OK, so my Italian host lady is turning out to be a little crazy and more than a little hard to live with. She's not really mean she's just obsessive about the house and all her stuff and very, very opinionated and always tries to tell us what to do. Now, if you know me and my family you will know that my parents barely tell me what to do, so this is not easy for me. She tells us what we should or shouldn't eat, what we should watch or read, where we should go, what we should do and she's always getting angry when we talk in engilsh (my room mates don't speak any italian so it's english or nothing!) She never leaves the house, but she's always complaining that we don't go out enough and she keeps trying to set me up with random italian boys! She invites them over to the house and then will just come into our room while we are sitting on our beds in pjs reading or whatever and she'll bring them in and introduce us! Then she complains about us using too much water when we take showers - now, let me tell you something about showers here, NO shower curtain, a moveable shower head with no hook to hang it on, and about enough hot water for ten minutes. SInce there's no where to put the shower head and you always have to have at least one had free to hold it you don't even have the choice of leaving the water running while you wash your hair or body, you turn it off and put it down between each step, then without the shower curtain it's all drafty and cold so all you really want to do is get done and get out - we shower FAST around here and still in the middle of the second persons shower the hot water goes! And she tells us that it should last SIX people!!!!! I tell you what, if shower races were included in the olympics an Italian would win. And all the work in the house is still not finished so the painters are here all the time - but I don't really think they are painters because they're not all that good at it, paint on the windows and floor, different kinds on two halves of a wall, not so good. They come around 6 or 7PM and stay till around midnight! And the sing in the hallway! Loud! In italian(and once in engish - a gwen stefani song!) I actually like the painters, they are funny and nice, but they are always fighting with the host lady - and they're italians so the neighbors probably hear every word! It's pretty annoying really. Then there's the TV which she told us we could watch, but hasn't really worked out. We could be in the middle of a movie and she walks in and without saying anything let alone asking if she can change the channel she just switches over to a boaring talk show or some old american musical badly dubbed into Italian. And the couch - on no, you don't sit on the couch! Well, you can, but you can't put your feet on it, you can't even rest your back on it! She says it cost about as much as a car and is really nice, but we can't see it really because it's always covered by some old sheet because she doesn't want it to get messed up because it's so pretty....now tell me, if you buy a really comfortable couch that you can't sit comfortably on and that is really pretty, but you can never enjoy it's beauty because it's covered by a sheet to protect it, well, what's the point of having a really comfortable pretty couch in the first place!? And we can't touch the walls, or the doors for that matter, we can't put anything hard on the shelves because they might scratch them, our beds can't touch the walls, or any of the other furniture or items in the room - including us! I thought the newly painted and furnished room was a good thing, but it's becoming a bit of a pain. And she doesn't understand no - she offered us another table, we said no thanks, hey guys look, I got you another table! O yay. You wan't some of this strange rice mush food thing I made? No, really no thanks. Here have a spoonful, how about two, three, four! Dai, dai, go on eat it it's good. Your towel is too small, I'll give you a bigger one. No thanks, mine is big enough for me thanks. No it's not, here have this big one. Thanks really, but I don't want another one. Here. No thanks. Here. No! I don't want the towel! Here. I know that in her way she's trying to be nice and helpful, but you can't force kindness on someone or stuff a gift down their throat - it just stops it from being kindness, it makes the gift an obligation. And the electricity is all faulty and things keep popping and going out and then she blames it on us. It's getting kind of crazy. But here is what has come out of all this crazyness - a crazy strong connection with my room mates. We have bonded like ions, we're tight. We have all joined a gym that's like a thirty second walk from our house and after school we all come home and change then go off and do one or two classes at the gym(our favorite is kick boxing:) and then we come home and make dinner together and then go cuddle on Claudia's big bed and watch a movie, or just sit in Vanesa and my room and paint our nails and talk and laugh about our crazy Italian home. Tonight Claudia made us all some special soup she feeds her family in Sweden, yesterday I made us all spinach and prosciuto torilini with tomato and basil sauce and parmesian cheese and then we took chocolate puddings in to watch Lucky Number Slevin on Claudia's laptop:) Vanesa wants to try to find some Mexican ingredients around here so she can make us one of the dishes she misses so much from home. We have only all been together for two weeks, but have already made classic memories, shared unforgetable experiences, and developed a language of our own made up of English, Italian and inside jokes. I love my room mates! We share and care and support each other and we laugh until we cry because our abs are so sore from tonification class at the gym! I'm so sore I can barely move - and I love it! We've made some friends at the gym - American and Italian:) - and we discovered today that the showers there are really nice! We decided that from now on we will just walk over to the gym whenever we want to take a shower - and they have a sauna too! Which would be really nice right now considering it SNOWED YESTERDAY! Not even joking! I ran home from the gym in the snow! You should have seen Claudia(45 years old) and me running and screaming and laughing and trying to get the key out quick and open the big old door to our house. I felt like I was six years old and had just seen my first snow. It was fun.

You should see us at the gym, we are getting pretty well known:) I'm the little blond american who always smiles and who keeps up in kick boxing class and Claudia is the stacked Swede who lifts more weight than the guys with perfect hair and make-up:) We have fun.