`Foreign Exchange students

Valentina Visits from Pisa, Italy

By Kyle Haidet

Outgoing Is an excellent way to describe foreign exchange student Valentina Tarini. Valentina is from a city on the west coast of Italy called Pisa. Pisa is home to the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa and the town has around 90,000 inhabitants. Those from Pisa are described as very kind and wonderful. She stated that on the weekends back home there is plenty of cooking, netflix, hanging out with friends, hanging out with siblings, along with camping or hiking. It is also common to see people hanging out, riding bikes with friends to the ocean, partying, watching movies, playing with family, lots studying, reading, and a lot of going to the beach in the summer. With that said, school, food, and the environment are quite different here in Dolores than it is in Pisa, especially with school. School starts at 8am and ends at 1pm. They get 15 minute breaks at 10.53 am and they also have students stay in one class with the same classmates everyday. Teachers move every hour in the class they need to be inas well. School for them in Pisa is 6 days a week. Schools also don't provide books which means they have to buy their own. School doesn’t have sports or school teams most of the time. If you want to play a sport, you have to do it outside of school. There are also no sports seasons, meaning you can play the same sport throughout the whole year. You can even have bad grades, go to parties, drink, smoke or do whatever, and you can still go to games, and tournaments. However, they do not have school sports there. That is one thing that Valentina does find cool about schools here in America. She also finds it cool that you can play many different sports here but it sucks that it's over after that sport’s season. In Italy, you can play sports outside of school all year long.

Valentina has never done wrestling before until now. State for her was fun but was really difficult. Going to Denver was a very big event with lots of people. Denver was also pretty big and had many cool places such as museums, aquariums. Before her arrival to America, she was expecting a small town rather than a city, to hangout more, a lower education level, and was expecting people to be more heavy set while eating nothing but starbucks and sandwiches. She also expected a big house, big tv, a big bed, and expected to be paired with another foreign exchange student with the host family. When asked how she feels about Dolores, she responded by saying It is definitely different from the city of Pisa. She also said there is a lot less to do here in Dolores and Cortez than there is in Italy. She did say she misses friends, family, volleyball, routine, hanging out with friends, food, summer in italy, the ocean, freedom, and parties. And lastly I had to ask out of curiosity how our pizza differs from pizza where she is from in Italy. She actually finds our pizza quite strange! I was told that back in Italy there is only pepperoni pizza and our toppings here are very strange. Even the fact that people like ranch dressing with pizza. In the end she told me her favorite American food is our biscuits and gravy.