Hello,

   This is Caleb Renshaw with my first blog about my upcoming trip. Now, as many of you may or may not have heard, I am going away from Boise for all of next year to live as an Italian on the island of Sardinia. I have included a Map of just exactly where I'll be. My city is called Cagliari  (pronounced cah-YAR-ee). This trip is one of the most exciting things ever to happen to me, and I'm so looking forward to having my eyes opened up to see the world in a whole new light.
   I am almost done with the processes of figuring all the details for arranging my trip, a series of events that has taken almost a year now. I am doing my exchange through Rotary International. They are a great group of folks all around the world that do non-profit charity and humanitarian work. They have organized two meetings thus far, and a mountain of paperwork for each one. In the first meeting, we found out where we will all be going. There are 18 of us who will be leaving from district 5400 this year, each to our own unique district worldwide. The reason it's called a "foreign exchange" is because in return, each one of those 18 districts will be sending another student back here to live in Idaho. I have friends who will be all over the world next year, France, Brazil, Taiwan, Turkey, or Sweden, each one of us will learn a great deal and have our own experiences. The purpose of this blog is to share mine.
   In the second RYE (Rotary Youth Exchange) meeting in Sun Valley, everybody had to give a five minute speech in the language of their host country. Considering that most of us only had four months to learn anything about our respective languages, we did okay as a whole. Mine was pretty good, although Federico, the Italian here this year, said I didn't move my arms and hands enough. :) That got a couple laughs.  During the conference, we figured out lots of fine details about really interesting topics such as insurance and money. I'm sure Mom and Dad found all of it to be vital insight as to what they needed to do for this trip, but I am willing to bet a very large sum that I never will become an accountant.
   A little about the trip itself. I will be staying in Cagliari for the entire duration of my stay which will last around eleven months. I will most likely be leaving in early September, if not, then late August. RYE usually arranges things so that the students will spend their time with three families, and receive a fair, unbiased and full view of the country itself as a whole. I will probably have two or three families, depending on how many they can find, and I already know one of them. About a month ago, I was contacted through Facebook by Ludovica Medda, who is my sister. She is an only child, and will be coming to Pocatello while I am in Italy. So, unfortunately I will not have a huge mafia-sized Godfather style family. I'll have two loving host parents all to myself. So that's going to be one of the many different things about living in Italy. I don't know of any of my other families as of yet, but that's normal. School will start on September 17th, and I don't know much more about the system there, though I've heard rumors that they go six days a week 9:00-1:00. I'll post again once I know more.
   I'll try to blog the happenings of my trip as they occur, but if you have any specific questions, or if there's anything I left out, let me know and I'll include it in the next installment. Until then,
Arreviderci!
   -Caleb