Monday, February 21, 2011

First week in Roma

Hey again! Come va? Bene? Anchio! (Check it: I know some Italian.)

Well guys, after my orientation in Florence, and side trips to Venice, Sienna, Pisa and London, I finally landed in Rome last week (landed in the figurative sense - we didn’t fly).

Let me paint you a little picture of my apartment: I share it with five girls-many of whom are very cool, one almost got us evicted on the third day. Two people per bedroom. One bedroom has two beds pushed together, one bedroom has four separate twin beds (only two of which have mattresses) and one bedroom has one double bed haha - no, but seriously, one bed. So Lily and I offer to take that bedroom because we know each other, we like to shnuggle, and it wouldn’t be awkward. Well, man does Lily regret that decision.

I have a little cold so I apparently snore like a “freight train” and move around like “I’m doing gymnastics” in the bed. This, in turn, bothers me, because I’m scared for my life if I make one little move in the bed. She tends to get irritable in the AM. I figured out the solution to our problem: I need to get Lily drunk before we go to bed.

Continuing: my apartment is decorated by three older women. This translates to hearts, butterflies and cupcakes everywhere. No, really - everywhere. The knobs on the kitchen drawers are little cupcakes, and heart-shaped pillows and butterfly wallpaper fills this apartment. The decorations are really cute, but are they sturdy? No, the shelf fell off the kitchen wall yesterday and the mirror fell off of the bathroom wall a few days ago. I actually found the silver lining on that one: I really like this clothes store but their dressing room doesn’t have a mirror, so it’s hard to buy anything. Portable giant mirror. Problem solved.



Can we talk about the lack of drying machines in Roman apartments? You know what that means? Clothing lines run across our rooms, which are hard to avoid in the middle of the night when it’s pitch black. Speaking from experience.

But Rome is actually amazing. We live in Campo di Fiori, thanks to Benny Ginsberg! (Not actually, but Benny asked me to give him the first shout-out in the next blog. It’s actually thanks to Gail Gutman!) This is the hip, trendy center of Rome where all of the international bars are and where all of these monuments and ruins remain. We live in walking distance from the Coliseum and Pantheon (or as my friend Jackie refers to it, the Panthenon. I keep having to remind her that the Pantheon and Parthenon did not have a baby), and I actually pass ruins on my way to run errands, which is amazing!

I have class two days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and a lot of them are on-site - which means, if we’re learning about a certain type of architecture or art, we visit a site and view it firsthand as the professor lectures. We went into a first century church for class on Tuesday, which was pretty cool. I felt like Xena the Princess Warrior down there. But actually, I did. And we went on a field trip to Tiboli today and saw the villa of an emperor and another villa, where a portion of the Lizzie McGuire Movie was filmed. Do you think Persian Princesses can rent out villas?

I also learned something really interesting on that field trip: in the olden Roman days, it was common for older men (like in their 30’s to 40’s) to have relationships with younger boys (like in their early teens).

Alright, I gotta get ready and continue the search for Paolo. Talk to you guys soon!

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