MY SUMMER 2011

This summer will be fantastic. The beach, ice-creams, holidays, the sun and more.. This summer will be the best ever!

In eleven days, I will go to Modena, the city where I was born. I will stay there for two weeks, in my uncles' home. I love city, mainly I love Modena, the shops, the center, people. It will be an incredible trip. I wish that I will have a lot of fun with my cousins, my chilhood friends and my ucles. I will go to see Modena center, a lot of commercial center and obviosly.. I will play volleyball! I will do a volleyball competition with my cousin Andrea, so I will engaged also in Modena. My cousin promised me that if we win, we will go to Gardaland. That's fantastic!








After I will return to Tertenia and finally I will go to the beach every day, I will swim in the sea, I will eat a lot of ice creams but after I will not gain weight because I will play volleyball :) Maybe I will do a competition in a small village near Tertenia, in the night! The last summer I played beach-volley at the same competition and my team and I won 500 euros. I wish that this summer I will win again. 











But there is a problem.. a lot of my friends will go to do holidays and two friends will go to study abroad with AFS. I miss them very much but I will have fun with my cousins.

This summer....

I have always dreamed of going abroad, to stay with another family and learn another language. I saw lots of organizations with which i could do this, but as always, it cost a lot of money. So my mother decided to contact an old friend of hers.. and now this summer I'm going to Germany!!

I will leave for Germany on the 21st of July, and stay there for a month. The town where I'll stay is called Schwenningen, and it is in south Germany, near the swiss border :) My host family is very small, just my "German mum" Beate, my "German dad", and my German sister Stefanie :D

Me and Stefanie are the same age, so she has organized a lot of things for us to do when i go to her house :) I will go school with her for a week, which in reality is her last week of school, then the other weeks will be a pure GERMAN IMMERSION :D

One weekend I'm going on a bike ride to raise money, and i will visit most of south Germany! Then I will be going waterskiing one day, and camping for another weekend.

Germany should be great, it's so close now :D :D 

Another thing I'll be doing during the summer is 'city camp'; City Camp is a full immersion in English. Children from my village, Gairo, will attend this camp for 5 days, in which mother-tongue tutors will teach the children English. I will be the helper, meaning I have to tell the children off in Italian when they are naughty ;) 

 

The rest of my summer will be very easy to plan: chill out at the beach. 

My summer is pretty planned out I guess, and I can't waitttt! 

  

I am what I am today because of communication

In my last post I talked about the weakness of communication, which is very simple: the modernization of ways to communicate. But communication isn't always a bad thing, it's actually very important.
The human being in order to dialogue with somebody needs words; he can't go through life with out having interacted with somebody. If we didn't have words, our brain would be chockablock full of feelings and ideas, but without words nobody can get that information across.
Nowadays communication doesn't just rest on face to face conversations, but as I said before, it's being modernized. In my last post, I criticized this new way of communication, but in this post I will show the positive aspects that it has, because like everything, it has its pro's and its con's.
In a world ruled by technology it's no wonder man has invented ways to talk via chat, via video etc.
This new way of communication is definitely a lot faster than how our ancestors used to communicate, via letters, and I guess this is what the modern world requires! Something fast, that will send some information from side of the world to the other. It's a very useful thing, like the computer, so emails, facebook, skype, our mobile phones, these are all thing that contribute to make communication faster and more efficient. It's a great way also to keep in touch with people who live on the other side of the world, to not lose contact, to not lose old friends. We have to embrace technology in our lives, but without overdoing it. It so important to know that we have got the facility to go on the internet and get in touch with people, we know it's there, but we don't always have to use it.
The future is at our doors, and we haven't seen half of it yet. Communication will continue to get modernized, because that's how the world goes. With every spin, with every movement man is already thing about 'the big next thing', because that's the world that we live in, in a world of innovation, of modernization, of promise, of passion, of imagination.

But for me, nothing beat a face-to-face conversation, it's what makes man a man, it's what makes us what we are.

Communication: Is it a good thing?

Communcation is the key to get yor feelings across to someone, to let somebody know everything that's going on inside your head. Without communication, we would have trouble expressing ourselves, and also keeping a relationship with a person.
The art of speaking is something not everyone has, so we have got to make the most of it. Communicating doesn't just have to be through speech, it can also be through gestures, which is how people who aren't able to talk, communicate to other people.

