The Longest Recap Ever

Well, I guess I have to pay for putting off my next post. Having not written anything for the past 9 (10? 15?) days, I have a virtual lifetime of experiences to write down, and I doubt I'm going to be able to remember any of them. It's a shame, my guess is that I've been chickening out about the whole translate-into-french thing. It takes up a lot of time and has caused me great amounts of stress while writing the english version; I'm fearful I might not be able to translate certain things! No matter. The point is to write this down so that I can remember it later on, because my grey matter has not served me very well in the past. So here we go.

First, I wanted to talk about my little journey I had in Ugo's SUV. While I was strealing their internet, I heard him get up to go leave, and he asked me if I wanted to go down to the well with him (they fill up water bottles from the well every so often because the tap water tastes really nasty). I said yes, then asked my brother if he wanted to go. Addicted to the internet as he is (he can't stop reading manga), he said no, so I went out with Ugo to the well, or so I thought. Since Charlie had decided not to go with us, Ugo decided to make him regret it, so instead of getting in his little Nissan, we went in his big Nissan: A 22-year-old SUV. Unbeknownst as to why, I got in and we drove down to the well, filled up the bottles, and put them back in. Ugo then proceeded to tie them down as securely as he could in the back of the car. Being the idiot that I am, I didn't take this hint and, once again, blindly climbed into the car. I finally realized that something was somewhat different when, instead of turning around, he continued down the road we were going on and eventulaly veered off of the mountain road and onto a little sheep trail. The bottles, meanwhile, were making the biggest racket I've ever heard; had he not lashed them down, I have no doubt that all of them would have shattered.
So we continued down the road, it getting progressively rockier and rockier, and Ugo explained to me that the road's no longer used; not too long ago everyone walked their cattle down this road to go and graze. As this was no longer the case, the road's slowly deteriorated and is continuing to do so. Thankfully it wasn't that much of a problem for the vehicle we were in, because the view once we got to the top was absolutely stunning: You could see all of Angoli from one side, the bordering village from another (I was told that that was where my great x 2,000 grandmother came from), and the rest of the world if you looked straight ahead: Everything laid out for miles and miles. I think if I had been about 100 feet higher I could have seen my house. Maybe not. But still. It was absolutely stunning.

After that day, we all went to the festival of Saint Joseph. Apparently, as I learned recently, the actual day of the festival was in March, but since around that time of year it's still cold and yucky, they decided to have the celebration in August, when the weather was (a bit too) warm, and all of the inhabitants had moved back to Angoli for the summer (during the other seasons, they're all elsewhere for work). It started with a church service, then turned into a parade: They took his statue out of the church and paraded him around the village, saying their "Hail Mary's" (in Italian) and setting off cannons the entire way. By the way, when I say statue, I mean statue. They're hauling a one-two hundred pound statue up and down a mountain in 90 degree weather. It was absolutely crazy.
One opportunity that came along during the parade was the chance to meet the priest. Apparently, being a South African doesn't give you the best skin color when you're in a southern-Italian village of 300 people. It's not like he had a choice in the matter, though; he was assigned to the village by the Catholic church. So, upon showing up, the villagers stopped showing up to church. And then they all started to accuse him of stealing the offering. Talk about a warm welcome. It's better now, although I'm sure many villagers still aren't very nice towards him. He was a really nice guy, though, and happened to speak French and English along with Italian, not surprising considering those were the two official languages of Togo, where he grew up. Sadly, though, he had a parade to run, so we only got a few minutes with him. Shortly afterwards, we left the parade; not everyone enjoys walking up and down mountains and I have to say I share this sentiment. So we went back to Ugo's house and ate dinner, then went down that night for the fireworks, which were loads better than the ones we saw at Bastille Day. After all of that, we walked to our house and went to bed.
Sadly, that's the best my memory is going to serve me. The rest is a blank, anything after that begins with our leaving Angoli, which was a very sad occasion. As a parting gift, Ugo gave Thomas, my brother, an Italia baseball hat, and he gave my dad a Mussolini watch (some Italians are still big on Mussolini: The only reason we as Americans consider him a bad person was because he was associated with Hitler. Mussolini established a universal language [before there were only dialects], created roads, and completely unified Italy during his time in office, even though he killed a lot of people.). After some good-bye's, kisses, and tears, it was time to head back to Rome. So we all piled in the car (my dad did a great job of putting essentially everything into the roof compartment, so it was nice and roomy) and headed to Rome with one extra: Sara was coming with us! The ride back was a lot faster than the ride there, mostly thanks to the absence of the enormous traffic jam that we had the pleasure of experiencing on the way there.
Once we were there, we all headed straight for the beds and crashed. Well, at least, the majority of us: me and my brother were pretty happy to find that we actually had internet that we could use without feeling guilty, so we took full advantage of it. After dosing ourselves to a satisfactory level, we all headed out to the Vatican to go see St. Peter's Basilica. It really was incredible, sadly I didn't bring my camera so I didn't have a chance to take any pictures. I'll see if I can steal some from my dad's iPhone some time, but it's unlikely that they'll be any good. Oh well, there's always postcards. Plus it gives me the excuse to come back again.

