Making New Italian Friends

As I continue to enjoy my time in Grado, I feel as if I’m becoming a part of the community. A goal I had before coming on this trip was to be able to make at least one new Italian friend. With this being my fourth week here I found that this goal was a lot easier than I expected. Italians love talking to Americans! My first group of Italian friends would have to be the group of girls my classmates and I met at a beach party Grado holds every Sunday night called Sweet Sunday. It was a little tough at first as I attempted to explain to them who I was and that I was trying to make new friends but after I said “Sono Americano”, I attracted their attention and they really wanted to talk to us. We’ve continued to hang with them and text them since that night and I feel as if it’s really accelerated my ability to learn the language. Along with the girls, I’ve been playing basketball with a lot of the teens that live in Grado and although I may not be the best ball player, I’ve been able to communicate and even learn new words while playing and talking trash on the court. My greatest accomplishment while making new friends, however, would have to be after a night out in the town with Kyle. Normally, when I go out I tend to stick with the other DePauw students and I have an English language crutch to lean on, deteriorating the necessity to speak Italian to anyone. Realizing this, Kyle and I figured we’d learn more if we went somewhere else by ourselves and we certainly did. We made so many friends that night and the conversation didn’t seem to end. There were so many different people to talk to, all with different stories and it felt so cool to be able to understand what they were saying and respond. After that night I even had my first dream in Italian which was so interesting and strange at the same time. What was even stranger was waking up the next day and having to speak English to my American classmates. My brain was still thinking in Italian and it felt so weird to speak a language I wasn’t thinking in. Overall, between my host family and all these new friends, I feel as if I am speaking Italian 24 hours out of the day every day. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of these friends but  I will work on getting a picture with some of them next time to prove I'm not making all this up.