My trip to Italy!

I am back! Extremely tired and currently locked out of my iPhone, but I'm back everybody!

For those of you who read my last post, this week I was away in Italy with my school. Honestly, it has been the best week of my life so far and I loved almost every second of it! Here's a little run down of what I got up to, and I'll be uploading photo's to my gallery page when I create it later.

Saturday 13th:

So, this was the day when we started our 22 hour journey to Aosta, Italy. I was prepared with three books, Pineapple chunks and my phone. The journey to Dover was quite boring; I read a little, watched a film about how a Skier almost lost his life even with a helmet on (why our teachers showed us this before hand, I don't understand) and ate my way through two lots of Pineapple chunks. We finally got on to the ferry and I just walked around for a bit whilst we crossed over to France. When we arrived, this was when I started feeling a little ill. I had the worst sleep of my life that night - I think I got an hour's sleep between 4 and 5 am.

Sunday 14th:

We continued through France, making it to the French-Italian border at Mont Blanc. The tunnels stretched for miles, but eventually at 11 am we made it to our ski hire. I had my boots and ski's fitted, and got my first sight of the views. Never in my life have I seen such a beautiful place! The mountains towered in the sky, with snow covering their peaks. As well as that, we watched Frozen on the coach so I was extra happy! In the afternoon, we made our way to the hotel. I'll be honest, I didn't expect it to be so... rural. The design was a little outdated but hey, we weren't spending a lot of time in the hotel. We had our lunch (Pasta, a meal which I am now sick of) and had a little walk into the town centre in Aosta. There were a lot of different shops; some sold comics, others sold Ice-Cream's, some even sold cheese. I thought I'd try a Lemon and Chocolate Ice-Cream, something I decided to call a "Cocoa Zinger" and it was lovely! After that, we headed back to our hotel and slept from about 9 pm until 6... Or possibly 7.

Monday 15th:

Like I just mentioned, we were supposed to be awake at 6 and down for breakfast at 7. Of course, me and my roommate decided we'd forget to put an alarm on and ended up sleeping in; trust me, that's not something you want to do on your first day. I rushed down breakfast, prepared my things, then got ready to go skiing for my first time.

We went on a Cable Car type machine called a Gondola to get to the top of the mountains. I'll find a photo off a friend of mine but the views were stunning. Living in England, you don't see much besides roads and rain. Here in Italy, the world looked like some strange heaven. Anyway, there were 7 others in my group, and my instructor was called Josh (who was only 19 by the way!). Surprisingly, the hardest part of day one was learning how to get my ski's on... That was a real pain. Besides that, skiing seemed fairly easy to me. We skied for about 5 hours before heading back down to our hotel. Later on the night, the 81 people who were on the trip walked back into town for some Italian pizza - I had higher expectations than what we got but it was still very nice. It was the only circular pizza I'd seen in the entire town as almost everywhere made square pizzas!

Tuesday 16th:

So on the Tuesday, me and my roommate got up at 6:10 to give ourselves time for a long hot shower and to get ready. Breakfast was the same as the day before (a selection of cereal, bread, French foods etc.) and we experienced the same brutal routine of putting on the tight-fitting boots and carrying our ski's with poles. Gladly though, the second day was a little better skiing wise because we'd learnt the basics. The majority of the day was spent going through turning and not slipping down the slope (something I still haven't mastered), but towards the end of the day we went down our first slope properly; I loved every second of it! It's such an Adrenaline rush when you speed down a slope! This is why I would totally be Dauntless if we lived in a world where Divergent happened...

Anyway, we finished the same time as the day before and had our dinner at 7. The starter was Pasta in Garlic Butter and Basil sauce - which I plan on cooking because it is unbelievably tasty - followed by, if memory serves correct, Jacket Potato with Ham. That night we were supposed to go Bowling but a power failure caused us to go on the Wednesday. However, we did do a quiz in our hotel which had a couple of rounds. My team, of course, came first!

Wednesday 17th:

Yes I know the daily logs are getting shorter but that's because we had the same morning routine everday; wake up, shower, dressed, breakfast, boots.

Skiing on Wednesday was the first taste of slopes. We were ready to go on to slopes for the majority of the day, which is exactly what we did. The first few attempts were repeating the slope from Tuesday, trying to minimize the falling over every time. After lunch (Pizza, Chips and Sprite for me) we continued down the same slope but started going further down onto an even steeper slope - probably my favourite one because of the speed I was getting! Like normal, my group finished at 3:30 in the afternoon and we headed to The Lodge (our hotel). Due to the power cut at Bowling the night before, we had to cram in two events in one night. Bowling was amazing and the place was actually better than the one closest to me! I came third out of about seven players, just missing the 100 mark by a few points. Straight after Bowling (literally straight after) we headed to a nightclub - I don't think I've hated something so much in my life. The music was too loud and jumping in the middle of a crowd is just not my thing. We only stayed an hour due to everyone being tired, and when we got back it was straight to bed.

Thursday 18th:

Today was the biggest day so far - Assessment Day. At first, I didn't know we were being assessed on our level. It turns out we were the entire time. Our instructor put a lot of trust in us on this day because we headed up about 2000m above sea level to some of the steepest slopes in the range. I fell over the most on that day out of all of them, which sort of brought my level down a bit. Despite that, it was the best day we had on the entire trip.

After skiing, we went to a local supermarket to buy food and drinks for the journey back to England. I stocked up on Pringles, Fanta, Chocolate, Lindt and also got an 11 Euro box of chocolate for my instructor. Of course, a lot of the food didn't make it to Friday as seen as it was in my hotel room and I sort of got peckish during the night. After dinner on Thursday, it was Presentation Night where we received our awards from our instructors. I achieved Level 1 but others in my group got Level 2. However, due to a mix up with names on the certificate and a brilliant instructor, I ended up receiving a Level 2 somehow.

Friday 19th:

We honestly didn't do much on Friday. We just relaxed on the slopes and just went down the ones we asked to go down as seen as we weren't learning anymore. I continued on my streak of the same lunch, having Pizza again and also learnt how to do faster turns. We finished an hour and a half early as seen as we were leaving at 5, but I enjoyed one last meal in Italy of Pasta and Pizza. The rest of the night was spent on our coach, heading back to the UK. I was pleased because I finally finished Eclipse, and started reading Breaking Dawn which I plan on finishing before January!

And that's it. Saturday consisted of small talk on a coach with my teachers!

I'd just like to say thank you to my teachers and everyone who went. It has been the most amazing week of my life and I loved every second of it. I hope to go again next year, or the year after, or even annually! But thank you for everyone who was involved and I hope another set of people get to enjoy the same thing I did.

Love you all,
Ems!