The next day, we all went out for a drive to tour Rome after having dinner at a really great restaurant. We saw the Roman Colloseum, an Arc of Triumph (Evidently there's more than one) and some other... things whose names escape me, because I'm American and they don't seem important to me. That and my memory really stinks. I'll publish the photos we took though, one of the coolest things I saw that I could actually get a good picture of in the dark was the "Face of Truth": A rock with a face carved onto it, with a room behind the face. In the Roman times, you'd stick your hand in the mouth and tell a truth or a lie, and if it was a lie then your hand would be cut off by "the face of truth", who happened to be the person sitting inside probably guessing whether or not the dude was telling the truth. Maybe he just got a kick of cutting off people's hands (Caaarl!).

So, now that I've talked about chopping off hands, I'm not going to bother to put on a transition because I really have no idea how I'm supposed to. The day afterwards it was back on the road to get to Florence. That's right, Florence. On the way back to Paris, we've decided that we're going to go to Florence and then Geneva on the way. Geneva! I've really always wanted to go there, and really the only thing I'm hoping is that I won't be severely disappointed. Apparently we won't be visiting much, which makes me kind of sad, I'm not likely to go back there for quite some time. If there was an LHC museum anywhere I would totally go for it. Anyways, Florence. After making the 3 hour drive to Florence safe and sound, we visited the hotel briefly to drop off our bags, then got right back out to go tour the city. It was absolutely marvelous! We saw the David (I snuck a photo of it even though it wasn't allowed), 2 huge cathedrals (one made completely out of colored marble) and Dante's Inferno. We also went on a bridge, whose name yet again escapes me, where there were actual shops. Above the shops, you could see a corridor that went from the now-gone royal family's offices, all the way across the bridge, down a block, into a tunnel, and back up again, which would lead them straight to the palace's grounds without having to touch the commoner's road. While I think the idea of avoiding the commoners isn't necessarily the best thing for a government to do, I did think the whole concept of an enormous passageway was pretty cool. At least their society contributed perspective. I think that's worth a distancing government or two.
So that's the total recap. I think I just broke my keyboard from all of this typing, we're off to Geneva tomorrow and I'm likely to try (and fail) to translate this post along the way. I think I'll make it halfway. Hopefully I'll have free internet there so I can translate words I don't know, they charge a ridiculous price for the internet here. 5€ for 30 minutes, 8€ for an hour, and 15€ for 24 hours, per computer. Insane. Sorry, Frenchies, this might take a while.

One last thing: I'd just like to make a note of how adorable the trucks here are. That said, it's a miracle how any of them get anything done given the tiny trunk space they must have, but still! Don't you just think they're so cute?

By the way, Blogger Draft is stupid and isn't letting me change the location. This was actually posted in Florence, Italy. Love you Blogger. Not.

Getting Lost in the Mountains

En Français

It's been about 3 days since we arrived, and in those 3 days not much has happened. We've met various locals, we went on a tour of the village, we went down to Pianopoli for an awesome dinner, and just yesterday we went down to the beach to go swimming. And that is the subject upon which I'm going to base my post.

