sunday night. you know what that means

reflecting on dare grazie and la mia famiglia and some other things like that

well, looks like this blog was a pretty dismal failure considering i've only written a handful of times since the end of august. it was mostly a combination of not enough time or internet to write anything and i mean, you really have to be in the mood for that sort of thing otherwise it won't be any good. i think i'm in the mood now. it's 1:39 am which means 12:39 in london, where I spent the weekend, and 7:39 at home.

so for the past two? three? weeks, i've been having recurring fits of existential discomfort and it takes me ages to fall asleep at night. whenever i think of my life it seems like there's been too much in it for me to keep it all in my head. I think it's a function of being close enough that I can see the end out in front of me and I can see how long it'll take me to get there, but it's not too close - still, everything I do, I do it while I'm looking ahead because where else am I supposed to look? It's hard to stay in this temporal place and impossible to stay in this physical place for much longer, no matter how balmy the air is. It was freezing in london this weekend but I had the greatest time seeing 5 of my nearest and dearest after months of separation. like a week or two ago, Jess and I climbed the hill behind the residence medaglie d'oro (is it one of rome's 7, greg smith?) with panini and beers and just exchanged all of the stuff that we were thinking about. Mostly we talk about becoming grown ups, that's mostly what I think about anyway, and she said that growing up means always missing somebody. This semester has taught me a lot about managing separation. on thanksgiving we had chicken, stuffing, corn and potatoes at matt and christine's flat. this weekend was as much a thanksgiving weekend as any other one I've ever had. I got to spend it with a lot of my school family. some of them I'm going to be living with when I come home. some of them knew me back when we still had to have our parents drive us around. I miss the rest of my school family and I have ever since I came here. when I get home, I am going to miss my new friends. when I get back to school, I am going to miss my home friends and my family. But all of these things are natural and good.


I think i'm mostly just learning that i can do everything that I want to do.

except, evidently, mail the postcards that i promised i would mail. i wrote most of them at least. this weekend i did a bad and condescending old lady british accent pretty constantly when I was in london. brutta figura, certo. i also almost died laughing like a hundred times and i love i miei amici more than i could ever say. so thanks for that and that rome feels extra warm now and the euro feels extra affordable now and i'm almost done my soc paper and i still have almost two whole weeks here. if i got to go to rome for almost two whole weeks for vacation i would be super excited. so this is all very good.

The internet in Italy

So I've complained a lot about how terrible the internet connection in the dorm is (currently writing this from school.) For one of my classes I'm doing a paper about the Internet in Italy, and I was surprised to learn that only 42% of Italian households have Internet access (compared with almost 92% in the US).

Furthermore, there has been a lot of debate about freedom of speech on the Internet. It should come as no surprise that the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government (which has a virtual monopoly on television) has proposed at least 3 laws that would give itself more power in regulating the Internet: a law "compelling online broadcasters to to seek the same licensing agreements as broadcast television," a law banning anonymous internet posting, and a law that would allow "anyone feeling defamed by a blog post, forum thread, or status message on Facebook to request the author rectify the post within 48 hours" or face a 10,000 euro fine in addition to potential damages and legal costs.

Furthermore, Italy sued Google for not being prompt enough to take down a video (uploaded by a user) that showed an autistic boy being bullied by other boys. Certainly this is a terrible video to post on the internet, but holding Google responsible for the content posted by one of its users is simply absurd.

I love it here, don't get me wrong, but the politics and bureaucracy are hopelessly corrupt and misguided almost invariably. I could never live here for real.

Rage, venezia, love and hate

Went on my very first weekend excursion - Jimmy, Alex, Laura and I went to Venice for the weekend! It's like 5-7 hrs away and we took the night bus there and back. Aside from being freeeeezing cold (at least compared to roma where today it is still a balmy 75 degrees F) everything was just basically too beautiful for words. Luckily my camera battery died after one day there so the pictures that I do have are limited, and it's going to be a bit before I get them online (I'm the worst) but we had such a great time. But for all of its beauty, venezia is absolutely impossible to navigate- great for just wandering around, but if you actually have a destination, forget about it. So that's why I was raging for awhile, because we were cold and tired and had 4 hours til the train and no hotel room to stay in anymore.

At orientation we were taught about the different phases of adjusting to living in a foreign culture, and I've been having my first bouts of rage that were particularly intense getting lost in the tiny alleys of venice, but overall everything's going great. We got into rome this morning at 7 am and then went to a flea market that we'd heard about in trastevere. If you know me, you know that I love the thrifting, and this flea market was a dream come true. so much great stuff. A bag for 3 euro! 2 scarves for a euro a piece! a harmonica for 5 euro! a hat for 9 euro! oh man. looks like I know where I'll be spending all of my sundays from here on out.

