Delapidated Beauty

Things were a little sombre after my arrival in Baiardo. When I signed my e-contract with the company they said I would get a week of training, two weeks of camp and one week in Baiardo. During orientation I was so excited about the prospect of everyone being reunited at the end. But it wasn't to be. As you may have read.

Oh well. That's life. I'll get over it.

That evening I wandered round Baiardo with Kitty. The company director had escorted them all when they first arrived and he explained a bit of the town's history. The medieval church was a ruin, for want of a more elegant phrase, but apparently it was like that for a reason. One Easter morning the roof had fallen in killing everyone inside. It stayed like that as a reminder and as a monument.

The rest of the town was remarkable. Everything I'd noticed about Sanremo's old town was true here, but so much more. It resisted change from every side and sat on top of this hill refusing to bend to modern ideas like capitalism and television.

I don't have much more to say about our exploratory voyage - the pictures will do that well enough for me.

 The view from Baiardo

 The ruined church

 The rest of the village

 Living standards

Delapidated beauty

Friends for a Season

My Sanremo roommate had arrived in Baiardo with three other girls - girls she'd taught with. As we were the new arrivals it made sense that we shared one of the spare houses together in the village.

At this point I feel I should interject with an explanation. This owner of the company also (as far as I could understand) owned a lot of Baiardo - at least he helped build a lot of the village and came to own some of the houses there. Anyway as he had little use for all these houses, he gave them to the company to offer tired-out tutors a break here and there.

So on the Monday this is where I ended up. There were two types of houses - in town and overlooking the hills. The spare one was in town. We all went in together to have a look at this house and found it was inhabited - by Lydia, and Lydia's, ahem, man friend. It was a hot building anyway - sandwiched in the middle of other buildings in the town. I looked around. Found what would have been my bed. And to my great relief, Kitty said that she'd been keeping a bed spare in her house down by the edge of the village, overlooking the mountains.

Thank goodness.

You see I had been hit by a nasty feeling. I really got on with my Sanremo roommate, but she had since bonded with the tutors she worked with. It's like I said before, we were no longer part of the same experience.

I saw her that evening and we caught up on what had happened in the last two weeks. she had done two camps and they'd been completely different to mine. She'd been in a suburb in Milan and hadn't so much as smelt the country air that we'd been inhaling solidly over the past fortnight.

But the more people I spoke to, the more I realised that everyone's camp experience was different and that I'd been so fortunate. Despite all its foibles, my camp had been one of the better ones. I hadn't lived with nuns who gave me leftovers from lunch to eat, neither had I been abandoned by my family, or been left to explain why dancing like Lady Gaga wasn't appropriate for 10-year-old girls.

It was at that point I remembered the friendships I had made laughing over the tablemat debacle and oversized pasta. At that point two things were settled in my mind - that I would never risk the programme again (in view of the fact that striking it well seems so rare) and that friends for a season really do exist.

They're Trying to Make Me Go To Rehab and I Say 'Yes, Yes, Yes...'

The Monday brought a really emotional goodbye at the train station in Brescia. There were tears and vows to come back as soon as I could manage. In all the kerfuffle I forgot to stamp my train ticket. Now for those of you that don't know, the yellow boxes scattered all over Italian train stations are so you can validate your ticket for the journey you're taking - if not you could use your ticket again and again and that tends to be... frowned upon, let's say... They come down really heavily on people that do this - to the tune of 50Eur.

I remembered just as I was pulling out of the station.

Oh.

When the guard came along the train I was ready to pay. It was my mistake and I should have known better. I hand him my ticket. He speaks to me in French. I speak to him in French - though what I need right now isn't a chance to brush up on things I learnt at A level, but I ran with it. He realises I'm not French and tries again in English. I tell him I'm very sorry. He smiles apologetically and validates it for me. 'Don't do it again' he says. I could have kissed him.

The rest of the [very long] journey passed without incident. I arrived in Sanremo that afternoon and met up with Kitty outside Grom - the world's BEST ice cream parlour. (This won't be the first time we'll hear about Grom.)

I also ran into my old Sanremo roommate outside another ice cream parlour and we all traipsed to the bus station to get up to Baiardo. You can see Sanremo from Baiardo, but it takes an hour to get there because, let's be honest, you're scaling a mountain.

We got there early evening and it was beyond belief. It clings to the top of a hill and to your left is Italy, to your right is France. It is quite simply wonderful. Cars are a joke there, so there is no roar of Alfas or Fiats, the population is getting on a bit and so the pace of life is slow. I don't know why rockstars and filmstars don't go there for rehab, because it would be the perfect place.

