why a language course is a total must

Tomorrow morning, nice and bright and early (5:41 a.m. I hop on the train), I'll be making my way to the beautiful region of Emilia-Romagna, and arriving at my cute and extremely-Italian-style flat in the old peoples' area of Parma. I would be nervous about this major change, only now I have no reason to be. I thank my lucky stars that a friend's mum researched into language courses and pointed me in the right direction to the one I eventually found myself on. Not only am I now confident and happy to speak to any friendly-looking Italian (which, let's face it, most of them are), I'm not in the least bit scared about flying once again on my own, arriving at an airport I've never been to before, and hauling my suitcase onto all the local transport I'll need to get myself to my new place of study.

The Cloisters of the Conservatorio I'll be singing in.

I've spent a full four weeks living in the centre of Firenze, shopping in the markets, tutting at the ignorant locals as they wander around touristically, taking shots of here there and everywhere (whilst I did all of that the week before), going for aperitivi with friends and taking buses and trains outside of Firenze to see the sights, taste the wine, and watch  the sunsets. I already feel like Italy could be my home.

The well-deserved view from the top of the Uffizi gallery

Alongside all of this, I'd been sitting down in a class full of other foreigners like me for four hours a day to soak up as much as I could about Italian Grammar and Conversation, whilst picking up some useful vocab and some very un-helpful words, which I'm sure I'll never really need to know... But all this total immersion into Italian left me happy and confident. When I went to Parma for the second time, to have a look around again, I got chatting to a woman who worked in the Conservatorio and she eagerly listened to me attempting conversation in her native tongue then praised me for my efforts as we said goodbye to each other.

Then as I was sitting at the airport, with a newly purchased Italian novel  in one hand, feeling smug that I could now pick out 80% of the words coming from the overhead speaker, an old man, seeing the book I was reading, sat down next to me and started up a conversation in Italian all about the Author of the book. He was Albanian and I was English and I felt so proud to be able to converse with a complete stranger and not have them attempt to repeat everything to me in English.

I have to say though that after more or less a week of being at home then a week of being in Sweden visiting the boyfriend, I'm hoping my Italian has not declined too much! I'll have to wait and see I guess! Plus one can only expect to understand so much after only a month's worth of learning..!