Time passes so fast! I’ve been in Italy for almost three weeks by now. It has been pretty fun and full of activities. I’m quite excited that there are still many amazing things for me to discover in Faenza and about Italy in general.

During the last weeks, I’ve been preparing the room for after-school activities, thinking after school activities for kids and also done after-school helping children with their homework. I had no experience in working with children before, so I was a little bit worried, but the kids are actually very nice and cute and I quite like the task related to after-school activities.

The great thing about after-school is the fact that there’s time for playing and time for studying. We tried to find some games which are fun and which also help Italian schoolchildren to improve their foreign language skills. To get to know each other, we had an activity in pairs – each person asked questions we had prepared to another person and then they introduced each other to the rest of us. During this activity I also had the chance to practice my horrible Italian.

I really love those courtyards that I’ve seen quite often here. One of those courtyards belongs to this office where we have after-school activities. It’s so lovely – quite small and cute yard with a lot of plants and palm trees which looks like a tiny magic world. Very exotic to a Nordic person!

I have other duties such as promoting Erasmus+ projects on different Facebook pages and finding partners for different projects. Such tasks are not very easy for me, because I’m very bad with all this social media and technology stuff. But the positive thing is that at least there are many new things for me to learn and to develop. Another new skill that I learned was how to use Canva to create graphics. At first I thought it will drive me crazy, but it was really cool actually. As my first task, I created a sheet for students in the after school activities, which came off surprisingly nice in consideration of my computer skills.

On Sunday, September 22, there was an event of organisations in Piazza del Popolo. Raquel and I had a task to do – we had to exchange one sticker for any other thing. For that, we were forced to use our “wonderful” Italian language skills. Of course it was much easier for Raquel, who is Spanish, to speak to Italians, but I personally was in a big trouble! As my Italian is still limited – all I’m able to do is to introduce myself shortly using about five or six very basic and easy sentences. But this time I didn’t need to introduce myself, I needed to explain what I want and as I didn’t even know any words I needed for that, I just typed the sentence on google translate (one thing I usually never do) and showed this to the people I had chosen for he exchange challenge. The sentence was surely not correct, but somehow they understood what I needed and I did accomplish my task. Well, thank you, google translate!

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Last but not least, I cannot omit to mention that I’ve been attending to yoga and mediation open days during the last week, which has been absolutely amazing! As in the other place, the courses are totally in Italian here too. Fortunately I’ll attend to official Italian classes since next month, so hopefully my language skills will be better soon and I really hope that after some months, I will be able to try writing a post also in Italian!