First, we headed down to Lamezia Terme to withdraw some money. Easy, right? Wrong. We went to one bank, waited in line, and had a lot of fun translating: Wanessa (pronounced Vanessa, by the way) talked to the teller, translated the Italian into French for me, and then I translated French to English for my Aunt Kathy. Then, she'd think for a bit, talk to me in English, I translated English to French, Wanessa translated French to Italian... Needless to say, it took a bit longer than it normally would for the line to advance. Not only that, but we had to find 2 places after that where we could change our money. After taking an hour more than we should have, we finally got into the car and headed to the beach, which was another good 30 minutes away. By the time we made it there, the stands were no longer serving lunch, so for lunch we all decided to eat ice cream and chips. At least it helped us stomach the enormous dinner we had later that night.

Anyways, while we were at the beach we decided to go snorkelling because the water was literally the clearest I have ever seen. We saw all kinds of fish, and amused ourselves by lifting up the rocks and watching the fish dart forward to feed on what was under them. We also tried to rent a paddleboat, but the person renting them out didn't recommend it due to the heat, so we took a pass. So we continued for a while, and then after said while we all got back into the car and began our way back.

The way back was where the problems started. John Cleese was leading us home during a traffic jam, and me not being content to stay stuck on the same road for the next hour led me to plot a separate route, one which Wanessa had never heard of. I honestly should have listened to her, because we ended up on a dead-end, a gate separating us between the tiny road we were on and the highway we could be zipping home on. Crestfallen, we all turned around, headed back, then, on the way back, we saw this other street that we thought might take us back. So we took that, which led us into the middle of nowhere (before we were on the outskirts of the middle of nowhere, it was legit nowhereness after that). Long story short, we spend about two and a half hours getting back when, normally, it would take us around one. Don't know what that traffic jam would have done to it, though. While we were all utterly exhausted by the time we got back, we all really liked it thanks to the beautiful views we saw on the way home, panicked as we were.

So, that's the biggest thing that's happened to us so far. Today we went to Domenico's house for lunch, where we ate tons of food, as is what happens when you eat at the house of someone who lives here. The view from his house is absolutely wonderful: You can see every single rooftop of every single house, the cars on the mountain roads going by, the ocean towns and the beaches, and the wind farm slightly to the left. If the Angolese have nothing else, they definitely have their views. I'm starting to wish I could extend my stay a bit or even live here, although I'm sure the novelty might wear off after a couple of months.

Glad my non-readers are up to speed. We've been in Angoli for quite a while, although I haven't had much to say about all of it. One thing that I really can't get used to here is the huge hills; I don't think I've ever craved something motorized this much. I also really miss being able to drive. Unfortunately, I'm sure that if I try I'll end up ruining the transmission in our car, due to the fact that I can't drive a stickshift, or at least I definitely can't drive a stickshift that well, especially when I consider the fact that at the moment we're living on a mountainside. Four months left. I still can't believe that it's 1/3 gone already. I might hide in a box when it's time to leave.

Angoli

So after navigating the traffic jam and successfully meeting up with Ugo and Wanessa at the AutoGrill that was about 30 minutes away from them, we began to make our way there. The drive up was incredibly terrifying, seeing as it was one of those mountainside villages and we were driving a tank. This morning I saw a charter bus up here and immediately felt incredibly sorry for the poor driver. At least he didn't have to follow a vespa that was comfortable navigating a mountainside road at not-okay-for-minivan speeds. The views were incredible: from the top of the mountain, you could see both the Mediterranean and Ionian seas, entire mountain ranges, and a huge wind farm that sprawled out for about two miles. Really cool. I wanted to take a picture, but it was a bit too dark. I'll try taking it later. Anyways, once we got up to the top we were greeted by some familiar faces, and my grandmother and aunt got to meet some new people / incredibly distant relatives. One thing that was really good for my French (and Italian, too) was their inability to speak anything but English; I had to translate for them whenever I was having a conversation. While it was helpful for my language skills, it got kind of old after a while.

