Week two started with great gusto and after having a break on Sunday where I relaxed, did some food shopping, and Skyped my family from the main piazza in Camerino, I was feeling more ready for some more Italian-learning fun.
Building on the banter we'd had in Perugia, I took a seat by Lynette's flatmate in class on Monday morning. I'd kind of forgotten she was in my class - I'd forgotten that anyone else was in my class other than the very, very loud man from the Lebanon. It was nice to have a familiar face in my class. I loved spending time with my desperate friends, but classes still felt like they dragged because the level of banter just wasn't there.
Wendy still wasn't pulling her weight and the only other familiar face (Anna, my flatmate) was being much like her character and a bit of a petulant teenager who felt she was 'too cool for school'. The classes were potentially the thing that I dreaded, and I say dread to be melodramatic - I've been in plenty of classes in my life where I didn't know anyone and you either swallow it and make friends, or swallow it and don't let it bother you.
So I'd thrown myself into Monday morning, taking a seat on the front row with Lynette's flatmate. I was trying to focus on whatever it was we were doing, but I got distracted. The blame for part of this distraction can be laid at the door of a phone call I received - it was from the company I'd taught with. They were desperate, and I mean dseperate for tutors. They had camps coming up and no tutors to staff them. They were embarking on a campaign of carpet bombing tutors with phonecalls and emails hoping one of them would bite and fill the gap that had started to emerge.
What happens is they hire a number of tutors and in the downtime during 'Ferragosto' - the national holiday - quite a lot of whom will go on holiday. What some tutors do however, instead of spending all the money they have just earned, they go home and though the company might be expecting them to stay on into September, if they've thrown in the towel, this isn't going to be an option.
I was one of the tutors they carpet bombed. I was quite overwhelmed to get an offer like that and immediately told them I was busy for the next three weeks. I may not have been enjoying classes as much as I might, but I wasn't ready to sacrifice the money I'd paid trying to learn Italian so I could teach children how to speak English instead.
I thanked them for giving me the deets and the offer, but I told them I'd have to think about it. Basically I had to choose whether I wanted to go on my family holiday or not. The company would pay for get me up to Domodossola in Piemonte (where we would be holidaying) but I would do the standard teaching thing for a week, stay with a family that wasn't my own and only get one week of my family holiday.
It was tempting - it was 250 Euros, but I didn't know if it was worth sacrificing my holiday for. Had this been the plan back in the day, then I would have been fine with it, it was just that I'd psyched myself up for two weeks of holiday and never teaching children again.
After some time I refused the offer. I'd spoken to my family and they felt the same way I did. I hadn't enjoyed my time with the company as much as I might have done - the enjoyment that there was I can attribute to my host family. I didn't want to chance this and get another bad camp but with a bad host family.
All it had succeeded in doing was mean that for the rest of the morning of classes, I paid attention to nothing whatsoever.
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