Killing Two Birds With One Healthy Dollop of Polenta

About lunchtime on the Saturday, we headed off for my special weekend in the mountains. The whole of my family was coming as well as my host dad's sister and brother-in-law and several of their friends. We were going to be a merry party indeed.

The house belonged to the brother-in-law and it was very traditional as well as very beautiful. It was nestled in a valley inamongst the furry hills of Val Trompia (funny, I know) and beyond. In a way it was one of life's great missed opportunities as if it had been built just a little higher the views would have been really incredible; anyway it wasn't. So we move on.

There was loads of nature and other miscellaneous pretty things to look at and at last I could get down to some proper relaxation. I don't regret a second of my time in Concesio, but after two weeks of camp after having never taught before, this was just what the doctor ordered.

The family welcomed me in, gave me a room and as it was Italy we probably sent out for pizza for dinner - really good pizza too. Come on, all pizza in Italy is good...

(At this point I'm going to interject with another anecdote. One evening I went with my fam to visit my host mum's brother. He lives in a beautiful plain just beyond Val Trompia in a wine region. We went so I could sample some pizza the like of which "I would have never experienced before". Apparently it had a thicker base - Italian pizzas are known for being crispy thin, whereas American pizzas are the thicker ones. Anyway, this revolutionary new pizza, it transpired, was an American pizza. That said I didn't have the heart to tell them it was the kind of pizza we buy in the supermarkets...)

So, back to the mountain house... It was chilly that night - July it may have been, but in the mountains, there's always a bit of a nip in the air at night. Keeping the food-y theme, I woke up the following morning to the smell of something really good cooking. That morning my host mum and the antagonistic pregnant sister (I don't blame her, it must have been 35 degrees) had got up at 7am to prepare a traditional Brescian Sunday banquet. I love my food - I'll try anything once, and fortunately, that mantra came into its own...

The centrepiece of this magnificent banquet was uccellini - baby birds. Yum. They'd been cooked all day and instead of eating them warts an' all, you ate them bones an' all, oh, and the beaks. As I was the guest of honour, I got three to myself. Goody. There was a heathly dollop of polenta and a very rich creamy sauce. I helped myself to a selection of vegetables and then eyed the uccellini again.
'You used to be a sparrow. In fact you still look like one.' I said to myself...
There was no way I could refuse to eat them and it would have been grossly offensive to their strict ideas of hospitality. So I ate them. All. (Except the beaks. That was too far.)

You know what... they tasted good. They tasted even better with the polenta, and they were delicious with the rich creamy sauce. I'm converted. Completely. I take pot shots at sparrows in my garden in the hopes I can re-create it. Jokes. But I'd definitely have them again.

So after a shaky start to dinner, I had a wonderful afternoon: amazing food and I was taught to play an unusual Brescian card game. I tried really hard to make the most of it all, as the following day, I was moving on.

All Good Things Come to an End

All in all my first camp was a bit of a nightmare. I had a class containing a child who spent the majority of his time on the desk and not sitting quietly on his chair; my final show was based on a highly complex story my kids had told about the Loch Ness Monster - to this day I'm not entirely sure where they got it from; things had got a little strained between Wickham and Lydia and the rest of us; and I still had very little idea what I was doing.

I knew that I probably wouldn't choose to do the programme again - just because it was highly stressful and only made palatable by my amazing family. I didn't want to risk having a bad camp and an equally bad family. So with this in mind, I made my peace with teaching and I taught my last class, resigned to the fact that it would be just that - my last class.

(For those that enjoy irony, you might want to read about what happens one year on...)

Therefore, with the Loch Ness Monster play still ringing in my ears, I left the school and went home with my family. Some of the other tutors were moving onto new camps the following morning, Kitty, Lydia and myself were finished (in more ways than one). We'd only signed up to a 2-week teaching contract after orientation, but we could stay in a little village (part-owned by the man who pulled the strings at the company) for another week if we wanted a little holiday.

Kitty and Lydia decided that this is where they were headed. As the fortnight had gone on, I actually got really close to Kitty, even though my first impression was that we weren't really that compatible. I too wanted to go with them, but I also wanted to spend some more time with my amazing family.