Speaking of my grandmother and aunt (I'll just call them Mary & Kathy to simplify this, seeing as typing it out every time is getting somewhat irritating), I've decided that I'll go with them around Italy to help them out, seeing as they have never driven around in Europe before and probably need a little guidance. From what I've heard, we're going to re-visit Rome (Roma), go to Florence (Firenze), potentially Naples (Napoli), and some other ones as well. I haven't really asked them, and quite frankly I'm not sure if I want to find out, seeing as each city is likely going to take a fair amount of driving. It's not that I don't mind road trips, it's the fact that European cars just aren't built for such things. In our Honda Odyssey back home, we drove everywhere. It was spacious, comfortable, and had other features that just made sense for long trips. In our Peugeot 807, however, I have to scrunch up my knees, and if I want an extra inch or two of wiggle room by sliding my seat back I end up crushing the person sitting behind me. There isn't any trunk space (we've had to get a roof turtleshell thingy, and we still don't have enough room in the trunk), the seats are built for someone with the height of Napoleon (although it is a French car), and the acceleration, even for a minivan, is abysmal. We can barely make it up a hill. Although I do like the automatically folding mirrors. Those are fun to watch.

I'm done griping about road trips, the only thing it really means for me is that I have to spend an uncomfortable day in exchange for a few days in paradise. That said, I am really not looking forward to driving from Angoli to Paris. 18 hours of clown-car fun. Paris should be nice once we get back, though. I'm kind of apprehensive about school, but then again isn't everyone their junior year. Speaking of school, I'm still putting off my summer reading, which I've heard they actually go over. Yikes. I'll get started on it soon, I still have a good 3 weeks to finish my book. Of course, that 3 weeks will go by like lightning, just like the past 2 months have, thus the reason for this blog. Hopefully I'll write more in the future, because at this rate I won't be remembering much in the future. Yes, you heard me right. If you're even there; I never really expected anyone to read this so this is pretty much just a way of keeping a diary. Even though I'm going to forget a lot of this, I really hope that I'll be able to come back sometime. The people in Angoli are really nice, even though they do stare at you like you came here from Mars on a banana (although it is a town of 300 people, so they probably don't get many foreigners). France is cool too, although they really don't like tourists so if you have even the slightest accent they kind of automatically hate you. Especially if said accent is American, English, or Belgian. They're kind of stuck-up and kind of, well, French. I'm just generalizing, though, a lot of the friends I've made there are really nice. The people that you'll randomly see on the street, though, not so much.

Strangely, the northern Italians are like that, too. The southerners, though, not so much. Just don't mention the mob (seriously, don't), and you should be fine. I've measured the reactions between English and French, and, as I predicted, they look at you weirder if you speak English. So I tend to speak in French. Depending on the situation, though, sometimes I'll have to speak English to my siblings, so they end up giving me away. I get some kind of weird kick out of disguising myself. I'm done ranting now, we're about to go check out the town with Ugo and get stared at some more. We're probably the talk of the town, I hope it doesn't get to my head.

A not-so-fun way to be in Rome

After writing my post on the car ride, I'd like to say that a lot has happened but I'm not entirely sure. We finished the car ride about 3 hours afterwards, but once we arrived at the bed & breakfast, the woman who managed it wasn't there, so we had to wait for 30 minutes on the pavement until she arrived to unlock the gate. I don't mean to sound unappreciative, but there really isn't anything worse than arriving after an incredibly long journey, absolutely exhausted, only to realize that what you've been telling yourself is really close is actually a bit further away than you expected.
Anyways, we got all of our luggage in the hotel, played a few movies, and slept for about two hours until dinner, upon which we all went to a skype pal of my mom's (she seems to have a lot of those). We talked, haltingly, in French, English and Italian, and they showed us some kittens that they found in a bucket at the side of the road, which absolutely killed us because they were too young to survive without a mother and looked terribly unhealthy. After talking about taking one in, deciding not to for obvious reasons, and setting them back down in their box, we went upstairs and tried to forget. After eating lots of food, we eventually got back home at around 23:40, upon which we all fell asleep. Except for me. Last night I literally did not fall asleep until I somehow magically passed out at 7:00, when everyone was waking up. Thanks to this inexplicable insomnia, I now have a sore throat and a runny nose, in a time where it takes all of my concentration to understand a basic Italian sentence. Seriously?
Seriously. So we're likely to go out into the city today, something that I'd otherwise love to do, but we're currently waiting on our new arrivals to wake up (my grandmother and aunt) from their jet-lagged fog. I'll try to take pictures while I'm in Rome, but, to be honest, I might just stay home while they go out. Woe is me.

