Italy, Italy, Italy! Can’t wipe the smile off my face. I landed right in the Alps and my heart is singing with the rustic beauty of it all, it’s like in fairy tales. I have even managed to exchange a couple of words in Italian already (although French kept coming out of my mouth) learned a whole lot and set my phone and iPad to Italian to further my immersion. I am understanding a surprising amount of what’s being said but it’s mainly due to the my favorite language learning method which taught me to recognize words by their common Latin root.
Took a pause just too look up and it took my breath away – again. Are you ready for it?? I am in love with the place! 🙂 That phrase is beginning to loose it’s potency now that nearly every place I go makes me say it, but the feeling behind it is certainly as fresh as ever. It is a lovely state to exist in – in love – with people, places and life in general.
The dramatic views are terribly distracting, and I’m hungry! These are another one of the “slow” morning pages variety. I am so immersed in feeling that I don’t know what to say. I guess I can try that stream of consciousness writing again, the whole point of these is that I should not know what to say.
Looking at my nails a lot again, noticing the little OCD tricks I resort to to distract myself from the task at hand. Aha! Just noticed it flash through my mind – the critic I am meant to stalk with the help of these pages. He’s been telling me: you don’t want to start writing mundane and boring or (god forbid!) whinging and complaining things down – you’ll spoil the beautiful poetic writing you’ve had going up until now. And so it is, he has shown his ugly face. Well, well, well, at least now I know who I am dealing with.
And he still manages to stop me dead in my tracks.
To hell with this, just write whatever, why is this so hard? Church bells rang, it’s 8am. I will have to be waking up at 4 am if not earlier each morning staring Sunday night to do my work during Australian business hours. Instead of none I now have 2 contractors on trial but both are still far from being left with my clients on their own. Oh well, work’s work and although I had to do some yesterday in a cafe instead of taking a stroll among a local village that was preparing for some sort of a festival that night, I had a strange feeling of actually enjoying it. I love web development – strange…but true. I also find it funny how if I can’t solve some problem on the day, I usually wake up with a solution to it the next morning, and I don’t even purposefully focus or go to bed thinking about it. I guess I have part of my brain dedicated to web development that does it’s own thing whether I am consciously thinking from that part or not.
Just saw a tiny stream high up in the mountain and had an idea – whenever I settle in a place I want to stay in (for now Campiogne D’Italia certainly holds the off the beaten track weird place no one has heard of allure) I am going to find a stream in my long forest walks and refill my own water bottles every day with the real mountain stream water!
Another crazy idea that came to me yesterday is to find a small restaurant and volunteer to be a kitchen hand in exchange for learning how to cook italian dishes. Until now I have only really cooked to relative mastery raw foods so a hearty satisfying cuisine like Italian would be a nice counter balance, plus then I can start creating raw food Italian, now THAT’s got some ring to it!
And I still have to find time to volunteer at a chocolate making shop somewhere ands learn all about chocolate! So many things to learn, so little time. I better get stuck into my Italian pronto. Thankfully the course I am at is neatly divided into people who only speak English and no Italian and those who only speak Italian but no English so there would be plenty of translation going on.
And there I am, almost at 750 words. Took about 1 hour with my starting and stopping, mountain admiring and nail picking but it is one of the best ways to start a day.
Now – parliamo Italiano! Michel Thomas is waiting…
