Simplicity

Last night Pepperoni came over and then we all headed out to Trastevere to hang out with other IES students. Nothing out of the usual except at one bar it was 1 euro shot night! Some people took advantage of that for certain (when in Rome?). I had a great night because besides seeing all my IES friends and roommates I got to see one of my friends from back at school!! A Cornellian whom I met last fall is studying architecture in Rome this semester and lives not too far from Trastevere so he came out with us! yay!! Then I came home and skyped until I was sleepy enough for bed.

Roommates and MY NEW DRESS!! :)

Today was pretty calm day and that was nice.

I woke up and had some breakfast while studying for my two qiuzzes. Julie kindly let me borrow a skirt today because after a week I'm starting to get sick of the same 4 options for warm weather pants/skirts. Even if we individually tried to pack lightly, all together we can make some killer outfits. After a quick bite at home for lunch I was off to school! I took my first quiz and it confirmed that 202 was way too easy for me. After that quiz though our teacher kindly took us to get gelato! Lavender White Peach was my favorite flavor of the day, but tirimisu was pretty good too. Then back to the center for my second quiz. This time the exam was primarily about a movie I haven't seen since I wasn't in the class earlier this week, but despite that fact I think I did pretty well! I know I can conjugate in the three tenses she was asking for and the reading passage went well. For homework I need to take a walk around the IES neighborhood (which is also my neighborhood) and write about  certain spots, so that won't be so tough this weekend.

A little pricey but close to the center and fabulous

Coming out of the center to go home I ran into three chipper roommates off to buy books! I went along to get my Italian books and we took the zig-zaggy route there and back. A couple hours later we managed to get back to the apartment in one piece aaaand  I accidentally feel asleep! What a great 45 min nap. Woke up and just made some cous-cous with parsley, tomato, mozz, and a little vinegar. A simple delicious fresh meal.

Tonight we're going to see the boys apartment for the first time, wooo! But I'm going to keep it a quiet night. Tomorrow morning Pepperoni and I and whoever we can convince are going back to the Ostia beach with some snacks and sunscreen and enjoy the warm weather and cool water! Going to have an early start in hopes that we can wear ourselves out before the heat of the day.

5 Hours Later

Whew! It was a long day spent at the Center. This morning I woke up and managed to survive on only a teeny tiny granola bar and a delicious cappuccino at a bar on the way to school. It was a pleasant warm breezy day and I wore my new dress :)  Ginny and I attended our cooking class with one of the ISCs Sara whom I really like. She claims her french is better than her English but she is so easy to understand so I can't imagine how good her French must be. We made Saltimbocca [saltare/salti= you jump  im= in (with a Roman accent) bocca =mouth) youjumpinmouth! haha It is a strip of veal then a strip of prosciutto layered on top and you roll a sage leaf in teh middle so you have something sorta like meat sushi? Then stick a toothpick in it. This gets fried in a pan FULL of butter and then later you add some white wine to the butter. It was tender and delicious with a hint of sage mmmmmm  we also made pesto pasta from scratch to go with it. Pesto is simply tons of basil, garlic, and pine nuts mixed together with a tiny bit of hot water from the boiling pasta pot. Sara is a great teacher, fun friend, and amazing cook! I ate well today.

basilico

Ryan and I cooking up a storm

After yummy lunch I checked email on the library computer until classes. My Italian class was first from 1-3:30 where I interviewed a classmate and got interviewed all about Italian musicians. It was nerve racking but actually went smoothly. After Italian I jogged upstairs and begin my first day in 301 (from 3:30-6), where I truly belong! I brought the A game today and my Italian was forming quickly and easily in my head. I met some new kids in my class and saw a couple acquaintances. I spoke with the teacher about the permanent switch and she said that was fine I can even request to be in the section with my roommate. The only down side is that I have to take the quiz for my easy class tomorrow AND the quiz for my new class tomorrow. Another day of back to back classes (on a Friday no less!!!!) tomorrow, but my first class is taking a trip to the gelateria as the final part of our quiz ;)  I can handle that.

For the weekend we as an apartment were considering catching a train up to Siena. Sadly most of the hostels are all booked up and it's kinda last minute and we all have quizzes.... might not work out. Thankfully we can do that any weekend because everything is so close!!! So instead I will hopefully meet up with my high school friend for a lunch/dinner date, and I'm meeting up with an IC/Pgh friend for the Stillers game on Sunday night!!! Beat them Ravens! We also might join Claudio's boys for another trip to the beach, which would be delightful in September :)  Tonight we're off to meet up with some IES students and hopefully I can also see my friend who is studying here from Cornell! Those Delts are everywhere! haha                        A Presto!


ps. fall break plans in the making, watch out Mere and Lauren!

