I spent a busy three-day weekend (Pentecost Monday, anyone?) that drove all thoughts and possibilities of blogging out of my mind.
More on the weekend later. Before I go on to new and exciting activities, I have to finish telling you about Italy...not that there's lots to tell.
But I do have pictures!

No festival would be complete without a dorky mascot and this thing was nothing if not complete. So, the minute we got off the bus, we were all herded along to join the giant fuzzy...whatever it was and get a group photo taken. I cleverly avoided this by whipping out my own camera and playing Ofiicial Group Photographer and Archivist.

If you look, you can see Mal in a bright blue sweater and Alex nearby with a long pink scarf.

We spent most of the morning tramping around the village, going from workshop to workshop. I was a tad grumpy, as I'd gotten assigned a group of 6th graders from another school, rather than the group my twins and their pals were in. And this group of 17 kids already had two adults with them and didn't even need me..grumble, bitch, complain, etc... So, I couldn't take any pictures of my girls.

Instead, I took a few of the landscape, which was a nice one. In this region of Italy, the roofs are all covered in slate. Very pretty!

The little metal hooks on the roof are to keep the snow from falling off in big chunks and crushing people....

As I said in my previous post, there were about a thousand kids there. And all of us ate together in an enormous tent. The din was deafening, but the food was quite nice. Only the italians would serve 1000 kids a starter of al dente pasta with fresh tomato sauce, followed by a veal stew (sort of like the French blanquette de veau). The dessert was an ice cream bar -a "gelato della panna" that was SO good!
And drinks? There was local apple juice for the kids and bottles of wine for the adults. So civilized these Europeans.
Now that I think about it, I suppose I AM a bit European...but I'm not European enough to be comfortable even drinking a smidge of alcohol at mid-day on a school trip. I stuck to water. Guess my Nebraska roots were showing. ... which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Here's a picture that Mallory took. She used her DSi camera mode and took about 300 pictures, many of them blurry, bless her heart. But the ones that were in focus were quite good!

After our idyll in the Heidi-esque mountain village, we piled back into the bus and descended into the valley to go explore the ancient town of Aoste.
Well, "explore" is a big word...we only had one hour of free time!

It's a pretty interesting place- the area has been settled since pre-historic times, of course, but it really got on the map when a Roman colony was established. It was called Augusta Praetoria Salassorum. T
This (pic below) was the eastern gate to the colony at the time. It's called the Porta Praetoria and was built in the 1st century BC. It used to be faced in marble, but that's long since gone and carried off for other projects...

Very cool!
Seeing all the Roman ruins (the town has tons. lol) almost made up for the suffering I endured. No, my iPod never did come unblocked during the trip. I had to endure the whole trip with no decent music or podcasts. Mallory lent me hers for a bit, sweet child. However, , while I don't mind Fall Out Boy and Green Day, it's not the stuff that's going to get me through six hours on a bus...

So, that's it for Italy. Tomorrow you get to hear about yet another Ren Faire.

I'll just add that progress is being made on our new room! As I write, JP and a pal are installing the radiator. The floor will go in after that's done.

Also- Alexa just phoned and asked to stay an hour later at school. It seems that a tv crew has come to do a story about Savoyard being taught in French schools and her class is being featured. It's supposed to air on TF1 in a week or so. (TF1 is a big deal! From Wikipedia : "TF1's average market share of 25-35% makes it the most popular domestic network. TF1 is the largest European television channel by its audience.")

So, that's all kind of exciting!

Italy: sunny, sophisticated, stylish.

While France may have a rep for being sophisticated and seductive, our neighbor to the south takes the cake (or rather 'torta'). Though I often see dowdy French folks sporting faded jogging pants in our local supermarket on the weekend , I think it might be forbidden by law for Italian people to go out the door looking less than impeccable.

At least, that's how it looked to me- based on a one-day whirlwind trip to the north of Italy on Tuesday.

You may be wondering how I ended up cruising around the Val d'Aoste in a giant doubledecker bus bursting at the seams with 76 junior high kids?

Well, I'll tell you, I wondered about that myself as I struggled to open the window and get some relief from the hormonal whiffiness of a herd of 12 and 13 year olds mostly unacquainted with deodorant.

I also wondered that as I turned on my iPod about half an hour into the three hour trip to get there and the screen promptly froze. I had nothing with me to read. And I had nothing to listen to but the chattering and the squealing.....

(Mallory does love her candid shots. I was giving some rowdy kids my "Look of Doom". Don't I look like a crabby old thing? )

Not that they weren't nice kids. And not that I wasn't happy to be asked to accompany the twins' sixth grade class (and a few other classes!) on their trip to a Franco-Provençal festival being held in the tiny alpine village of La Thuile.

Hey! I figured. A free trip to Italy! What's not to like?

Well, it turns out there were a few things not to like, like the fact that it took so long to get there. We left at 7am and drove for three hours. Then we had to be back on the road by six . So we had had only eight hours of visiting for over six hours of travel..

But mostly it was fine and a good time was had by all.

The majority of the day was taken up by the festival. My twins (and all the other kids on the bus) study Savoyard a few hours each week as one of their language options. So, after they've been to French class, English class and German class, they head to the classroom of Monsieur B. He's the math teacher, but has a not-so-secret identity as an accordeon-playing Savoyard activist.

Savoyard is a local dialect that is slowly dying out and not getting any support from the French state, in contrast to the more prestigious dialects of Brittany and Alsace. The Franco-Provençal family of languages (to which Savoyard belongs) is found in a pretty small area and the speakers tend to stick together. So, our school was of many in the region invited to this big three-day festival.

-I'm going to stop here for now. Blogger is bugging out and refusing to let me post any more photos. I'll try again later tonight and tell you the rest of the story....