I changed houses last week and now I live at my friends house from school with her mother and their dog Jack. I switched on Tuesday night and didn't even get a chance to settle in until Friday! Every night last week there was either a Christmas Party or a birthday party of one of our friends to attend. On Tuesday after school their was a social lunch for anyone who wanted to attend for Christmas. Students made something then brought it in to donate to the lunch. We had music and food and people dancing in the corridor of our school and big banners decorating it. Tuesday night we went to a party for the 18th birthday of one of my new host sisters friends. Also there were some friends from school. Wednesday was another party for one of our school friends. I went to it after spending some time at the gym with Paula. We didn't actually make it to the gym part... only the sauna and steamroom section. But it's in the same fitness center as the gym so we'll just call it the gym. The 24th was the first day off school.

I went with my host sister and her dad to a family friends house for a Christmas Eve gathering of their two families. In Italy it's very common to be a single parent with one child, so the gathering wasn't to big. We ate typical christmas food which was fish. And i'm almost 100% sure that pasta is typical food for any occasion of the year because we ate that too. For dessert another typical Christmas food is Panettone, it's really similiar to Christmas cake except a bit softer and you can peel the cake apart. It has dried fruit pieces inside. There's alot of board games played with friends and family during gatherings. Once of them is called Tombola. It's an ancient game in Italy and it's almost like bingo except there's different ways to win other than getting one row covered with chips. You can have only two numbers covered in a row and that counts as a win, but no one else after you can win off of just two numbers covered. You pay 50 cents or one euro to the pot when you start and win money. Unless you're me, then you just loose money. We played a few card games and then started to teach and learn some Italian dances that are popular and at parties and people used ot do them all together at celebrations.

On Christmas morning we got up and opened gifts from Babbo Natale. He brought me an umbrella and a Cd of an Italian singe, soap and handcream. We exchanged gifts and ate breakfast. Afterwards me and my host sister went on the bus to meet our friends and go to a lunch for homeless people. It's organized through our school and alot of people we knew went together to it with friends. Christmas is not as big of a celebration here and it's common for friends to hangout with eachoher and do things together. It's not a big ordeal and just a few friends for dinner together is a normal christmas get together. So at this lunch there was a community of homeless people who were in contact with each other because they all came to Italy together from Afghanistan. They didn't speak Italian so there was a translator there for them and a few of them spoke English so I talked ot them in English. We served them a four course meal including meatballs, vegetables, potatoes, lasagna of course, and for dessert pandora, chocolate with nuts in it, and panettone. They were all given blankets as a Christmas gift after the meal. When the food was cleaned up they showed everyone their typical dancing from the area they came from. They had music to go with it and they all danced around while everyone was clapping their hands and cheering them on. It was really neat to see so much difference from my normal Christmas days. After the lunch was finished we came back to our house and I was able to Skype my family back home. Which was amazing on Christmas day. Skype was hooked up to the in my Nana and Grandoas house so everyone could see me and I could see them while my whole family was gathered around for christmas. I watched them open gifts and talked and it was really nice to see everyone together.

Our Christmas gathering here consisted of a dinner with friends of my host family as well as me friend Anna from Rotary and we all ate dinner togather. It's not like in Canada when we have a big turkey with a big feast and all family. We ate vegetables and a spinach omelette type thing as well as potatoe slices and panettone/chocolate/pandora for dessert. There were a few people coming from Algeria in Africa who knew my host family and they spoke French. We all had fun with their two little kids trying to speak French to them and learning about their life. My French is horrible now! It's so hard to seperate french and Italian in my brain so when I start a sentence in French I finish in Italian. We played a few card games and tombola after dinner all together. There was about twenty people in our appartment. It was really fun with everyone. I lost some more money and at about 2 am we called it a day. It was such a different Christmas from what I was used to but a really good time and I learned alot.