Wednesday, April 1, 2015

March in Review

It honestly seems like I was just at the February RYE conference in Ukiah...I'm not completely sure where March has gone! It hasn't been a super eventful month in the way of my exchange, but I figured I might as well sum it up anyway. Here goes!


  • I went to two rotary meetings this month...both the second and last weeks of March, I believe. On the most recent meeting, I had the honor of being named a Paul Harris Fellow, an award often given to rotarians once they have contributed $1000 to rotary, but sometimes given to community members or others who they believe show outstanding rotary-like qualities. Anyway, my club(Arcata Sunrise Rotary) names all of their outbounds Paul Harris Fellows, and I was certainly honored to join their ranks. Along with the certificate, I also got a wonderful pin that I can't wait to add to my RYE blazer!
Rotary member Terri presenting me with my Paul Harris Fellow certificate and pin.

  • Of course I've been working to learn as much Italian as possible. I've been using Rosetta StoneDuolingo, and my favorite of late, Memrise. I like Memrise because it presents the information in tiny segments which I can literally make progress on when I have just 5 minutes...one of the major bonuses of all three of these programs is supposed to be the "learn on the go" ability to just pick up and use the app/website in a few minutes of free time, but Memrise is the only one that I truly feel I can do this with. Memrise also pairs new vocabulary with user-created "mems", or visual memory cues, which are quite helpful for me. One of my recent favorites was an illustration of a spartan warrior with the caption "Questo è Sparta!!!" in Italian, and of course "This is Sparta!!!" in English. I don't think I'll ever forget "Questo è" ;). Unfortunately, Memrise is mostly a vocabulary building tool, not so great for the grammar aspects. But still, it is a fun tool to use in conjunction with my many other language resources.
QUESTO È SPARTA!!!!!!!!!!!

  • Paperwork wise, we have decided to use the travel agency "It's Your World, Travel" to assist in the logistics of a year abroad...I'm antsy to get started on the process, but Italy still hasn't finalized its requirements visa-wise, and its pretty hard to collect paperwork to submit to an embassy when you don't actually know what paperwork is required.
  • Overall, I've just been extremely busy, with spring season of Crew and preparing for my exchange adding to the already time-consuming schoolwork and other life. As my mom put it(talking to me): "Yeah, at one point you just stopped playing me in Words with Friends. I think that was around the same time that you were told you needed to learn another language and started traveling every weekend for crew". Gee, I wonder why I've been a little busy lately :).
And that was my March, exchange-wise! Coming up next at the end of April: Rotary District 5130 conference in Yosemite!