Carlo Gavatorta - Italian dinner!!!

Hey everybody! I'll dedicate this whole post to tell you about the Italian fundraiser dinner i just had last Sunday night.


First of all I organized this diner to raise money for the Rotary Bus Trip with all the exchange students that's going to be at the end of the year. It costs 1700 $ and since I waned to earn this money but I can't work I thought about doing this. I practiced some few Italian courses. Some Rotarian friends and my hostfamily really helped me out and it worked out really well. The menu was: Insalata con arancie e noci, pasta alla carbonara, agnello al forno con patate e verdure grigliate and tiramisù. It was a lot of work but it was really worth it! 12 hours in the kitchen are exhausting but also fun if with the right people! :-) Cooking for 45 people and making it a nice thing is not as easy as it would seem, anyway everyone liked it and enjoyed the dinner a lot.


It's such an amazing experience and I'm so happy I finally did it , after procrastinating for months. I was really tired after it but I felt so good and satisfied. I hope other exchange students will do it in the next years. It would be awesome!


I'll blog again soon and write other cool stuff happening in the amazing Steamboat Springs!


Carlo

Maggie Kriz: AHOJ JAR!!!

I can't believe how quickly time passes when you are on exchange. I just looked at the date and I realized that it is already March! I have been doing so many amazing things here, it is hard to choose a place to start!

In January I went to the Austrian Alps for a week with my school and it was really amazing. Before leaving Steamboat I had never realized how blessed I was to have a ski mountain literally five minutes away from my house.... lets just say that I will never take that for granted again. The alps were so beautiful and it was so nice to finally be on a snowboard again. We stayed in a cabin and there were about sixty kids and four adults supervising us. My favorite day was the last one, all the days before we woke up to beautiful bluebird mornings and when we hit the mountain we knew that we were going to find nice groomers but on the last day we woke up to about two feet of fresh powder. It was perfect because unlike the mountains of Colorado, the Alps don't have many trees on them so my friends and I could catch fresh tracks all day long. It was interesting though because the Slovaks didn't really know how to ski well in the powder, they are so used to groomed runs that they were amazed at how well I could maneuver myself through such deep snow. It really was a day that I will never forget.

The olympics were very interesting here in Slovakia. They are obsessed with ice hockey (ice hockey is to them as football is to the United States) so you can only imagine. Everyday people would be talking about the hockey games and I found myself staying up until 2:00 in the morning to watch the matches with my host brother and his friends. Really the only thing I could thing about though was.... "God, I hope they don't play America.... awkward..." Both luckily and sadly they never did.

I have found here in Slovakia a kind of routine, just like how you have routines in your home country and was amazed when I realized how comfortable I am in my host country. Everyday it seems that I have some plans after school with all of the new and amazing people that I have met here. It is interesting to me that although all teenagers come from different places and backgrounds we all like to do similar things and are drawn towards similar activities. I love to learn about the differences in this culture but I think that it humanizes us to learn that really we are all the same.... perhaps prejudices could be broken if only people traveled more and saw these similarities, rather than searching only for the differences.

It is finally beginning to warm up here and almost all of the snow has completely vanished. I was walking home last week from school and heard a bird singing, my initial reaction because it was February was "Poor thing must be lost," but it is those little things that remind you that you aren't in Colorado anymore. It was at that moment that I realized that I survived the Slovak winter... but more than just surviving I flourished. It was an amazing winter and I began to think about how I have built really close bonds to the people that I have met here and it was incredibly odd to me to realize that the weather is changing to how it was when I first arrived in Slovakia. It made me sad for a little to realize that I don't have much time left in this amazing country.

I am really looking forward to next month. My family is coming to visit me in April and we are going to to the beautiful city of Barcelona while they are here. It has been so long since I have actually been in the same room as them that I am so excited I could scream! My mother is perhaps the best cook in the entire world so I really can't wait to taste her delicious food once again! I will also be going to Greece and Italy with my Rotary district in May so I am very excited for the next few months of travel!