This picture is of some of the many AFS kids in Peimonte from all over the world! We all met up in Ivrea for the Orange Carnival.

You may be wondering why so many of us are wearing silly red hats... well, the thing about this carneval is that the entirety of it revolves around orange wars. There are many different teems that ride around in horse drawn chariots and they chuck oranges at the croud, and the crowd in return chucks oranges at them! (If you are wearing a red hat, then you are supposed to be safe from getting hit by an orange, but you still have to be careful!)

There are huge stacks of crates of oranges in the plaza's and once it has begun the ground gets completly covered in oranges and horse poop. It is pretty amazing! People really get into it too! The guys on the chariots have on protective gear like a football player, but everyone else only has their colorful jumpers on over their clothes to protect themselves with! I saw tons of black eyes, and bloody noses (there was a girl in our group that got hit in the nose and had to go to emergency because she was loosing so much blood!). Many people were injured but I think the worst part was their hair! It was enoughto make you vomit! People had the gnarliest globby, sticky dried up orange bits all tangled up on their heads with red blood orange juice dripping down their faces. It makes me shiver just thinking about it!

Over all it was a very fun day!

I went to the library in the castle last week and found that they had several books in english! I got The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (but they only had an abriged version that was for italians trying to read in english) and a big old book of Edgar Allen Poe short stories! What fun! Now every night before going to bed I write in my journal and read a story of murder and madness! Thankfully these stories aren't having any negative side effects on me. I am still the happy, goofy, optimistic american wandering around Italy with her jaw hanging loose murmering sentences that may be italian and may also be jibberish.

At school my friends have been tightening their belts on the english and forcing me to speak italian with them which is a good thing! I actually can converse with them most of the time! And I have crossed out all of the italian words I had on those flash cards I was working on because I have them all down, and now I am putting new words on them to study! Simo and I were going through all the words for foods and stuff I didn't know yet...

I really enjoy studying italian too! All is well! Pizza is yummy! As are bugia (a little sweet that has nutella or chocolate or jam inside, but Bugia translates to lies so sometimes they lie and come empty!) and I am a Happy 2kg heavier american!

Oh! and I also posted more photos on Facebook! Yay!