My Big Italian Adventures, T-Minus 31 Days

Ciao! Come Stei?

As you can clearly recognize from my above sentence, my fluency in Italian is just mind-boggling after only two classes.

Good Morning, though. Right now, it’s 11:33 am in Rome, which put it at a whopping 5:33 am in Michigan. This morning, I had to wake up early at 6:30 to for an adventure I’ll expand on momentarily, and managed to catch my boyfriend just as he was going to bed–at midnight in the States. 

Anyways, I started classes Monday and so far, they’re okay. I’m a student at John Cabot University, an American University just south of the River and near Trastevere, for those with some Roman knowledge. The college is made up of primarily students who are studying abroad. In fact, during the school year, 30% of the 750 students who attend the school are actually students who go there year-round. The other 70% are all study abroad. In the summer, there’s only 100 kids in the school, and I’d guess that 95% of them are study abroad. The regular semester in Rome is 15 weeks, but we’re expected to do the same courseload in 4 and a half. As you can guess, this is impossible. Luckily, my teachers understand that. For my Italian class, we spend about 75% of the time talking in Italian, but the other 25% talking about Italian culture and the differences between America and Italy. Maybe it sounds silly, but a lot of the differences come down to etiquette, so it’s probably a class every traveling American should take. My second class, Rome and its monuments, is essentially a traveling class. We meet every Tuesday or Thursday morning in a different location in Rome, then tour museums and monuments. Yesterday, after being given the syllabus, we actually toured a little bit and I was thrilled to finally see the Colosseum, and some temples. We get to bring our cameras too–so there’s tons of picture opportunities. 

School takes up most of the day, even when I only have it for two hours, because it’s primarily in the middle of the day. Unfortunately, that means I haven’t done much else recently. A lot of the time things we try to do, we end up getting lost. Indeed, last night, we tried to take a tram to see the Colosseum at night, but that failed. And, this morning, we tried to go see the pope give his blessing, only to spend an hour getting lost. As a result, we missed the blessing. Tickets are free though, so hopefully we can try again–and take a taxi—next Wednesday.

In about an hour, I’ll leave for school, and then head off to go to the shops, do homework, have dinner, and then pack for Capri, Italy–where I’m heading to tomorrow night. Hopefully, this will mean a great blog entry on Sunday because alas, I will not be taking my computer with me.

Arrivederci!