Oh yea... so Friday (the 18th) was my 17th birthday. The whole week before that was a mix of booooring scuola, making friends, and seeing il Duomo! So I'll start at the beginning :)

lunedi - first day at school! Not capitalizing the day is gonna be a little difficult... here there is no Lunedi its just lunedi (monday). Scuola was interesting... the first day. I did not understand anything, but I met the principal and the english teacher (who is super funny). The english teacher has a hilarious habit of saying "yes, that's right" to everything anyone says... so I would be stretching my arms during class (another habit that is not allowed here ?!?!) an she would catch me and say AH AH AH! While I am blushing, followed by a "Mi dispiace!" (I'm sorry) followed by, "Yes, that's right!" So... hahaha there are so many things that have culture shocked me here I can't even begin to explain. I appear to be taking Math, Science, English, Philosophy, Religion, Italian, Latin, Art, and Gym (rarely). I go to school at 8:15, usually by bicycle with my cousin Enrica. School the prima settimana (first week) got out at 12:30... but usually we get done at 1:15. There is a break from 10:15-10:30 where students can go to the cafe in the school or outside to smoke. Which apparently they do at school here. This was just a little surprising the first day, haha. My class has 16 kids in it, 3 boys and the rest are girls. They are all very nice! Everyone talks in English to me, or tries to... whic h is quite infuriating when you are trying to learn italian... haha but they are all really nice. Another difference I noticed between Alaska and Italy.. In the class everybody knows each other and is nice to each other.. there are no cliques from what I can see. After school I go home (because I lack the ability to make solid friends quickly) and hang out in my house. The next day I have a delicious breakfast of coffee and cookies... and a peach! The breakfast here really is quite lovely haha. When we were biking to school, Enrica saw that she had some bike grease on the leg of her pants (near the foot, where you don't really notice). Being as it that I bike a lot, I just said oh don't worry you're fine, that happens to me all the time... apparently in Italy that doesn't happen all the time because her reaction was a tad different. She kept saying "this is simply unacceptable.. I have to go home and change..." the only reason we got to school on time is because her brother agreed to bring pants to school for her so she could change. This was the biggest culture shock for me yet... it was just such a different reaction compared to an environment where kids wear sweatpants and pyjamas to school. I also have discovered that whoever made the statement "math is the same in every language" is a freaking liar. Math is super hard... I'm pretty sure we're studying parabolas but past that I am a little lost. Science is a fun subject, the teacher is really nice and tries to explain everything to me as best she can. Science is a mix of chemistry and biology... right now we're studying amino acids. It was pretty crazy to realize that the names of the elements on the periodic table are in a different language. After school I come home and eat lunch with my family... then either stay in (like I did the first couple days) or go out. On Wednesday I even went to mi amica Ale's house for an hour, followed by me biking home and NOT EVEN GETTING LOST! I was pretty excited about this, in case you couldn't tell. So school school school... then along comes FRIDAY! Normally it'd be a TGIF moment, but sadly, we have school on Saturday :'(. However, Friday I got to go to the Duomo (center of milan) with Emma!!! Which would explain the picture above. The Duomo was sooooo big! When we got off the subway I literally was like WOAH THIS THING IS FRICKEN HUGE!- Whilst many a tourist looked at me quite odd. We went shopping and walked around... saw the Louis Vuitton store, Prada store, Salvatore Ferragamo store... all the stores we couldn't go in... the duomo is so big and old that it kind of seems like a seperate city than Milan... a little city inside the city (like the Vatican). Then we got gelato. It was GOOD. There was one called Baccio that I got that means kiss in italian and it tastes like NUTELLA ICE CREAM. Kind of a genius creation. Strawberry is really good also. I had to go at 4, so me and her took the metro until I had to get off. The next day, Saturday, I had school. I disagree with this school on Saturday thing. However it was only 2 hours (first saturday school only) and then my dad Andrea and I went to get me a metro pass downtown. That took about an hour... and it turns out I have to wait 15 days to get it! Lame. After that my sorella and I went to go shoe shopping, and I got a really adorable pair of high heels! And they are high, about 3 inches. This turned out to possibly be the stupidest idea I have ever had. Saturday night Emma and I slept over at a family friends house. Their son had done an exchange in Wisconsin for a year and since it was my birthday we went to the discotecca. Just in case you were wondering, going dancing in 3 inch high heels for 4 hours isn't really that easy. Or fun. But dancing was amazinnggggly fun! It was so so so fun to be out and dancing all night. We went to an old villa near the center of town... it had been redesigned? i guess? As a club... it was awesome though. Also met a ton of people, don't really remember any names, but i've never been good with those :P After this, school dances are going to seem a little lame :/ haha. Anywayyy after that we went back to the house at about 3:30 and fell asleep, Emma went back to Buccinesco while I slept in till 1:30, nice. Sunday we went to the park, which is the closest to nature that you can get here in Milan, so that wfas fun. Now I'm tired, even after drinking tons of coffee. I drink so much coffee that my mom here, Ale, thinks I will have a heart attack (ha ha ha... too much coffee, what a joke). However they don't use milk here, just sugar... different
Anywayy I am tired and have been writing FOREVER so ciao!!
Katie xoxo