So, yet again there has been all kinds of craziness (good and bad) that has made me too lazy to ever come and write about it here. I'm bad at keeping a blog. Sorry.I continue to be too lazy to write about things properly, so instead I'm going to record the highlights of the past couple of months in photos. Yay for laziness!
So. We teachers returned from winter break all full of energy and ready to start the million new courses we had planned for January, and, when they had finally started, Reggio dumped a million tons of snow on our heads. This made it difficult to get to the abovementioned courses, because the school cars are just barely more powerful than golf carts, and possess neither snow tires nor snow chains... nor really anything to help them operate in the snow. It's very difficult to make them start moving, and equally difficult to brake once you've managed that.
Thus commenced a three week period of quasi-constant anxiety about cancelling courses, hoping colleagues were managing to avoid car accidents, etc.
As evidenced by the above photo, though, the snow was aesthetically pretty nice. Reggio, congratulations on being photogenic even under a ton of snow.
Then it was decided that we should use the snow to go skiing in. I had never been skiing before (aside from one experience when I was a young-ish child, in which I was clipped into a pair of skis, but, lacking both any kind of initiative and a teacher, did not actually manage to go anywhere on them except by stepping sideways; fail) so this involved my ever-patient colleague skiing backwards in front of me so that he could hold my hands and drag me down the mountain. And by mountain I mean "hill with the gentlest incline you've ever seen".
Nonetheless, by the end of the day, I was pleasantly sunburnt and had managed to ski down the baby slope several times without killing myself. Not pictured: the part where I nearly fell off the ski lift and was dragged up the mountain holding on with only one arm. (Mountain still refers to the hill that is just barely a hill.)
Then some good weather came. We explored the castles of Canossa (above) and Rossena (below). Canossa is lovely because you can climb all over it like a little kid and imagine that your are defending it from invaders or whatever. If my brother had been there, we would totally have been making arrow-shooting noises (whatever those are) and reinacting an epic battle.
The castle of Rossena (above) is more difficult to get into, so we just admired it from afar.
On another fine day, we climbed up the Pietra di Bismantova (weirdest-shaped rock ever? I think possibly), which involved some scrambling on a slippery still-snowy path (we miscalculated the season just a little, and discovered when we got there that the paths were still snowy... oops) and then a lovely picnic lunch on the top.
