Welcome to Brescia

After our first train had been a good four hours, we were quite surprised when, 40 minutes out of Milan, we arrived in Brescia (a place none of us had heard of). Our camp director (an eccentric Italian lady with a shock of orange hair) met us at the station and whisked us off in her car en route to Concesio - the place where our camp was to be.

Originally I had wanted to teach older children in a small camp, made up of tutors from orientation; what we were given was a large camp of children - the oldest being 11 - and we were to be joined by four more experienced tutors. We weren't to meet our fellow campers until that evening.

Kitty was dropped off first and the camp director gave a glowing reference of her new family - talk about full of praise. Lucky Kitty, methinks. Then it was Lydia's turn - yet more A* quality - the family seemed truly angelic. Then it was me. We made polite small talk in the car; I revealed my Italian expertise, which was received with surprise, giving hope to the fact my application probably hadn't been scrutinised that closely: my origami would live to die another day...

After that brief interchange we fell silent and soon arrived. As we walked through a rusty gate and into a dark hallway the camp director looked over to me and said,

"The house has a history."

Oh. Where was my exceptional familial review? Aren't there any nice things you have to say about them? Can't you at least give me some information!

Then I met my mum.

I was welcomed into her home, introduced to her charming daughters, given the house keys, and left to take it all in by having a well-earned nap. It was not a restful nap; my thoughts were plenty: who were these people? How should I behave? What if I offend them? What do they expect of me?

I confess there were feelings of regret - granted it was only two weeks, but two weeks is a long time if you're not enjoying yourself. I thought of my Sanremo friends all having identical experiences at the very same moment. My mood wasn't helped by the weather - it had turned strangely mysterious and the thunderclouds had rolled in. Talk about pathetic fallacy...

I wasn't given long to ponder these issues as I was soon delivered to the school to meet the rest of the tutors, so off I popped with my mum (whose name I had already forgotten) to meet some more people that I was to spend the next two weeks getting to know.

Heading East

On the Friday of orientation we were put in groups and told where we'd be going. Despite the churning rumour mill, everyone got a place, including Jack and Jill... I was off with two girls that in honour of Pride and Prejudice we shall call Kitty and Lydia. I had spent very little time with them during the week and I had a feeling that Kitty was going to take it very seriously and Lydia, well, wasn't. I was half right (more on that later).

Although we were by ourselves in a compartment on the 9am train east from Sanremo, we'd left as a mass exodus of tutors so every now and then a familiar face would stop by. A short while later Lydia scarpered to watch Shrek 2 with 'her friends'.

Lydia was a funny one. She was stick thin, like properly stick thin, like skeletal, like a bit gross. She was born in Malta, but was really English, and studied in Birmingham. Along this confused family tree were some Italian grandparents, giving her a reasonable grasp of the language. Despite this, when an elderly couple entered the carriage, wanting to sit in their rightful seats - one of which Lydia was occupying (or, to be precise, a third of which Lydia was occupying) - I've never seen so much huffing: you'd have thought it was a steam train...

I actually thought the couple were very polite about it all considering the Italians can get flared up so easily, but Lydia, who seemed incapable of working out the seating plan stuck to the wall exploded (or imploded as she didn't actually go on and make a scene). Not much longer into the journey she had answered the call of Shrek.

Now I love a petulant teenage display of insolence as much as the next person, but I could see that we probably weren't going to be the best of friends forever and ever. I was just glad she ran off so she could moan at someone else.

Kitty, however, was much harder to read; we did the polite conversations, the awkward silences, nothing that will really help you to get to know someone. She didn't seem to fit into the stereotype I'd given her and in true Pride and Prejudice style, I realised that my first impression may have been wrong.

The only time I'd really spoken to her had been in a group activity earlier in the week when she'd shouted down one of my ideas in favour of one of hers, which turned out to be a bit rubbish. But after my reassessment on the train, I decided I would get to know her a little better after placing her into a Stereotype-Tupperware and putting on the air-tight seal. I suppose I considered her a little incompetant; both Lydia and I spoke Italian and seemed to be a little more Europe-savvy than Kitty (who was from Canada).

We changed trains in Milan - my first trip through Milan station (please make a note, it will not be the last), and, with a reduced number of tutors, started heading towards Brescia.

The Laughing Seagull

Being a four-day intensive programme, we got little time to sleep; we were in bed after 12 every night and we had to get up at 7 in order to make it in time for breakfast. It didn't help, therefore, when we discovered that the Ligurian coast was inhabited by a healthy population of seagulls.