But now in the modern day, talking to people is becoming very rare. Why? Because people nowadays prefer to communicate on the computer, by chat, by skype, by facebook, in other words the virtual world is becoming more important than the real world. I probably speak to my friends a lot more on the computer than what i do in real life. It's freaky how much technology has taken over our real lives. To be quite honest these ways of communicating are taking over our lives at an uncontrollable speed, and we can't do anything about it.
Communication is losing its power.  Face to face conversations are so important, but sometimes we forget this importance and only think about chatting on the internet, or texting. We tend to forget how important actually real conversations are, and this is very unfortunate for a conintent where the lanugage is so important and we must preserve it.
Disabled people find the internet very easy and useful to communicate with others, especially when having the disabilty to not be able to talk, which is something that can be very problematic. Through videos, and scripts they can easily be understood be others, but this doesn't necessarely mean that they are happy.


A word is what describes something that we find on this planet. Without words, we woudn't be able to communicate like we do.

We need to remember how important face to face conversations are, and how much communication is important to our community. Our lives can't revolve around the computer and a virtual life.

COMMUNICATION TODAY

Technology is the main character of the modern age.

Since the industrial revolution, technology evolves day by day. Now we are in a completely  industrialize world  where grass and forests give way to development and buildings. There are a lot of negative aspects but now we are in a modern society and it's impossible to go back in time also because technology give us a lot of good things: advanced medical cares, to work at home, to know a lot of people, to be informed to our world, to do scientific discoveries  etc..
Now I will say how technology can be useful for the comunication:

Advanced medical cares: with the technology we can save life to many person or we can ameliorate people's life. People with disability can communicate with special PCs that play written words. People who don't hear can hear with hearaids.

To meet new people you can use: Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger.. and more. They are virtual meeting places, where you can share and show your emotions, your life. You can talk with people who are far away. More, if you want to be famous you can load some video on youtube and all the world can see you. On Facebook I met two friends from my childhood, I talk and see my uncles and I have a good time.
Internet is speeder than a normal missive, it's very serviceable.

To be informed:

• Internet isn't a controllable media like the TVs are, wich are controlled by powerful and rich people. In each moment there is some information to tell the world, it's like a constant TV news. Every day I read the Repubblica and Corriere della Sera sites and there is more information than TV news.

• New papers: everyday 5 millions new papers are sold. It's the most important way to be informed. With new papers we can know news by all the world.

Royal Wedding.. what a bore!

'' The wedding of this century '' '' the most beautiful wedding'' '' the wedding of my dreams '' and more, and more, and more.. STOP!

Yes, it was sure a beautiful, incredible, and unique wedding.. but now people are exaggerating. In this period I hate the journalists: they talk only about killings, kidnappings and.. the royal wedding! I didn't watch this wedding but each TV news talks about Kate's dress, the Queen's yellow dress, William's few hairs, Pippa's dress, Camilla's hat.. The media has transformed a beautiful thing into a boring one. For example they talk about how Kate waved at people. They said that she waved a lot of times ( 4 times, exactly! ) and this means that she is a sure, not shy and determinate person who married William only for money and to become famous. Wow, immediately all journalists became psychologists! They talk about William and Kate's kiss. They say that it's a rapid and not romantic kiss, but I'm sure that if the newly married couple had kissed with 'passion' they would say that the kiss was too exaggerated. 
Moreover, they compare Diana to Kate.. a horrible thing. They are two beautiful women, they have two different characters and above all, they are two different people! Each small particular gets compared. I think that it is an unnecessary and hateful thing that hurts Kate. 
I hope that William will keep journalists away from their private life, because it's difficult to live without privacy: an example is Diana, who suffered a lot for this reason.






 Beyond the wedding, William and Kate are a good married couple and  she didn't marry him only for money but I think that they must be careful:  paparazzi can end this wedding! I estimate Kate because she doesn't care a lot to the old rules of the Royal Family, she is a modern princess. For example, sometimes she wears dress not branded but she is always beautiful! 






Keeping out critics, this is a 'modern tale', no? So I hope that they will live happily ever after :)

The royal wedding

Being English, the 289th of April was a very important day for me and my family: it was the day of the royal wedding.

I could almost consider William and Kate a 'perfect' couple, in a way that I hope one day they will be a fantastic king and queen for my country. It was a happy wedding, everybody looked happy, and it was definitely very different to the last wedding of lady Diana and Charles.

The church service was so happy, and you could see the love in their eyes. The queen also looked delighted that her nephew was getting married, and she looked adorable ^^
Kate looked stunning in her wedding dress, a simple yet beautiful gown. The part I like the most was the balcony kiss, and it did actually bring a tear to my eye.

Many italians seemed to have criticized the wedding left right and centre, and they actually seem more interested in this day than the English people. The English population was and is very happy for the newly wed couple, and hope that one day they will be our future king and queen.

For me, this truly was a fairy tale wedding. It was perfect in every way. The media did their bit, and the lunch and dinner was strictly private, as it should be. They are normal people, but with a big weight on their shoulders: they represent England, and proudly.


- Francesca