And now...

And now, a short word from our sponsors:

Italiano

Italian is a strange and funny language which lends itself to being combined with my French skills. Hence the following situation:

Italian professor: [in Italian] "When is your birthday?"
Me: Il 12 avrile.
[Note: the French word for "April" is "avril", and the Italian is "aprile". Therefore, avril + aprile = avrile]

Among my other abilities, I can count to ten and say that I don't understand any Italian.

Isn't it funny...

Isn't it funny how one purchase snowballs into many smaller purchases? It turns out that my camera and laptop don't get along, so I had to buy a special card reader. Then I also realized that my current card doesn't hold very many pictures, so I bought a 2GB card (on special, I might add).

Isn't it funny how hard it is to learn another language? I guess I've just been so used to being able to have conversations in French that I've forgotten how hard it is to actually get to the point where you can have real conversations with content in a second (or third) language. But, on the other had, my French skills do help me with Italian - some structures and words are quite similar. Of course, this is to be expected, considering that they are related.

I still haven't gotten my orientation leader for freshman orientation yet...This worries me....

Graduation

Sooooo today was my high school graduation. Yipee! (said sarcastically, of course)
It's strange that the next step in my education is in Switzerland. I'm starting to feel more excited than nervous now, mostly because I've become more laid back about the whole social aspect of living abroad. I was really nervous about meeting new friends and creating a network of support from scratch, but I've come to realize that what will happen will happen and there's no real use in worrying too much about it. So yeah.

In super fun exciting news I finally got a laptop! It's a Dell Inspiron, and it has Windows Vista, which is crazy. The screen is quite large and I imagine will be quite good for watching DVDs (airplane, anyone?). It's weird to have total control of it, to not have to share it with anyone. Oh, and I also got a printer with it (my dad bought both for me, apparently it was some sort of deal). I'm probably going to have to ship the printer over, but I'll figure that out later.

I'd also like to thank those who commented with ideas about buying a cellphone in Lugano. I think that's what I'm going to end up doing. They sound cheap enough for even my budget.