pps. a picture from our first day at IES

Sophia Ginny and I

Quiet Nights

Yesterday evening Nico took us to Baffetto (which means mustache) Pizzeria. It was perfect. A true hole-in-the-wall Italian pizzeria with a woodfire oven and zero elbow room. Thankfully she called ahead for us and put in a reservation because when we showed up there was a line maybe 30 people deep waiting outside, popular spot for Tuesday night dinner! We got a table after 10 minutes to the disgust of the people in line. It was nice having Nico around again and of course dinner took place almost entirely in Italian. Fun words that tripped us up : english --> italian "Boom!" and spaceship  italian-->english "awesome".  After dinner Nico and her friend (who is also an ISC for IES students) went out with two other girls from my apartment. Kat, Ginny, and I went home to try and finish watching a movie we started some nights ago, La Dolce Vita. We watched another half hour before it was making us sleepy and realized that we still have and hour and a half to go! We called it quits and will try to watch more some other night.

Clean plate club!

   

Our wine jug 

Kat joined the clean plate club too

Felt well rested and woke up at a good time this morning. It's hard for me to switch into an Italian morning routine. I want to eat a bowl of cereal and wake up with a mug of coffee. Here I grab a small yogurt and maybe make a piece of toast, most mornings I also make or buy espresso. It's just not the same. I need to find an activity in the morning that will help me wake up, maybe I'll start showering in the morning instead of afternoon/evening? I did my homework for Italian then Kat and I explored Chiesa Nuova since it's 2 min from our apartment. It was interesting inside but we didn't see the sanctuary because we didn't want to open doors that we shouldn't. Another trip will be easy enough to make. We grabbed panini from the cafe across the street and ate outside in the sun next to the fountain. A beautiful meal in my opinion. Then off to class!

Italian class today still seems not challenging enough but my professor is really reluctant to let me move up for some reason. None of my classmates had ever studied pronomi combinati before, ever. My professor suggested tomorrow I take my normal class with her then stay and take the next level up just to see if it's really what I want. That means 5 hours of straight Italian classes tomorrow from 13-18:00  oh goodness! On top of that my roomies and I signed up for one of the cooking classes that IES offers. So in the morning we'll go and make some yummy food to munch on for lunch, then I sit in class for 5 hours straight and come home to do homework. Sigh. Today I finally took off my nailpolish (every guy reading this just groaned) but nailpolish remover is absolutely the hardest thing to find in Rome!! It's incredible because they sell nailpolish in plenty of places just no remover! I'm glad my roommate brought some but I want some of my own. grrrrr.

I've made plans to meet up for lunch with one of my high school friends who is studying in Rome this semester with another program. I'm excited to see her on Friday and touch base on our experiences and on all the art we've seen because she took AP Survey of Art History with me, gotta love that class and Sturd! I'm hoping to see some tiny pea-heads while I'm here ;)

Quiet night here, Ginny and I walked over to the Pantheon for gelato after dinner (you know cause it's ten minutes away hahaha) thanks to Ginny's superior Italian translation skills we helped some Americans understand directions from an Italian woman, turns out the gentleman used to live in Pgh!! while at the Pantheon people watching we also saw a man in a green Pittsburgh basketball shirt with "South Hills" written on the back where an athlete's name would go. Small touristy world.  Homework and bed now

baci!

Intensive Italiano

Hooray! I made it to class!!

Today started off with another delightful sleep-in. Since dinner starts around 20:00 for us, it usually ends close to 22:30 or 23:00 then we have dishes to wash and conversations to wrap up. If we want to see friends in the evening we meet up with them just before 00:00 and spend a couple hours with them before walking home. Since nobody lives particularly close to us it's more than the 5 min walk to the the center or a cafe. So last night we ate dinner, my roomies kindly let me off dish duty since I put together most of the meal. We then we out and met up with friends at the DeeJ Bar in Trastevere and walked around on a bit of an adventure to find the bar we went to our first night in Italy. It was a good time with good friends. I'm happy that we're getting a chance to talk with kids in our program outside of the center. My two roomies and I weren't ready for bed when we got home and we all got the chance to skype with friends from home (since it was only afternoon/evening on the east coast). 

Sitting on a bridge with friends

We all got up in time to finish up any Italian homework we had left. I had a meeting with my academic adviser to finalize my schedule for this semester. I managed to switch into another art history class. Now I will be taking four art history classes and italian..... yeah this might be the perfect semester. I'm pumped to get started and meet my professors. After my meeting I had to go almost directly to my intensive italian class (I made it this time!!). My teacher is fine and thankfully I have two friends in my class and the student I was paired with today is also friendly. Unfortunately I think I was right in the fact that they placed me too low. The class was not challenging to me in the slightest. I think I'll be trying to move one up to join Julia and Tom. That will be better for me. After Italian Tom, Pepperoni, and another Wooster friend went to the American bookstore to buy our textbooks. We got a little turned around but like I've mentioned before, it's impossible to take anything BUT the scenic route in Rome!! So we bought books. Tom made us stop in the McDonalds so he could get some food cause he was starving and it was right next to us. Their McDonalds are nothing like ours haha it's really classy, the ordering process is completely different. In a lot of stores here you get and eat your food and then pay for it, which makes sense it restaurants and such but not for a situation like Starbucks or Coffee Tree. It's just different. After we got our books we took the longest trek home. My feet were tired, I was tired, and my books are so heavy. They cost 202,95 Euro but our program gets us a discount so I only had to pay 190,00 Euro (that's $275.50 for those who don't realize the conversation rate is garbage)! I am beginning to keep better records of how much I spend here because I feel like I am going through too much money. Gotta save it for trips and museums and all the delicious food they have here!