They did indeed take great pleasure in chatting to each other at 6am outside our window. Being a heavy sleeper these mutterings soon found their way into my dreams. I don't really mind seagulls in my dreams, but there was one in particular that sounded a lot like someone laughing. I tell no lie.

Breakfast chat at the hotel usually began thus:
'Did you hear the laughing seagull this morning?'
'Yeah, something must have really amused it this morning.'

By far the strangest thing was that the laughing seagull never appeared in my dreams; I did, however, think the noise belonged to my roommate. In the moments of exhaustion-filled surreality I thought she was sitting up in bed, laughing. I recounted the story to her the following morning at which point she seemed greatly relieved. She replied that it was good to hear such news as she had had the same dream about me...

They Call me the Sweeper...

Throughout orientation, our time was somewhat punctuated by Italians (in a nice comic relief-style way). There was the company director who, though passionate, was a little annoying, but did give Jack someone to talk to... However, by far the most [unintentionally] entertaining person was the sweeper.

Obviously being July and being Italy it was sweltering, so we'd often go outside for our workshops. The result of that was that we came into contact with quite a few locals. There was the man in the Apecar that seemed to take pleasure in scattering our game of 'Captain's Coming' so that he could drive round in a circle before disappearing. This also happened with people on Vespas, but they took up less space and to be honest in a competition between a Vespa and 150 tutors-in-training I know who I'd bet on.

But the sweeper.

Someone told me he may have been an olive or two short of a pizza, either that or he was horrendously socially awkward. He used to sweep the grounds, making sure all the Vespas had a clear road (until they ran into us, that is). He had a yellow-handled brush with a green plastic sweep-y bit (technical term), no shirt (it was tucked into his trousers), and a rather unpleasant smell. But we collectively kept our distances and no more was said on the matter. Well until that fateful workshop on pre-school children...

I was a couple of minutes late due to a large queue in the toilets and when I found the group, they were sitting on some steps in a lovely shady spot. I duly joined and started learning how to teach English to 4 and 5 year-olds. About halfway through over comes our friend, the Sweeper, wanting very much to sweep the area we were all sitting in. He mumbles in Italian and gets a little shirty with the lady running the workshop, but she smiles, says 'cinque minuti' and he wanders off, brush in tow.

Two minutes later he's back, trying to express earnestly how much he needs to sweep this particular area. We do the whole 'cinque minuti' thing and off he trundles.

Two minutes later he's back again, but really quite agitated. This poor girl with her even poorer Italian tells him that we'll only be 'cinque minuti', but this time, instead of wandering off, he stands there, seemingly staring us all out - just having a good look at all these peculiar people sat upon the things he desperately needs to brush away.

He stands there for about two minutes more and we manage to ignore him, on the whole, then he decides to remind our workshop leader he's here and we repeat the whole 'cinque minuti' saga, which is now becoming slightly tiresome. Really wanting to make his presence felt, he stands even closer to our workshop leader who is, by now, halfway through the story of 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'. Now he really starts to become a distraction - we're listening intently to how the caterpillar eats more and more and m... Oh my goodness, he's standing practically on top of this poor girl and, oh no, he's scratching himself.

I confess I don't know how the story ended - whether it held true to the original, or whether the caterpillar was set upon by aliens, because the other show was far more captivating. But then, regardless of the caterpillar, the Sweeper decided he would wait no longer and proceeded to sweep around us which, when you're sitting on the floor at the extremities of the group, it is by no means the best place to be...

We're at the Robot Disco...

Obviously the point of the week, all partying and banter aside, was to learn how to teach kids (and specifically Italian kids) English. It wasn't just the past participles and the subjunctive! Oh no! We were also taught how to bring a spot of fun into the classroom with songs, games and drama.

Much of the focus was on the final show extravaganza. As one of the methods we had to employ was practical teaching, in a highly ironic situation we had to do some practical learning and come up with a show of our own.

Oh Mamma...

In theory this was fine. I was in a group with some lovely English girls. And a not-so-lovely American girl. She is New Yoik through-and-through and potentially the most irritating person I have ever had to create an end-of-camp show with.

Once we had decided on a show, however, everything seemed to be a lot easier. The trouble is it took us two full days to do that, meaning that time at the business end of making a show was reduced. Massively. Each group had to come up with their show as if they only had a certain level of English - our level was such that we could only operate in the present tense using very simple language. This was a concept my American friend did not comprehend who kept throwing past, future, and even the conditional at our modest script.

