Research: mind

Let's see how my story changes in the end of the stay, but - I had to answer quite a few questions for an assignment to get my scholarship from my school. One part of the tasks was to find out about the target city and country. There will be 4 entries. Before I tell you what I found out about (1) Italy, (2) Veneto and (3) Padova, (4) I will show you some pictures of my first impressions and tell what I knew before. This is the part where I tell about the first impressions and what I knew before.

I have been in Italy for 2 weeks with my parents and my brother in the summer of 2002. I had just signed up for starting to learn italian at highschool, which made me sad that I didn't know any before going there.

Back then I didn't know much about Italy. Basicly I knew what the nature was like, because we had visited Greece several times before. Much less greener than in here. Buildings are painted with white and everything looks a bit sunburned, including people who mixed our plans with their bloody siestas. I didn't care for old gorgeous churches and fresco's. I was there to holiday and swim a lot. I also remember that mom got heart pulsation of the strong coffee, they sold.

Later on, after attending to the italian classes, I got to know what the coffee was like.. and all kind of varieties of it: caffe, caffe lungo (in finnish laiha kahvi), caffe macchiato (with just a little bit of milk), caffe corretto (with alcohol), cappuccino, caffellatte.. and our teacher also told us that if we want a finnish kind of coffee, ask for caffe americano.

Of course, I knew to combine Italy with pasta, parmesan cheese, wine, vineyards, olive trees, calcio (football), ferrari and formula 1 races (how could I not because of the little fanatics in my family), fashion and art.

The italian professor showed us once a music video of an italian band called Gemelli Diversi. I have no idea of what their image is in Italy, but I fell in love with their song Mary.

Pictures from our stay in 2002 (all pictures are taken by Arja Tulonen - mom):