This was the beautiful view I woke up to every morning for the past week:
We've been staying half an hour away from Austria, most people here know me as "Maria" (no-one can pronounce Alice so they call me by my conveniently Italian sounding middle name instead), and it's my job to live with a family and look after the children. I'm basically a von Trapp :)
I have truly climbed every mountain and forded every stream this week, including part of this scary looking one:
It made Duke of Edinburgh look like a light stroll and all that was running through my head while climbing over slippery rocks on my hands and knees was whether my travel insurance stretched that far. I doubt it, so maybe from now on I'll stick to walking in the park.
Speaking of perilous situations, Italian ideas of what constitutes safe driving + bendy mountain roads with huge drops down one side = many terrifying experiences. I have discovered that there is aptly no Italian word for "passing place" so they use the English word to refer to the concept, even if they do not use the actual passing place in practice. They call the blind spot in a driver's field of vision the "angolo morto" which means "dead angle". It certainly is a dead angle because I never see it being used! Oh dear, I'm a terrible backseat driver... I am sorry for all of you who ever have to drive me somewhere, but at least all driving in England will seem perfect now that I've got used to their interpretation of it here!
One of the girls who lives on the farm where we stayed is called Astrid. The kids I'm looking after had even more trouble pronouncing her name than they do with mine, and kept thinking her name was pronounced "Hagrid". Suddenly the problems I have with my name don't seem so bad anymore...
The Alto Adige/ Sud Tyrol region of Italy is so different from the rest of the country that it felt as though we'd left Italy all together. All the TV was either in German or the dialect of Italian that they speak in parts of Switzerland and the radio played this weird Austrian punk concoction which made me glad that the signal was sketchy. I found that it was lovely to have a change of scenery and experience what was almost a different culture in the mountains; the humidity was a lot less suffocating at 2500m and after 8 weeks of nothing but pasta for lunch everyday, dumplings and apple strudel were a welcome change! As lovely as it was to get away though, I am glad to be back in Treviso where I have work to do and an established routine for the next 3 weeks before I can come home and speak English all day everyday :) Being understood in my own language is something which I will never again take for granted, and I think this experience has given me the ability to have a new level of patience with people in Britain who struggle with English. I think learning another language gave me a degree of heightened patience a long time ago, but it's impossible to imagine the exact feeling of isolation and frustration that sometimes comes along when you can't make yourself understood, or you run through a sentence in your head 10 times before saying it to find that people are looking at you blankly when you finally get it out. The good news is that those moments are thankfully becoming fewer and further between, but if I didn't have the wonderful enthusiasm of the Italians and the encouragement to learn their language that they willingly give, I would be in a bit of a pickle.
In other news, it's forecast to hit 42 degrees this weekend, and as much as I worship summer and the heat, that would be going too far. My laptop shuts itself down every hour or so because it can't take the heat and the insides of my phone are melting to the extent that it would probably be quicker for me to send a letter via the Italian postal system than a text.
That's all for now wonderful people :) There is freshly made pizza wafting up the stairs calling my name...
Alice x
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