It was all time travel related - there were plenty of pirates and robots and Miss America was, of course, the protagonist. Once I'd explained the point of the exercise and the relative grammatical level of the children we were pretending to be, we managed to get something together; it was, however, arguably the worst of the lot - its only redeeming quality was the song, penned by my own fair hand in approximately 8 seconds (which, similarly, is how long it lasts):

"We're at the robot disco
We like to disco, disco."


I can practically hear EMI banging on my door right now. I still do get it in my head from time to time and with it comes the urge to dress up in a cardboard box and dance like Peter Crouch...

As for Miss United States, well she got lumped with Jack and Jill (the oddballs from a previous post) and I felt that the world's balance was temporarily restored...

Don't Stand on that Syringe!

The last night of orientation went down on the pier. Although not clear, the view back over Sanremo was pretty impressive and the misty sea behind us was hypnotic. We'd all gone down for some official takeaway pizzas. It was a real DIY fix with the plastic cups zipping up and down along with our friends, the 5 litre vats of quality wine. Mmm...


In theory it was a lovely way to close the whole shebang - we weren't on a time limit, we could roam, we could dip our feet in the sea, we could watch the sunset and so on. However, in reality we seemed to have accidentally taken over Sanremo's junkie haven for the night:
"What's that inamongst the broken glass?"
"A syringe."
"Oh."

Many of the party did shimmy over the pier walls to go and dip their feet in the glittering sea - the wine went with them. To this day I know not how they got back as the wall was at least 5 foot. I think the wine may have helped.

The following day we all went our separate ways and although some of us met up again, much of the Sanremo magic had gone; we were no longer part of an identical experience. I kept (and still keep) in touch with a few of the people I met in Sanremo, but I have a sneaky feeling that four days out of my life will be all the time I ever spend with them all. It's a shame, a real peccato. They were a fabulous bunch.

So before my train heads off to Brescia, stay tuned over the next few days for a couple of stories from the business end of my training week so you can begin to understand how it's possible to make lifelong friends...

Happy Birthday to Yah!

During the four-day orientation there were about as many birthdays. I mean I can think of better ways to spend my 21st than in a small Sanremo backstreet dancing with a lot of drunk people I have never met before...

My roommate had the [mis]fortune of having her birthday during our stay. She did at least pick a sophisticated venue for her meal - the boat club. We got hopelessly lost on the way and hadn't even come across the helper directing everyone to his 'boom gate' - whatever that was.

Although it might have been a posh venue, the same old food was rolled out: pasta and pesto, some questionable meat, stale bread. Mmm... my mouth is literally not watering. Not only that, but the presentation was impeccable - plastic plates and bowls and plastic knives and forks: you know when you're trying to cut up a piece of incredibly dry chicken, a fragile bit of plastic is just not going to do the trick. At the end of dinner the table was littered with broken eating irons. Only they weren't made out of iron and is thus the point I'm making.

As the night wore on, we felt it slipping away for some of the would-be campers and, as my roomie had had a bit of a rough night the previous day in the old town, I hot-footed it out with her and a my airport friends for a night of exploring Sanremo with a dash of banter and a spot o' gelato.

We ended up sitting at the entrance to Narnia (or the old town to everyone that hasn't read the previous post) eating our ice cream. We were 'approached' by several locals of the male variety and tried to distance ourselves from a very interesting conversation with a French immigrant as the witching hour edged closer.

Apart from that it was a really fun night and the other three girls were a great laugh. It's at this point that one of my old housemates would nod wisely whilst saying 'ahh, friends for a season' and I would then shout her down for being cynical. That said, however, she's right. They were my friends for a very short season of my life, but though they may have disappeared out of my day-to-day life, they're definitely not forgotten.

The Ghetto

Something that I've noticed about Italy is the fact that it is constructed in such a way that humble Britons have never considered. To clarify - do you ever see anyone taking pictures of council flats in Britain? Do the busloads of Japanese tourists ever stop by a tower block so that they can admire its quaintness? No, is the answer, in short: no-one in their right mind would compliment a British ghetto for its architectural contribution to a city.

