One of my first "best" shots...

I cannot remember if I ever talked about this picture.

As the data says it has been taken in July 1999. In those days I was in England for a "study-vacation". I went there with some classmates and a teacher, to learn English of course.
I still don’t know why I did such a stupid thing, I had been studying English only for 9 months, at school, as well as Italian school can teach English to an 11 years old Italian girl. I guess I only knew thing like the use of the auxiliary verb “do”...And surely I wasn’t old enough (12) fur such a travel.
But, I was following my dream. I can say that since I have memory I have been fascinated by English language, by the skill to be able to speak and understand 2 languages… When I was 9 I wished I had an English or American relative that could teach me to speak English, so, 2 years later the idea that I could learn that language from people who were native speakers, was really fascinating.

Dream isn’t reality. By definition.

That travel had been a kind of nightmare.
I was unable to understand a lot of things that were said (and I think it was normal). Food was few and quite disgusting (a day I put ketchup in white rice because it was so "white" and with no taste that I started to appreciate ketchup, and I felt fooled when a day there was "pizza" and I found a piece of bread with 2 spots of a weird "fresh tomato sauce" and 2 slices of cheese. That's not pizza! You cannot seriously call it pizza! You cannot call it pizza to Italian people!) .
Italian classmate used to send me away because I was “the strange girl that uses internet”, teachers send me to classmates because “I had to stay with people of my age”… as result I found my self “alone” in the middle of known and unknown people. What to do? When happened I used to talk with students coming from other countries, but with such a poor English as was mine the best thing I could do was to speak Italian with a girl from Spain that answered me back in Spanish. Quite useless to learn English, don't you think?

The 25th July 1999 we went to an amusement park. There were interesting things, some funny too. I hadn’t a great day, if I am not wrong, that day I got so angry with a girl (she behaved as a cheerleader who think to be the smartest human being on this world) that I was going to punch her on her nose. I didn’t.
But I felt extremely bad I had reached such an high level of hate, I felt sad that in no way I was being able to have “friendly” relationship with people around me.

After lunch, I think, I discovered that kind of river (dunno what it was exactly), with ducks. It was calm, peaceful. I sat there alone (yep, I was being a quite reckless girl)…The minutes I spent there, had been the best part of those days. The duck of the picture got so close to me that I had been able to picture it with my compact film camera. This simple event made me smile, made me be happy and glad to be alive and there.

Before I didn’t feel at home, after I did.

That’s probably the reason that made me to love taking pictures.

In my life, often, has happened that everything and everyone seemed to be against me, that I couldn't do nothing more than wishing to be somewhere else…
And for some unknown and weird reason, during the saddest moments there is something alike that duck getting so close to me that make me feel “at home” again. That makes me, again, able to love this world and this life.

That makes me feel loved.