5 Things that No Longer Surprise Me about Italy

So I have been here for two months now....some days it feels as though I have been here forever, and some days it feels as though I just got here. Almost every day, though, there is some little moment that makes me just step back for a moment and realized "whoa....I'm actually LIVING in ITALY for a whole YEAR!".

Since I have been here for two months, I am slowly starting to adapt to the Italian way of life, and things that seemed strange when I first got here are now things that I barely notice are different. Because of this, I wanted to share a few of these things because a) I don't want to forget how amazed I initially was at them and b) because I love reading lists and maybe you do too.

Here we go, in no particular order:

1) Phone Plans: In Italy, I have a fairly normal phone plan that gives me 3 Gigabytes of data, 3000 texts, and 300 minutes of call time. What is so strange about this, you may ask? Well, this phone package costs me just 12 euros a month. 12 euros. 12. I'm pretty sure I'll be spending less on my phone plan for the whole year than some people in the USA spend for one month.

2)Sweets: Maybe its just me, but in the US, its just not really socially acceptable to eat sweets for breakfast. Yes, the occasional doughnut or breakfast pastry, but not really cookies or cake. Enter Italy, where cookies and cake are a totally normal part of breakfast, and its not uncommon for me to come downstairs in the morning to find the family snacking on a pack of chocolate cookies. Also if it's breakfast time(or really anytime) you should definitely cover that bread/cake/cookie in jam or Nutella.

3)Which brings me to Nutella, and on a related track, hazelnuts: First of all, if you find something in Italy and looks like it is chocolate flavored, there is a very good chance that either the chocolate you see is actually Nutella, or there are also hazelnuts in the chocolate dessert, and chocolate+hazelnuts=Nutella. I'm not complaining. Don't get me wrong, regular chocolate exists, but it is quite overshadowed. Also, I guess hazelnuts just aren't a very big thing in the USA, but in Italy, you can find anything in hazelnut flavor. Some hazelnut things that I've tried so far include gelato, cake, and yogurt. Hazelnut yogurt? Mehhh.....but hazelnut gelato is nothing short of heavenly(but isn't all gelato?).

4)Hand gestures: I'm sure that you have all seen some sort of video or such that makes fun of Italians and their hand gestures by depicting someone who looks like they may or may not have completely lost track of their arms. While the whole hand-gesture thing is absolutely a stereotype, it is an absolutely true stereotype. When an Italian gets worked up about something, the results, hand-gesture-wise, are nothing short of hilarious, in my opinion. Someday I will get a video of this amazing spectacle, and you too will be able to understand the hilarity(I'm looking at you, Sara). On the upside, it generally makes it much easier for me to understand conversations that I otherwise would not understand when someone is practically half-miming the conversation, and it also makes it much more socially acceptable for me to communicate through gestures when I can't use words.

5)Dinner time/the general concept of the afternoon: In the US, 2 or 3 PM was "mid-afternoon", getting into 4 or 5 PM was "evening", and 6 PM was getting into "dinner time". When I first got here, I tried to hold on to that concept of time, but it was quickly uprooted for a new and improved afternoon timetable. On a normal weekday: 3 PM is "lunchtime", 4 or 5 PM is "mid-afternoon", 6 or 7 PM is getting into "evening", and around 8 or 9 PM is "dinner time".

Was this surprising to you? Or maybe not? Is there something else in particular that you would like to know about? Let me know...I would love to hear from you!