Another update after lunch, and today I went to ... McDonalds! It took about a week and half here before my craving for good old American food overcame me, so today I stopped in and had a Big Mac and fries. Right outside the window was a place called "Boston Travel Agency", so it really was like eating at McDonalds back at home. Except that the quarter pounder was called a 280 gram'er. Although it was a bit more expensive here (5 euros), it was also a pleasant reminder that there's no food tax here.

I attended my first classes yesterday. In the morning I went to Computer Animated Design, which was wonderful. There's only about 10 people in the class, though unfortunately 8 of them have been taking the same classes together for 2 years so they all know each other very well. But the course itself seems wonderful, just what I would hope for from a class like this. It also seems that it won't be over my head even though it's an intermediate level course.

Before class I had my first espresso, though it was an accident, because I found out that ordering a caffe (coffee) is asking for an espresso. Boy was that a strong drink. I learned at least that it's not something you should try to savor, but instead down in two or three swallows. It definitely did keep me awake for the morning though.

In the afternoon I went to my Writing About Self class. I'm not all that excited about this class however, because I haven't felt much inspiration for writing since getting here. I also realized that I've never written before on a notebook (there are only 6 computers in the free computer lab for hundreds of students), and that writing fiction would be extremely difficult in a notebook. So I'm going to try to switch that class, perhaps to another cooking class.

Speaking of cooking, last night we cooked at Leanne's apartment and had a few people over. Found a great new cheese, pecora, which is a less intense version of parmesean, and had some great Chianti. The pasta itself was so-so, but needed about twice as many tomatoes. We did all agree to do this cooking thing every week on Tuesday nights, so I'm really looking foward to that.

Only one class today, which is Italian from 6:50 to 8:00. Hopefully I can stay awake during those hours, because I'm actually looking foward to this class quite a bit, even though I don't have found memories of all my Spanish classes. Being immersed in the language is probably really helping though.

I may have found a way to get my pictures up here. The computer lab where I work is very nice and I think has free internet access. That's not what it's there for, but with all the free hours I bet I can bring in my pictures and upload them while I work.
posted by Jon at 1:34 PM
4 comments

Sunday, February 02, 2003

Just got in from lunch. Me and Leanne had the biggest craving for Mexican today, so that's where we went. I wasn't exactly sure what Italian Mexican food would taste like, but it was actually quite good, and the woman there was very friendly. If anything, it was so good to eat chicken again. It seems that chicken is pretty unpopular here, which may be because Italians are just so into meat, what with all the cows wandering around. I'm still quite wary of a lot of the meat here, as Italians are much more into ... organs. I've actually mostly eaten vegetarian since getting here.

Well, I am now settled into my own studio apartment looking over the Arno river in Florence. Me and my former roomate, David, looked at one other place in Florence, but it seemed just as drab as the first place, so we decided to both move into the apartment with the two studio apartments on seperate floors. The biggest problem was that the third floor apartment is much better than the second, so we had to flip a coin. Here, instead of heads or tails it's called 'testa' or 'croche'. I called testa and, unbelievably, won, which is quite surprising since I seem to always lose coin tosses. The apartment is a bit small, but I really love having my own place. Last night me and Leanne cooked a dinner there, and I arranged it so that we can eat looking out the window which has a great view over a piazza an the Arno, which is lit up at night. We cooked a pretty simply fettuchine with garlic and olive oil meal, salad, bread and cheese, and wine - but everything here is so incredibly fresh (we had just bought everything two hours earlier from the central market) that it tasted five times better than it would have tasted in the states. Also, the wine was great and $4.00, something you definitely can't get in the states.

Classes start tomorrow, which is pretty unbelievable. I think my two classes are computer animation and writing about self. Then the rest of the week I just have one class per day. My apartment is a bit of a trek, but I figure all this walking is good for me. No wonder all Italians are in such good shape.

Unfortunately, I've been trying to upload my photos for the past half hour and it hasn't really been working (very slow), so I guess I'll have to keep looking around to try to find a way to upload all my pictures.



posted by Jon at 3:13 PM
3 comments

 

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