Recap

This is a recap starting from the 14th of July, which happens to be the French Independence day. I apologize for not posting at all during this rather long period of time, we've been rather distracted what with things being more French than we expected. Plus, finding internet when you have none is fairly difficult. All right. Here goes.

The 13th was our first day at French school, a place called "Fondation La Navarre", which, or so I've heard, is a place where all of the trouble children go during the school year. Which makes sense, considering there's a huge gate up front, all of the glass has cracks in it, and every single window has bars to prevent the children from escaping. A veritable prison. I'm in the highest level class with about seven other people, and it's hilarious because all of the teachers just love making announcements to our section because they don't have to speak slowly and use hand gestures. Just another ego boost to make me all the more hated once I get back. Or maybe before. After we went to school, we began preparing to meet the Mazzeis, a family that my mother has been following considering that we share some ancestry with them: If we can prove that we share ancestry with an Italian family, and that that family emigrated to the United States and had a child before they renounced their Italian citizenship, then we ourselves can become Italian citizens and therefore European Union citizens, which means that we can actually work in Europe. It's a rather long story.
Anyways, after we left, our GPS ended up taking us to the wrong place (oops!) and we ended up being 20 minutes late getting there. Great first impression, but I've heard that the Italians can be up to 1 hour late and not notice at all, which makes me feel somewhat better. We met them in Bandol, which is really a wonderful little town right on a huge harbor. After meeting them out in front of the town casino, we went to a little cafe and talked a bit. After that, we went to Lenou (the mother)'s brother's shoe shop, which was, funnily enough, called "Scalise", which is another Italian family name of ours. After that, we headed back to our minivan, which they found absolutely enormous, and went up to their house, where they literally stuffed us to the gills with a 3-course lunch: Paté, ham, sausage, and bread followed by a pasta dish and some salad (with olive oil as dressing) followed by pastries, followed by fruit. My mother explained to us that the more food they offered us, the more they liked us, and that we should try not to offend them, but I literally have never eaten so much in my life. And that was only lunch. After walking down to the harbor, they bought us ice cream, and after returning to the house they decided to serve us dinner, only it was the very same food that we had said we weren't able to eat 3 hours ago. So we stuffed ourselves again. With the same food. Later on, my mom admitted that at the time the only thing she was thinking about was how much she'd have to work out to lose all of the weight that she had likely gained from that day.
So, after nearly exploding, we went back down to the harbor to watch the fireworks (it was Bastille Day, and I was anticipating making up for what I had missed the 4th, considering the fact that all we really did was sat and stared at each other while a huge party was going on back home. And I was somewhat disappointed, but only because I was expecting American-size fireworks from a tiny beach town. They had anchored a battleship in the middle of the bay, and I was amazed at how many bottle rockets they could fit on the thing (although it is a battleship, I suppose). The show lasted about 20 minutes, and then everyone and their mother began running to the car to beat the end-of-fireworks rush. So we all returned to the house for a glass of water, and then we managed to find a clever way of avoiding the traffic that knocked at least 45 minutes off of our journey back, which was already a good half-hour. Plus, it was about 12:30 AM, meaning that we were going to be zombies when we went to French school the next day.
The next day was fairly uneventful: we pretty much went to school, got back, took a little nap, and then the Mazzeis arrived. We talked, ate (less) food, and skyped with my father, who was in Germany at the time. The funny thing was, my dad hasn't seen us in at least 1-2 weeks, and after speaking Spanish and German to everyone for that amount of time, he was absolutely craving an English conversation. Only thing was, the Mazzeis were over. So he was greeted with "Ciao Henry! On va parler en Français maintenant, ou si vous voulez on peut discuter en Italien!" For those of you non-French speakers, that was basically the Mazzeis telling my dad to speak in French to them, or Italian if he wanted. It was all he could do to not explode. Lucky for him, though, that he was arriving in Marseilles the following evening and would stay at our apartment for the next two days. The only two problems were that Marseilles was about 90 minutes away from our apartment and about 50 minutes away from the Mazzeis, and that their prioritization was more oriented to finishing the meal that they had made for us. So he ended up waiting for about 15 minutes, just about ready to start looking for hotels (the shuttles stopped running at midnight). Once we picked him up, the back of the car immediately went to sleep while my dad told me and my mom about his adventures in Spain, Holland, and Germany.
Today we went into town and watched Toy Story 3, and even though it was in French I found it absolutely wonderful; I really love sequels that don't make me cry. After that, we went and saw the old town, which forced me to imagine my mother trying to navigate the 2-meter wide streets in her minivan (we came very very near to that particular situation, she had to pull back her mirrors just so she could fit in the street). Once we got up to the top, though, it really was amazing: you could literally see the entire village (old and new) sprawled out in front of you, with the structures terminating where the sea began. I love views, but unfortunately my camera's been acting up lately, so I'm afraid I can't share it with you. I hope my readers (if I have any) are actually appreciating the fact that I added pictures to this post, though.

