Yesterday marked one month of being here in Italy! Time has flown by so quickly! I feel like I have already learned so much Italian since I’ve been here, I can’t wait to see how much I know in another month.

Yesterday I was able to Skype my family for the second time since I’ve been here. It was nice to see their faces again :) I also went to a birthday party yesterday for Camilla and Martino’s grandma. It was the third birthday party I’ve been to this month! The party was held at her house and the whole family came over. And when I say the “whole family,” I actually mean the WHOLE family. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, sons and daughters of those cousins. It was crazy, but apparently it’s pretty normal for the whole family to get together every Sunday. I asked my host grandfather about it and he said, “It’s like having Thanksgiving every week!” Each family brought some kind of dessert for Nona (grandma), so there ended up being five or six desserts on the table after everyone had came! There was chocolate cake, pistachio cake (?), gelato cake (basically like ice cream cake but gelato instead of ice cream), waffles (made by Camilla), and someone even brought a huge bowl full of chestnuts! I never knew you could actually eat them, I thought they were just some kind of made up nut from the Christmas song “Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire.” Anyway haha, I ate my first chestnut about a week ago at the Festa dell”Uva with my new friend Giulia, it was very tasty! I was very happy to see the huge bowl of them yesterday :)