Have you heard about the Battle of Oranges?

Tomorrow, I will have been in Ivrea for a week. Almost everyone I have spoken to has asked me "Have you heard about the Battle of Oranges?" Why yes I have you Ivrean person you. When you Google Ivrea and look at the pictures, almost all of the pictures of these battles that apparently shut the city down for a week. My understanding is that, there are 8 different teams that you can join starting at any age you want to start paying. Two teams are at one Piazza, 2 at another and 4 at the large piazza. It is a time honored tradition during Carnivale. Apparently it lasts about 3 to 4 days during Carnivale with a princess and other days of celebrations for the week. Then my kids in class asked me if we had any thing for Carnivale and I said "nope, it's pretty much an international holiday and my fellow tutor said came up with the reason because we don't have a lot of Catholics in the United States since we have the right to all kinds of religion. And too bad that February and March are hard to take time off of work because I would love to experience any sort of Carnivale celebration. Us Americans are missing out apparently.

Also the castle here has 3 towers which I thought was kind of cool. Apparently the fourth tower fell during World War II due to ammunition inside the tower exploding. But this castle is the biggest one I've seen so far. They said because Ivrea is close to the mountains, if people on their horses were going north and weren't going to make it before the winter came, they would stay in the castle until they could pass. How nice!

So it was Friday once again. And we had our final show. Only this week because I had the cool kids who did not want to act. So we made a video based on some Italian parody of Lord of the Rings. And when I say the parody is long, it is about the same length of the original Lord of the Ring movies because it is dubbed over the actual film. My kids found the clips they wanted, transcribed them, translated them and then with giant white pieces of paper, plastic bags and nature, a film was born. I have it on Youtube and can show it to you when I get back or email you the link if you can't wait. But I filmed it and edited it all on my iPad. Thank you Apple. So during the show, when the younger kids were doing their show of Grease, and the kids were singing, my class gets my attention and tells me that our video is better than the Grease show. And I said, I know, I'm good huh? And they were like yeah, you are good. I gave them my email and said if they wanted the link to email me so I could email them the link of the film since its on private now. And you know what? I had 4 add me on Facebook. Cute huh?

I also forgot to mention updates on my Chris Pine twin. He was very sweet. When I asked him to find the parody so I could see what they meant, he found it, stopped it for a second to tell me there were "bad words and sometimes we use bad words to be funny" and I laughed. Being from the US has desensitized me enough I think where I was ok. But then I thought about it and on tv here, there are very scantily clad women, I don't think language is a big issue and I look around at the ads and commercials and I don't think there children are overly sexualities like in the US. For example, at the pools here the little girls don't wear tops. And to be fair they don't need to because other than a couple of things little girls and boys look the same. However, being from the US, this culturally bothers me. However, no one around thinks anything about it. And you don't get the feeling of perverts lurking in every corner. It is just a little vibe of looking out for each other and enjoying the outing without worrying about anything.

I hope a couple at least email me to practice their English and I can practice my Italian! I may create a blog sheet of all the Italian words and phrases I have learned so I can practice. We'll see.