-We wanted to go to the flea market last sunday but saturday night ended up staying at the discoteca until we missed THE LAST NIGHT BUS and had to kill an hour getting caffe at termini until the subway opened at 5:30! My first foray into the club district of testacchio was a riotous success and I look forward to much more of it

-Something new that I particularly love is a breakfast food called pizzetta, which is basically a pastry with sauce and cheese. I think I called it a piazzalle ("town square") when I went to pay though. But I know a bunch of verbs now and how to conjugate them in the present tense!

fall break is coming up soon so who knows where that'll take me. me and alex were thinking morrocco and somewhere in spain and/or paris. we'll see

the daily grind

So I thought I should tell everybody what a typical day looks like for me right now. Granted, it's been only a week so my routine has not solidified, but here's the best case scenario of what I've been up to:

-Wake up mid morning, say 10 am. Yogurt and bread with nutella for breakfast. Get dressed and begin the 45 minute walk from the residence to school.

-En route, stop at the Mercado Triunfale, a market that is open daily until 1 pm. Buy 3 peaches or nectarines for a total of about 1,30 euro.

-Stop at a cafe for a cappuccino or a cafe (una cafe is an espresso by default, unless you ask for a less potent variety such as macchiato or cafe latte) for about a euro or a little less. Probably will not understand everything that is being said to me. Freeze when it's time to say goodbye and they inevitably say ciao and I never know if it's acceptable to say ciao back. Sometimes i'll say arrivederci but a lot of times I'll hope that a wave and a smile will suffice.

-Arrive at school, eat a peach, check email. Have Cristiano's Italian class from 1-2, where he makes weird sounds and mouths things at us and solicits us to asks him words we don't know (Come si dice ... ?). Somebody will ask something he thinks is dumb (like how do you say nail polish remover) and he will comically berate us, saying "You do not know how to say window, you do not know how to say door, but you ask me how to say nail polish remover? You know nothing and this is what you ask me?" It's a great class.

-Break until 6 pm. Grab lunch nearby campus, probably a panino full of vocabulary words that I don't know, so I'll have to point and say "questa." Even if it's the wrong one, I'll probably take it. They'll say "Caldo?" and I'll say yes, to get a toasted sandwich. Worst case scenario (which frequently occurs), my sad Italian will prompt the clerk to speak english to me. That's not good practice. Maybe get another cafe. This will all probably cost about 4 or 5 euros.

-Go to the library (really only about two rooms) and do homework, or read the paper. Surf the internet. Eat another peach.

-Economics class, learning about international trade with the demanding but entertaining Dottore Patania.

-Sociology class, learning about Italy's crooked past or Italy's crooked present. Very good class that gets me excited to learn all there is to know about political and social tension in this country.

-Last class ends 9pm, walk home. Cook dinner with my roommates and Jimmy when I get home; typically pasta with sauce, a loaf of bread and 2 bottles of wine. la dolce vita indeed.

an exciting time to be here

In my first Sociology of Postwar Italy class last night, the prof alerted us that it's an exciting time to be living here, as there is a real possibility for the dissolution of the current governing coalition. This could be great for Italy, because Prime Minister Berlusconi is one of the most crooked guys in world government, who essentially keeps changing the laws to protect himself from extensive criminal charges of corruption. He is the richest man in Italy who also basically owns the media (all 6 TV stations and a major newspaper) so his ousting would be a particularly historic occasion.

Since I've been here, I've noticed that there is a ton of graffiti everywhere. My political science prof explained this as reflective of the Italian attitude towards public property. Despite being one of the earliest republics, Italy has not been a democracy for much of its history and lacks the "for the people, by the people" sense that we have in America. My soc prof pointed out that a lot of the graffiti is political, and he showed us several symbols that are commonly drawn by extremist groups on the right (neo-fascists) and the left (communist terrorists.) I can't wait to learn enough of the language so that I can hear Italians' opinions on all of this.

Things you can't do in Rome

I'd meant to start to blog earlier, but turns out that the internet in the residence is just awful awful awful. I haven't gotten on even once yet despite trying a couple times per day. so hopefully that gets all fixed up and I don't always have to do this from the school computer. So I've been here since about Tuesday which was really Monday. I stumbled all around center city last night to try and orient myself and I have pictures of lots of touristy things although I unfortunately can't put them on til I get internet on my laptop. So here are some of the first mistakes that I made so you don't make them. Do NOT

1. Order a cappuccino in the evening. Apparently this is a faux pas equivalent to ordering a beer at 7am. Too bad I already did it before I knew (at Bar Doria where I'm considering becoming a regular. I mean I've been there 3 times so I practically am)
2. Pay for 31.83 euro worth of groceries with a 50. They get so mad when you don't have the right change. It also didn't hurt that I couldn't understand a single thing that the signora was telling me about it. You need to have loads of change in your pockets at all times.
3. Say ciao the same way you say hi and bye in english. No singsongy ciaaaoooooo. They say it curtly, quickly, so it almost sounds like you're mad. Ciao.

I've also been walking about 100 kilometers every day, or so it feels, and eating only carbs. Bought a 2 euro bottle of wine in a plastic bottle that looks exactly like ginger ale. There are endless wonders here.