This is one of the many areas where Italy differs from Great Britain. I spent an evening in Sanremo's ghetto, taking an awful lot of pictures and getting lost in its delapidated simplicity. It sounds horribly pretentious, but it was genuinely like stepping out of a Narnia-esque wardrobe: crooked TV aeriels, broken shutters, beautiful hanging baskets spilling over balconies, and the odd neighbourhood cat enjoying a spot of evening sunshine outside a door that had been left ajar. Most of the community were Southeners that had come to look for jobs inamongst the northern prosperity. This was my first experience of the North/South divide; these people were not living in prosperous conditions, but no doubt better than the life they left in the South.

This world fascinated me. It was just totally incomparable to Britain. I tend to spend a lot of my time lamenting the lack of something in Italy, or the presence of something unwelcome instead, but sights like Sanremo old town help to remind me that even though I am squarely in the European Union, that umbrella does not begin to explain the cultural differences that exist everywhere you turn.

At the top of the old town was a small set of gardens with a panorama over Sanremo. It was at that point I really noticed what an ugly city it is.I feel it would be much improved by sunshine; however in the heavy heat of early evening, I saw it all - tower blocks, overcrowding, hotels, restaurants, carpets of sun loungers, congested roads...

Down there was Europe - not a country in particular, but Europe and the EU; it had taken over a town like Butlins. Italy was being suffocated on a little hill - or is that resisting change? It was a breath of fresh air up there - the narrow streets below were far too claustrophobic.

Early Bath

So the training took place over four days and it would take far too long to go into detail and, to be honest, it would be bone-crunchingly boring for anyone who wasn't there. Let us, however, start with the people that were there...

We were not the first group of would-be tutors to embark upon a week of training that year, and, as is often the case in the 21st century, Facebook tainted our enjoyment slightly. Someone had posted in a makeshift 'let's get to know each other' page and accidentally let slip that he had been sent home from the training week but a month previous. An early bath, therefore, became a very real possibility.

During the first night antics, there was no party atmosphere in the chats I was having. We began to think back to our applications and the minor fabrications we had added. I saw myself turning up to camp and be immediately expected to create an entire nativity scene out of origami whilst playing a number of classics on the guitar. The reality was such that I would have been able to make an origami house, and play 'Amazing Grace' with lengthy pauses between each chord. I could practically visualise standing in front of the departures board.

Despite our greatest fears, everyone at our orientation got a camp in some form or other, even some of the stranger participants... I'm not going to mention any names, but there were two people in particular that only narrowly got through to the judges' houses after bootcamp (so to speak).

There was a gentleman, let's call him Jack, in his mid-30s; he had apparently been in prison in Thailand and had no experience of working with chlidren. He took pictures of everything and subjected everyone to his odd music. He gave feedback liberally and voiced his ideas readily - ideas that were ridiculous. I have no amusing anecdote about him because I avoided him at all costs.

I do, however, have an amusing anecdote about another member of our group, a young girl from Glasgow that we shall call... Hmm... Jill. She was Glaswegian and had an accent that you could hack with a Stanley knife lifted from a Glasgow street corner. We tried to include her, but she seemed to prefer the life of a space cadet than back on earth. Consequently we ignored her and all rubbed along fine. Having said all of that, it was never going to go well when she volunteered to do a lengthy demonstration of the song 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' and the jungle explorers came across some sticks. When a room of people are fed up of watching pointless exercises, they tune out - especially when Jill was involved. If, however, someone suddenly starts shouting a world that sounds a lot like 'sex' over and over, it's going to give people the wake-up call they needed.

Poor Jill.

Sanremo, Italy's St. Tropez

As is often the way with a programme like the one I was on, you make friends instantly and forge such fierce friendships over a short space of time that you actually feel closer to those people than older, more distant friends. I was partaking in all this Italian fun with a friend from my university, and along the way we picked up another girl in Nice who was going the same way. It's funny how subconscious coping mechanisms kick in and you're soon giving the banter your best and having tearful goodbyes at the end of a week.

Anyway, before this gets too philosophical, I'll get back to the story. The three of us decided to hit Sanremo that evening to get some necessary nourishment. It was the first of many, many pizzas during my stay. It was there I was introduced to the phenomenon of the 'coperta'. You peruse a menu, decide you can afford one of the cheaper pizzas, and agree to share a bottle of still water (none of this fizzy stuff - seriously why would you do that!?). You can do it all for under 10 Euros which, on a meagre student budget, is very reasonable.