The Dawning of a New Era

So yesterday was the last day of school for me, or at least, the last day of school for me as a sophomore (Despite fleeting thoughts, I've resolved to not be a truant), and its closing really didn't make me feel any different. There was this odd thing that happened to me starting freshman year, where when school ends, the end of the year just doesn't have a tangible feeling of finality, unlike my experiences in middle school. I'm not saying it feels different because I'm an old fart, but it does kind of bug me, because at the end of the year, after studying my brains out, I feel like I have no other purpose in life but to study, and they dump me out to do nothing at all!

While I certainly don't want to go back to school because of that, I'm definitely going to start studying things that I actually want to know, like Perl. Perl has been really cool for me, I've only learned bits and pieces of it, but so far it's looking fantastic. Before Perl, the only language that I could really mess around with was PHP, and PHP for me was somewhat limited in that I could only really use it to develop web pages, although I've heard of people using it for other purposes. So Perl's my current obsession in the computer world, along with getting my bloody Eee PC to work again. I need to get it to work if I'm going to blog about my time in France; that thing is so tiny it's the perfect computer to sneak into a suitcase.

Last night, me and my friend went to see the Repo Genetic Opera, which I must say was pretty darn cool. It was showing at the Tivoli theatre at midnight, and the only reason I went was because my friend had been invited by someone else and she needed an escort. I felt special. Anyways, we went up to the box office, got our tickets, and walked in. The film didn't start for an agonizing amount of time, I'm pretty sure the film operator was either high or half-asleep, because it took forever to start and the last 10 minutes of the film couldn't be watched because he broke the projector. Despite this setback, we enjoyed it thoroughly. The film was shadowed by a bunch of actors, who performed onstage while the movie went on behind them.

The actors had encouraged us to shout at them, shout at the film, and pretty much do whatever the hell we wanted save burn down the place. So we did. Or at least, most of us did. One time, when a scene opened up with one of the characters, Shilo, lying in a pool of blood, this random guy in the audience shouted "NEED A TAMPON?" So yeah. That was pretty much my night. Speaking of blood, the whole thing involved gallons of it, in addition to gore, violence, copious cursing, nudity, sex... It was only afterwards that we discovered that the film was rated R, which led us to wonder how the hell we got in. We got out at about 2 am, and I drove home as discreetly as I possibly could, because I realized about halfway through the movie that there's a 12am-5am curfew for young drivers such as myself. So I dropped my friend off, walked back to my car, and I notice that a police car was cruising down the street, high-beams on, patrolling the neighborhood. Thankfully, he didn't stop me, and while I have no idea why, I was incredibly thankful. My mother probably wouldn't have been too happy getting woken up and dragged out of bed to talk to a policeman about me, especially when she had been suspicious about the whole outing from the beginning.

That movie was so amazing, though, that I bought the soundtrack. I rarely buy soundtracks for movies; the only soundtrack I think I've ever bought was James Bond, which was necessary because I was bored and running around the house pretending I had a gun necessitated some theme music. So that was my night, and it sure was a great reward after sitting around taping pieces of cardboard together for 5 days. And now, it'll be back to packing for France. I still have an entire room to clear out.