. A lot of Italians hate it when you do not finish everything on your plate, so every time I try to wolf down the giant thing. Almost every time I fail. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people chew food with their mouth open, you can just hear everything that is going on in there and ugh... the lip smacking. It is fantastic that my host brother only eats like this, another fantastic thing is that he loves to eat. A lot. If his brother does not finish, he eats it, he eats so much sometimes his mom tells/orders him to stop. So much lip smacking... it hurts. But back to the main subject, the weekend was nice. I have attached photos