Writing an exam – or getting really pissed!

Somehow we made it through the first Italian semester and yesterday it was time to write an exam on the history of England. We’ve mainly been studying law history as the class is at the political faculty but we’ve also been studying the history of the monarchy of England and the different Tudor and Stuart periods etc. The teacher had told us a couple of weeks ago that the exam would be about what we had learnt and read so far and that we would be given two hours and that the test was small and that she would only have us answering to three small questions and that we would elaborate one a little bit more than the others. That sounded fine and it felt as if I could really pass the test. I spent the whole last weekend studying and memorizing everything though and then on Monday she tells us (two days before the test): “I think that you should also read this book cause it’ll be included in the test as well”! The chapters she suggested were two hundred all together so I got really pissed because it would have been impossible to memorize all that information in two days. Therefore I skipped that part and studied harder the other things so that it would be impossible not to pass. So here comes Wednesday and me and my classmate (we are only two people taking this class) are sitting and waiting for the teacher to come. Forty-five (!) minutes pass by and she still hasn’t arrived. Then she finally calls the reception (where we had been two times asking for her) and lets us know that she’s on her way. Then she arrives, puts us in the same room and leaves us with all our stuff and our textbooks. When I ask her if I should leave my bag in her office so that she would know that I wasn’t gonna cheat then she’s like: “Why, I’m not a cop”. No thank god I was thinking. So we glance at the test and there are ten questions to answer, one was for example “explain Humanism”, you can surely understand that those were not short and easy questions but more difficult ones. But that’s not enough! Because here comes the most crazy part! Underneath the ten questions she’d put like five different periods such as ”the reformation” and written that we should write a three pages essay as well on one of these periods! Well fu---- good luck! It was impossible for me to make it on time (it was in English) so then you can imagine what my classmate felt like. He thinks that English is not so easy. We were both so pissed off! And when we ask her for more time she tells us that we have miscalculated the time and that we have to write the essay at home for the week-end instead. I guess it’s like Tommaso told me yesterday “you have to learn how to shake it off if you wanna stay here longer”. Living in Italy is not always a “dolce vita”, it can be really difficult as well.