...Padova?

The first weekend I lived with my second family, my host mom took me to Padova. My host brother lives and goes to university there and she had to go to clean his house. It's very different in Italy. Basically the mother does everything for the family, cleans, cooks and drives them everywhere. Because of this, I feel like the kids are less independent than I'm used to. Since there is another exchange student living in Padova I decided to hang out with her while my host mom was cleaning. Sadly, it was already dark so I didn't get to see much of the city, but we did go shopping. Padova probably has the best shopping I've seen so far in Italy, but of course I haven't been to Milan or Rome yet. As we walked into the center the first stores I saw were Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Rolex. Plus it had all the popular stores for teenagers: Zara, H&M, Stradivarius, etc.. After about 3 hours of shopping and dinner, we decided to go back to Sarah's house. So before I went to Padova, my host brother told me that they have a problem with the Russian and South African mafias there. And that they have Military police men in the bad parts of the city. So as me and Sarah are walking back to her house, in the dark, we came to a fork in the road. We could go right which was close to a busy road where there were a lot of people. Or we could go left through the park which was the shorter path, however it's also where the drug dealers hang out. As we are contemplating our choices, Sarah says, "My host mom told me not to go through the park at night, but it's shorter so we'll go this way". So we start walking left towards the park with no one around. As we walked, I was freaking out, because we are two young girls walking alone at night in ghetto Padova with our hands full of shopping bags and there were men driving by staring at us. After about 40 minutes of walking, we decided we were lost. As we turned around to retrace our steps, we see the Military police men with their big machine guns drive past us. That's when we started running until we finally found Sarah's street. About an hour later, my host mom came to pick me up and we headed back to Bassano at about midnight. Let's just say I wasn't that impressed with Padova.

 

Okay this is something I saw and thought was really strange. They have a 9/11 Monument in Padova, Italy. Like how weird is that. It even has a piece of the building in it.