So my friend Liz said that for two blogs she writes I have to write at least one...I figure that a good amount of time has passed since my last update and my english has gotten more terrible than every so now is a great time to write again! It's just hard when writing seems so uninteresting and there are ENDLESS things to distract yourself with like, oh it's funner to count the number of colors on my pillow than it is to write this blog. So where to start. The last time I wrote was about New Years, which was amazing, and then I went to France for 7 days with my family to ski. So the morning we were headed out I asked my dad how long the drive was and he said about 4 1/2 - 5 hours because we're really close to France. Turned out that 5 hours actually means 12! WHoo! We drove all the way to a town that was right next to the town that we were supposed to be in, and there they told us that we couldn't continue this way because there was a snowfall blocking the road. So then we had to drive alllll the way (4 hours or so) back around the circle and go a different way. Hard to explain, but safe to say that at like 10 or so at night (we left at 9 am) we arrived! Wooo! The place that we went is called Tignes. Even though I'm pretty sure it only snowed once the whole week we were there, the day it snowed it snowed a BUNCH. THis made for fresh beautiful powder practically the whole week that was soooo wonderful and easy and fun. Also on the last day it snowed, and me and my brother got very, very lost. This ended with a half hour of walking to a freaking ski lift in the middle of nowhere. The ski plan is above :) So.. my family, my brother's girlfriend, and our family friends Silvia and Bianca Maria were who was there. We rented a like.. apartment I guess for a week and it was soso cute and had a little fireplace and everything and a COFFEE machine and I drank like, american coffee for a whole week and I was... thoroughly dissapointed. Ohh dear. I think I will be definetley bringing back a coffee machine to the states because it just doesn't cut it anymore :( Apparently my spelling is so terrible that the word I'm trying to get doesn't even come up when you click spell check. This is bad. Oh well... the snow was amazing, it was so much fun to go for 7 days even though I was really happy to return to Milan too. So I first tried it in France but apparently we have it here too it's called Vin Brule and it's like heated wine... it is SO. GOOD. It tastes like apple cider but with a slightly bitter aftertaste and MANNNNN it is delicious I pretty much had it everyday. Also the hot chocolate in France is terrible like the kind you buy out of a machine in America and I am sorry but everyone needs to work on their hot chocolate skills. Except Italy, they got it down. France has a lot of cheese. It's really good. We had cheese every single night for dinner. In the end it was a little too much cheese. But it was still pretty good. After we got home from skiing i usually feel right (is that right?) asleep... but one night my family taught me how to play 7 1/2 which is like the same as blackjack but instead of 21 its 7 1/2 and I started out with a euro and ended with 6 (we played with small coins) so yea that was really fun. Also one night there was live music at one of the bars in the tiny place that we stayed (you can see it on the map in the far right corner, on the lake called Tinges les Brevieres). So, my brothers, Silvia, Vanessa and I went to listen for an hour or so and it was pretty fun the people who played were actually really good and then there was some drunken frenchmen dancing around which was nice too. However most of the french are kind of snobby. But I still like their country. Then, on Saturday, fter another wonderful 7 hour drive, we returned to Milan. I was pretty tired so me and Tonje decided to go to a bar and then go to bed early at around 1. Now... more updates? Nn lo so haha. I've been pretty sick for like a week and haven't been going to school very regularly because in the US it's normal to go to school when your sick and cough at school or whatever but here when I coughed everybody looked at me like I was a freak and was like... why aren't you home? So I think it's better to stay home haha. Also here it's really interesting they are SUPER GREEN. We were talking about recycling the other day in class and there was only ONE girl who's family only recycled like.. a little I think. Everyone separates their trash and then takes it down to the parking in the apartment building where there are different bins to put in the different types of trash. If you don't recycle right, you get fined. Also, instead of kleenex in classes (this is a bit gross) they all carry around hankerchiefs like it's the 1800's. I respect that this is super green and you save a lot of paper and stuff but it's still kind of gross when people blow their nose and then put it back in their pocket.. that's a little harder for me to get used to. Right now to improve my italian more I am watching all these movies in italian with the subtitles in italian... it's not that difficult but without the subtitles it is for me because everyone speaks DIFFERENT and it makes it harder to understand. I really don't know what to write about now! A couple days ago I went to a happy hour with my friend Costy, and it was more of a like meeting of people than aperitivo and we talked about what's happening in the south of Italy with the mafia. The guy that spoke at the meeting told us about how there was a big mafia boss who got arrested by the police and all of his orchids and fields and things were abandoned because he wasn't there to order people around, so a group of people called Terra Libera which means free earth got together and started cultivating the fields which is like a positive thing you can do to protest the mafia... and the mafia family down there got really mad that they were being productive and stuff (they make wine, tomato sauce, pesto, ect..) and the workers found a gutted dog on the fields with all the insides and blood smeared everywhere and this was a sign that if they didn't stop the mafia was going to kill them and stuff. However they keep going... It's a really big problem, the Mafia here. In America I think that we think the mafia is a joke like something you see on television or something like Scarface I don't know, but it's actually a huge problem in Italy and they are really worried about it and it's hard to understand that this stuff is really happening like people disappear and things happen and some people just choose to not think about it but it's really happening. Also apparently before I left for France I recharged my metro card for April. I was unaware that you could do this. But yea, YOU CANN! ha.. Remember foreigners that here the date ALWAYS goes DAY/ MONTH/ YEAR not Month/day/year. It is now the 21st and I still have not changed it. It's not necessarily lazyness just non dedicatedness. IM SORRY I WILL START UPDATING MORE I PROMISE