FIrst Few days!!

Hey everyone! So today is our third day in Roma, and it is absolutely wonderful. This city is so beautiful and the weather is amazing. The plane ride over here was pretty miserable. We had a 7 hour flight to Paris. Then we were in Paris for a few hours and had a two hour flight to Rome. When the traveling was over, we were taken by bus to our apartment at Via Rasella 137. I am living with Courtney, Jen, and Alex. There are about 32 students in our program, and we are the only apartment that is separated from the rest of the group. The location of our apartment though is amazing. We are right by the Trevi Fountain and near the Spanish Steps. We live down an old street with huge, tall doors and our place is on the third floor. The apartment itself is very small, We all have twin beds that are hard as rocks and tiny rooms with barely any storage space. The bathrooms are crazy small too. We do have a living room though with a kitchen table and couch. But our kitchen is about 5ft by 5ft... it is ridiculously small. We have yet to test the kitchen out because we have not had any time to go to the supermarket or cook our own food. The food in the restaurants has been great though!

Today was our first day of classes. Our apartment had to travel to Gambero Rosso, which is a combination of a cooking school and food and wine magazine/tv network. It is an awsome place to have school, however it took us 2 hours to get there today! We had to wake up at 7 and left our apartment at 7:45 to walk to the tram, take the tram to a bus, and then get lost walking to the school. It is safe to say that we have walked soooo much. We don't mind it though because it is so beautiful and the weather is great. After our food and culture class at Gambero Rosso we had to go back to Scuelo Leonardo da Vinci, where most of our classes are. This is the language school that the woman who wrote Eat Pray Love learned Italian. The teachers are great, but everything moves at such a liesurely pace in the classroom.. there is no urgency at all. We had art history and Italian today. Our Italian teacher refused to speak English to use, which was interesting considering noone speaks Italian in our program. But it is helpful to get some Italian lessons because not as many people speak English as we thought.

The Italian culture here is so different from American. For one, not only do we have to adjust to a time difference of 7 hours, but the meal schedule is so different. Italians eat dinner around like 9pm and go out around 11 or midnight! And like I said, most people are very liesurely about getting things done. Our orientation took five hours, yet everything could have been completed in 45 minutes. Today when we were walking to and from class, it got so hot that I took off my jacket, yet Italians were wearing puffy coats, hats, and gloves. They think that 55 degrees is cold!

Well we are trying to start making our trips now for the next couple of weekends. So far we have Switzerland, Venice, Dublin, and Greece on the calendar. But my computer is running out.. so that's all for now!

Ciao!