The birthday girl!

Hello folks!

It seems like yesterday that I landed in New York, full of hopes and excited to start this new and breathtaking experience…. But time goes by and it goes so fast.

The first month in New Paltz is over and just another one left to go… Then we’ll move to the “City”, where every dream can come true, no matter how big it is!

Many things have happened these past 30 days and among the craziness of a brand new life I had the chance to meet fascinating and surprising people and spend some valuable time with them.

Less than a week ago, it was my 25th Birthday and I decided to celebrate it in class, simply by eating a piece of cake with my international mates and asking everybody to wear some beautiful “Happy Birthday” crowns as a reminder of this busy but still important day! That seemed enough for me, though.

So, after a long day spent attending my courses at the University, I headed back home by walking. After a few steps, I started feeling overwhelmed by the circumstances… I was so tired, had no chance to hear from my parents and friends in Italy the all day, and missed home so badly.

I was deep in my thoughts when I arrived at the motel and approached to enter my room… It was closed from the inside… :-/

I imagined that my roomie was in there, maybe sleeping and didn’t want to be bothered…. But then, someone came to open the door and…

SURPRISE!!!!

My crazy, fabulous, sweet like sugar and affectionate Italian girls had prepared an amazing intimate party in my honor.
My room was dark and lighted just by tens of candles strewn all over the place…. Chocolate cupcakes on my desk… Random pictures of my life posted above my bed on the wall… and beautiful, stunning roses sent from Italy by my boyfriend!

I was the birthday girl.

And I felt home again.

Thank you all for making my birthday so memorable!

Hugs and Kisses.
Gaia.

The historical background

I’ m sure all of you are wondering what the name “New Paltz” means.

Well, I found that New Paltz has a good historical background, as it was founded in 1678 from a group of French Huguenots.

The Huguenots had to leave France during religious persecution; they first moved to Mannheim in the German Palatinate, and then crossed the ocean and finally settled near the Wallkill river shore, in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.

In Mannheim’s dialect Palatinate (Pfaltz) is pronounced Paltz, so, thankful for the hospitality they got, the Huguenots wanted to name the place New Paltz.

Nowadays is still possible to see most of the original settlement in what is called “Huguenot Street Historic District”.

New Yorker's Life

Hi Everyone!!

 

Our second week here in New York is ended!

I’m starting to get used to the working life (even if is not easy at all!!) and everything is completely different from New Paltz here: the subway, the crowd, the office, the projects, the responsibility that you have to take,…

We have to grow up in a short time!

Personally, I love the life in the City: my supervisor is amazing (I just need to improve more my English, in order to understand everything), she is so patience with me and lets me learn a lot about our HR thanks to all the project that she gives me.

I have to be honest: I was extremely scared two weeks ago, because this is my first job experience and I wasn’t really confident with my spoken English. But all my fear disappeared the first day, when I saw how Julie and all the other people in my department approached me: they are extremely kind and they do as much as they can in order to teach me everything about their sector!

Thanks to their behavior, every morning I wake up and I’m happy to go to work!

I’m doing my best and I hope to improve my knowledge and work ability during the next weeks!

 

And what about your experience? In these weeks we haven’t met a lot as in New Paltz: are you satisfied of your work?

It’s hard work (mostly)

The dedicated reader of this blog might think that we enjoyed wonderful eight weeks of leisure time at SUNY New Paltz. But we should put something right here: The IIB program is an academic program that is, although it’s a lot of fun, still hard work. To our excuse, posts and pictures of us sitting in the library is not the first thing we share on our blog. Therefore, this media gallery is about the one thing that remained concealed until now: Our HARD work. University life in the US is quite different to other countries. Here, you have to do many small group and individual assignments that sometimes reminds of middle school homework. Because there are so many of them, it requires time management and self-organization. Group work requires the ability to work in a team as wells as collaboration skills and finally the amount of work can be overwhelming sometimes, at least, if you want to see something else than the campus. This is very similar to the job life and thus prepares you well for it. I hope…

Road trip to Boston!!

For our first weekend in New Paltz we decided to rent three cars and drive all the way to Boston, Massachusetts. We barely knew each other and we were already going on a trip all together. It was so much fun!! We stayed on a beautiful hostel, we went to a nightclub, and visited the most important attractions in Boston. We also visited MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard, both universities are incredibly huge and beautiful!!

We had such a great time and it was an excellent opportunity to get to know each other outside the Super 8 and the university.

Here are some pictures of the trip!!