Inside the Italian Mind

I like speaking Italian.
I was able to conspire with my classmates the otherday. There's this new girl at our school, she is with AFS and from Australia. She's doing the 1/2 year program. So, now there are two foreign students. She doesn't speak any italian, and it's weird seeing her, because it's like a mirror of 6 months ago. And it makes me so proud of not being...'her' anymore. She's so lost, people talk about her in front of her because they know she doesn't understand. She laughs when she doesn't understand the joke, but it's better than being the only one not laughing in the room.

I'm trying to help her with my past experience though. Because there are things she doesn't realize. Like she feels excluded because her classmates don't talk to her much, even if they have learned english. But she doesn't understand that it's because they are embarrassed about their english. Some of my classmates/friends have never talked to me in english because they feel too self consious about it. They also feel self consious about being italian. I know, it sounds odd. But we are foreigners, we have premade judgements of how loud and gesturing Italians are. And they know this. Like how I'm embarrassed to be kinda fat and not very good at geography because it is evidence of a typical American stereotype.
It's like the phrase 'it's more afraid of you than you are of it', usually this is referring to a spider or bees. But in this case, it refers to the citizens of my foreign country.