Sorry for the lack of pictures (I added some to the previous post) I need someone with tech skills to look at my camera. I think it's not really broken but I don't want to fool around with it and seriously damage it :(  I'll try to steal photos to the best of my ability.

Tonight Nico is home and is going to show us a cool pizzeria tonight for dinner as an apartment. We missed her and are all getting back into the swing of Italian so we're thankful she's around to correct us.

This is pizza Italian style! large rectangles that get chopped up and folded into almost a sandwich/panino

STUDY abroad

It's true, I'm supposed to be studying and learning while I am here, but today was the first day of classes and this week we are diving into our Italian and next week we begin all other classes. Sadly I managed to get confused about timing and missed my first (note: only) class today. Oops! Thankfully I met with the teacher and should be fine just got to make sure I do my homework tonight. Sigh. What a way to start the week!

Sunday:
After the lake on Friday and Ostia beach on Satuday we were a little run down by Sunday. We all slept in late for the first time (well as best we could through the loud noises out our window). The girls all took off for an intense excursion around Rome but I decided to stay home. I cleaned our apartment pretty thoroughly since the streets are very dusty/dirty and we manage to track in a lot of grime. I did some laundry in our rocket ship machine (it sounds like it's taking off every time we use it) and I read some more of my book from the plane because it was just. too. hot. I couldn't imagine walking around in the middle of the heat of the day! The girls can home tired and thirsty but pleased. Julia and Sophia were the quickest to recover and put together another fabulous dinner for us. We stuck to the game plan and made it all the way through dinner in only Italian! It's easier for us to stick to the language when Nico, our ISC, is around but she has been studying or working all day everyday. We made an apartment trek to get gelato in the rain last night then I had the briefest of conversations with my Pgh bestie and some Cornellians but it was late and I needed sleep before my first day of classes.

Monday:
Finally the construction workers on our street have finished... but that meant they spent all morning moving loud metal pipes onto their truck cleaning up, VERY early in the morning. rude. Since classes weren't until the afternoon we were up and out the door for some site seeing and exploration in the morning. Starting off we said "Ciao!" to the Ara Pacis, I mean we kinda just ran into it on our way [I love that things like this can happen in Rome]. Then we visited Santa Marie del Popolo in the Piazza del Popolo. This is also where the twin churches are and another fabulous obelisk from Egypt. We went into the church after Ginny kindly reminded us to don our shugs. Gotta cover up those shoulders ladies!! This is where Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Paul and the Conversion of the Way to Damascus are. Yes this morning I walked 10 min and got to see two Caravaggio's in person, for free. I love this city!

After the church and piazza we went to Via dal Corso where all the hot names in fashion have stores. The kind of neighborhood where you have doormen in top hats and the dresses cost more than a year at Ithaca! It runs into the Spanish steps where we have been before. We found the cheaper end of the street and stopped in two or three shops: Zara, Promod, and H&M. It's funny how some things are exactly the same as in the states but some things are so different! Just simply shopping for clothes in a store is different in Italy. I walked away with a good sized handbag (between my small convenient blue one and my giant brown falling apart one) and a cute dress that can be dressed up or down. I defiantly did NOT plan for it to be this hot for this long! Ginny and I grabbed some sandwiches at a bar and kept walking until we stopped by Trajan's Column for a quick look then moved on to the Pantheon since it was on the way home. We went inside and got to look around, saw Raphael's tomb, and watched  the sun from the oculus rise up the wall. It rained for a while last night and there was still a small puddle in the middle of the Pantheon floor, but we were sad to not have the chance to see it raining today. We're back to sunny skies and hot temperatures.  ALSO we took a quick detour from the Pantheon to the Trevi Fountain instead of walking home through Piazza Navona.

Pantheon (better pictures to come)

                   

















After site seeing we came back to the apartment and I realized I had missed my class! I was confused between our schedule this week and next. At the IES center I met with my teacher briefly and apologized and think I am set for tomorrow. Bummer, but I do know a couple kids in my class so I'm hoping it will be fun. I'll add some more pictures when I get the chance, my camera isn't cooperating with me so I'll need to steal some from my roomies.  A presto! :)

There are a few strikes tomorrow on the public transportation, thankfully not too close to us and we are easily able to walk to IES.

More pictures of the Panetheon (thanks Susan :P )