Just went to Rome for a "day-trip" with my program on Wednesday. The reason I used quotation marks here is only to inform those who read this that Rome is not somewhere to do a day-trip. It is a city and a big one at that. Unfortunately I did not have the option and since we are traveling on the program's money and time, aka indirectly my money and time, we were forced to partake in a day with 6+ hours of meetings and 2 hours of free time, split between lunch and dinner.
Even with this terrible inconvenience, I did get to explore the city a little and see the most touristy of tourist sights. May I add that this was all done in my now aptly named 'Mad Men' suit (The same suit ensemble I wore to Brett's wedding and to this day have yet to wash). Even with this day-long experience, I am not sure how I am supposed to act 'when in Rome,' except to be rude, non-Italian and take pictures of anything that moves, does not move or looks remotely ancient. Which you may have guessed, is everything.
Here is me with the Coliseum and an Asian man on a bike.
Today I spent all of my time putting together a recently purchased IKEA bookshelf and cleaning my room/doing laundry. No matter how much school work or concrete productivity I can squeeze into a day, I will never feel as accomplished as I do after a day of cleaning and organizing (which usually has to occur once a week due to my ability to create an entirely new mess in the period of a day or less).
I can finally say with minimal conviction that after my 5th month in Florence, I finally feel comfortable with my house mates and living quarters. It is not home and will most likely never be, but comfortable as what I was aiming for and what seems to have been achieved as of late. This may be due to the stockpile of American food stuffs in my pantry, piles of leftover Christmas candy in my room and my latest trip to IKEA to purchase homey items (seeing as all IKEAs are the same, the one outside of Florence seems like a mini-trip to the US, even though they are all Swedish...), but I am comfortable nonetheless.
Currently, my favorite things in life are as follows:
my 2010 squirrel calendar, the memory of tito's handmade vodka, reading for pleasure rather than reading for class, fastpasstv.com, my new Skype phone # (757-238-5869 ahem.. call me), chicagopoly, my really easy to make alfredo pasta sauce, spending money and my new bookshelf.
(squirrel calendar)
My bad. This was a long post, but if you made it through the entire thing congrats, you get a gold star in my book (I do not have gold star stickers or a book to put them in, but luckily most lies do not make me feel much guilt).
