Guess It might be time to blog again...

I have now been here for four months, and I can’t believe it! It feels like I was just saying good bye to everyone and just got here. But at the same time I feel like I’ve been here my whole life. When anyone here says anything about going back I don’t believe it’s going to happen because my life home seems like a dream. We just got what everyone says is the “rough” part of the year with Christmas and all the holidays. If that is supposed to be the hard part the rest of the year is going to perfectly fine. I actually found this part the best part of the year so far. It was strange not having my own family around, but I had my entire Italian family her the whole time. My sister was in from college which was fun. For Christmas we had dinner on the 24th at my aunt’s house with my mom’s side of the family. Afterwards we went to midnight mass and opened our gifts. Christmas day is not the big day like it is back in the U.S. Here we had Christmas lunch at our house. I have to admit this is my first year without watching The Santa Clause or Elf, but it was still amazing. For New Years I went to a party with my friend and spent the night at her house. There we played cards and shot off fireworks. On New Year’s Day my family and I went to eat lunch at my uncle’s house out in the country where we also got to ride his horses! On January 6th there is also another holiday with La Befana. For it we do like our stockings from Christmas. I also got what’s called a Moka, which is a coffee machine to make Italian coffee. That afternoon we went to Potenza to eat lunch at the house. That was the last of the holidays here. We ate a lot of food (which was all delicious) and we were always with our family. My family is all very nice, and it’s like I’m a real part of the family. Everything is going smoothly here. With my family, I’m really lucky to have been placed into a family that I have no problems with. School is school, and I’m not starting to enjoy going six days a week, because I get to see all my friends. With the school I’m doing shot-put, volleyball, and I also played some soccer. It’s defiantly not as competitive as it is in the U.S., but it’s fun and keeps me in shape. The language really isn’t a problem anymore for me. I can’t believe that I’ve learned as much as I have in such a short amount of time. I still make a lot of errors, but I can speak fine and understand almost everything. It’s now been a year since I’ve been accepted into AFS and I couldn’t have imagined anything better. I hope the next six months are just as good as the past four months have been.