We ate, drank, and were merry; I asked for the bill in my basic Italian and recieved a nice 3,50 service charge (or 'coperta') on each meal. So much for a cheap and cheerful dinner. After a quick jaunt back by the American bar (where our fellow would-be tutors were loitering) we headed back for an early night with a week of training yawning ahead of us.

Sanremo is almost better in the dark. There is something tatty about it at close inspection. Forty years ago it would have been the place to be - when you finished in St. Tropez, you moved onto Sanremo. The shame of it is that the people that came forty years ago are still coming today, and no-one has bothered to patch up the wear and tear. It did have its little surprises though. At the bottom of the road up to our hotel was this fantastic Russian Orthodox church: it looked like it had been lifted straight out of St. Petersburg. In the day it was impressive, at night it was incredible...

So when I get up to my room it transpires that my roommate had arrived in my absence... and then departed again. It's very difficult to judge a person from a pile of stuff on a bed. I did my best psycho-portrait and then went off to sleep (somehow I think the two were linked).

Two hours later, my roommate returns. She was dreadfully apologetic and rather sweaty (courtesy of Sanremo's sticky nights). After she composed herself and the formalities were over we ended up chatting for an hour, dispelling any hopes of an early night.

And here we are again, making friends with complete strangers. She wasn't the first, and she certainly wasn't the last.

Nice Biscuits

I really don't feel like there's much to say about the first leg of my journey. I had a minor incident with my clear, resealable plastic bag and then another when I realised I didn't have any cash, but that's what debit cards are for... That happy moment was the last time I used said debit card as I usefully went and forgot the PIN shortly after.

The flight itself was relatively uneventful and soon I was at Nice airport trying to make my way to Sanremo. It's a disconcerting feeling when you can't communicate with someone and, despite my A level, all the French I had left was pretty much sans use. Collectively, myself and my two friends managed to buy three tickets each to go to Sanremo and with the best will in the world, though we had quite a lot of luggage, we didn't have that much.

There was much excitement as I was greeted by my first double-decker train of my stay and everything was very clean and efficient. Then we hit Ventimiglia. It's the first train over the border from France and, to be frank, it's a dump. We used the underpass to change trains and were immediately chased up the stairs by a toothless old lady who seemed to want to terrify the young child behind us.

Welcome to Italy...

We had the pleasure of a drunk Frenchman in our carriage at Ventimiglia, but not for long as he was soon evicted by the rightful owner of the seat. Twenty minutes later we're in Sanremo and walking out of the largest  underground walkway I have ever seen. It is to be hoped that no-one ever arrived at the station late unless they'd been taking lessons from Usain Bolt...

We were greeted by the company that would be taking care of us over the next month and whisked away to our hotel at the edge of the city and that was that. I had arrived.

The Beginning

A wise person once advised starting at the beginning, and that is what I intend to do. Readers, we're about to head back in time: back to June 30th 2009, to be precise, and my first Italian adventure.

Actually, I've gotten a little ahead of myself, I'm not starting at the beginning at all, what would Maria say... This is not my first Italian adventure, it's my third. I had breakfast in Aosta after traversing the Mont Blanc tunnel on one particularly memorable family holiday, and a few years later I spent another family holiday sunning myself in Tuscany. Lovely.

Ok, back to June. Oh no wait. That's still not the beginning. Maria, this is not as easy as you made it sound. Let's flesh out the deets a bit. I went to university in September 2007 to study English at the University of St Andrews. Yes, before you ask, it was full of posh people; no, I did not meet Prince William (or his lovely lady wife). One of my biggest problems in life is indecision. I began by studying English with a little casual Italian and linguistics on the side. It really was vair interesting. And then, all of a sudden, English ceased to be so.

There I am, a year and a bit into my university career, and in the midst of a quandry. I had to make some decisions that though, at the time, seemed relatively minor, had quite a large impact on the course of the next few years of my life.

I changed my degree. I stopped studying English with its unfriendly staff and peculiar book lists, and I made myself a student of Italian. Fun times. Many, many months later I had decided that the subsequent year would see me trot off to study in Verona and that I would have to do a spot of practice before throwing myself into second year lectures about the Roman Empire in Italian.

So, now we've made all that a bit more fleshy, we can reconvene on June 30th where I happened to be flying out to Nice en France, before dashing over the border to learn how to become an English tutor that would hopefully give me some soft exposure to the Italian people and the Italian language before I started to learn about Emperor Trajan's social reforms.

Well, Maria, what I seemed to have done is to start at the end of the beginning. Oh dear.