In the interests of killing two birds with one stone - watch out for the birds in the next post - I thought that if I ask for another weekend with my family, I can train over to Sanremo on the Monday and then meet up with Kitty and head on up to this mythical mountain-top village with her. That way I didn't need to lug my stuff over with everyone else and I could say a proper goodbye to my fam.

I put it to them. They were thrilled that I wanted to stay a bit longer. I, as you may remember, am more than happy to just relax. My family operated using a different philosophy and so decided that my last weekend with them should be special. (I wanted to stress to them that it had all been special - the Garda road trip, the out-of-body experience of watching X:Men Origins: Wolverine at the castle in Brescia, embarrassing myself on two wheels in front of a bella vista...) Anyway they wanted to make my last weekend extra special.

We were going into the mountains...

Never Work with Children or Animals (Part II)

I've left my favourite camp tale until last. It's one of my favourite dinner party stories due to its complete and utter unpredictability and bizarre outcome. When it happened, as you will read on to find out, I was utterly speechless, felt hysteria rising inside me and wondered why I ever thought teaching English in Italy was a good idea in the first place...

The Tablemat Saga
When you arrive at a camp run by the company I was working for, all the tutors set upon the resources like gannets. Shouts of 'I need the markers, I have the young kids!' and 'Who's taken all of the size 7-8 t-shirts!?' ring out from the staffroom and often full-on fist fights break out over the animal masks and cut-out clocks.

These resources are by no means necessary to teaching, but when things are getting rough on a Friday afternoon sometimes whipping out the bingo cards gets the kids off the tables and back on track.

One of the more useful resources for this is the tablemat: a simple white piece of cloth with a blue border, can be combined with the fabric pens with wonderful results. My children were of an age where they could understand a lot of English - specifically vocabulary - and when I taught a class on 'I like' and 'I don't like' I decided to give them an easy second lesson: to draw 'something they liked' on these hallowed tablemats.

Kitty saw my plan and wanted in on it in a big way. Her children were far too young to understand the difference between Italian and English let alone 'like' and 'doesn't like' so her children were given free reign. I chatted with Kitty while my kids drew British flags, cats, dogs, love hearts, and other such things that tempt the magpie-like eyes of chidlren.

Kitty's children integrated with mine really well, despite the age gap - with one exception. A little boy had segregated himself from the main group - quite happily, mind. He was naturally a loner and ever-so slightly odd - a lovely little boy, but very much a space cadet (not on the planet).

Anyway, after a while this little boy had folded up his completed tablemat and was busy throwing it up and down. Kitty called over to him: 'Have you finished? Can I see?' The little boy was more than happy to oblige. He ran over and handed Kitty the little parcel. She unfolded it gingerly.

In amongst the aforementioned childish frippery going on in the room, this little boy had drawn a perfect technical diagram of a toilet. Plumbed in and everything.

I was utterly gobsmacked. I wanted to laugh more then than I have ever wanted to in my life. Of course I didn't - I didn't want to break this little boy's heart. I bowed my head to compose myself, then joined Kitty in enthusiastic encouragement.

I fear we may have encouraged him a little too much. Later on that day Kitty got a further three technical drawings of a lav. From different angles...

Never Work with Children or Animals

Camp always gives the most entertaining tales and reaffirms in head of the teacher that it is never a good idea to work with children, let alone animals. There are a couple of stories from my first camp that I don't think I will ever forget...

Mr Darcy's Gift
At the end of the fist week we said goodbye to some of the kids. Seaside holidays and mountain treks meant that for even the most conscientious of students couldn't stay the full two weeks. Now the Italian hospitality is a funny beast. In the same way that some Italian Mammas will be mortally offended if you offer to help with the washing up, some families believe that helping their child in any way deserves a little thank you.

Gifts can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I've had hospitality as a gift - staying a few extra days with a family; I've been sent with care packages on long train journeys; I've been given coffee, hair products, books and even a dictionary of Italian etymology. None of these compared with the oddity of the gift that Mr Darcy was given.

The mother handed the package over first thing that morning: it was long and tubular. We pestered him enough that he decided to open it at lunchtime - and just in time too! Mr Darcy had been given extra-long spaghetti. Useful.

Tourist guides I can understand, even coffee and a commemorative notepad - all these things can be used in the moment, and packed neatly into a suitcase. A pack of 1m long spaghetti does not fit into this category. We were all travelling light, but Mr Darcy, on his journey out of Brescia had an extra addition to the sleeping bag holder at the top of his rucksack. Needless to say the other occupants of the train carriage weren't too impressed with the generosity of the child's mother...