Week 3

Just a few random things I've been thinking/noticing lately about this beautiful city I'm living in:

• Rome is a very dog-friendly city... this doesn't help me with the fact that I miss my golden retriever a ton! People take their dogs everywhere and there are even little hooks that people can attach their leashes to outside of shops and markets and such. A lot of cafes and shops are dog-friendly, too. Also, everybody dresses their dogs here (at least right now since it's a little colder out). It's adorable. BUT people don't seem to care as much about picking up dog poop around here so you have to be careful when you're walking around because there's usually dog poop all over the sidewalks (or at the bases of trees in the middle of the sidewalks). 
• A lot of people order food to go (or da portare via, as I learned today in Italian class), but they don't eat and walk at the same time. There's no concept of getting breakfast and eating it on your way to school/work in the morning. And if you order a coffee to go, usually the lids on the cups don't have drinking holes in them, so you have to take the lid off in order to drink from it, which isn't easy to do while you're walking. Apparently Italians consider eating on the go to be in bad form. So if they order something to go, they either take it with them to wherever they're going or they stand right outside the door and eat it. Definitely got a few stares the other morning as I was eating my morning croissant in the metro while waiting for my train to go to school... oops.
• People smoke everywhere. Definitely not something I'm used to because of all of the public secondhand smoke laws in America. People don't usually smoke inside, but they'll stand right outside the door to smoke. But I rarely see Italians walking and smoking at the same time (just like eating and walking). So I definitely don't take the fact that in America, I can walk down the sidewalk without inhaling clouds of smoke every time I walk past a shop or a cafe for granted. 
• No open container laws. People drink everywhere. You can buy alcohol almost anywhere--even McDonald's sells beer. We went to the Trevi Fountain the other night and there was a group of people sitting on the steps openly sharing a bottle of wine--no big deal. If there is any kind of law regulating where you can buy/drink alcohol, I sure haven't noticed. Coming from a state where you can't buy cold beer at the grocery store and nobody is allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays, this is so weird for me!
• I'm really starting to think there is no such thing as junk food here because even what we would think of as junk food isn't really made out of junk. We went to McDonald's today just to try it and let me tell you, I don't know how McDonald's gets away with selling the crap they do in America because it is 100000x better here! The one we went to had a separate McCafe complex that had a real espresso machine and what looked like DELICIOUS desserts and pastries. Even better than what a Starbucks in America would have. And the food is so much better, too. I just got a cheeseburger and fries, but I didn't walk away with that heavy feeling in my stomach that you get after eating American fast food. So I won't be eating McDonald's every day here obviously, but it was interesting to try it at least once and now I have higher standards for McDonald's and all fast food at home! We also walked past a Burger King and a Subway that looked like they were both similarly high quality and more gourmet than their American counterparts.

Also, I went out today to do my first assignment for my digital photography class. It was kind of an interesting assignment: we were supposed to pick a starting point, take interesting pictures at that starting point, walk 11 steps, and take another picture. I had to do that 20 times to get a total of 20 good images to turn in and 4 to critique in front of my class. I started out in Piazza del Popolo, the square close to my school, and continued walking down Via del Corso, one of the big shopping areas in the city. Here are some of the pictures I took... enjoy! Some of these are also from an outing we made in class last week to a church and its surrounding area in the square.

She had asked us to capture different textures of the piazza

From the church in Piazza del Popolo (featured in Angels and Demons!)

From that same church

More of the texture of Piazza del Popolo

A Walk Around the Aurelian Walls

The Aurelian Walls are ancient walls built to protect Rome built in the 3^rd century A.D. Just take a minute and let that sink in. A huge part of these walls built to protect the city of Rome thousands of years ago is still standing… enough of them at least that yesterday, we were able to recreate the parts that were missing and walk around the entire length of the walls (about 12 miles, in case you were wondering). Now, a huge part of the city lies outside of the original walls (our professor said something like only 5% of the population of Rome lives within the walls, something that has happened pretty recently), but most of historical Rome exists within them, since they were built so long ago.

A map of Rome with the Aurelian Walls outlined

We were supposed to meet our fearless leader, a professor at Temple Rome who has been leading this “wall walk” as  he calls it for 22 years, at San Giovanni, which was supposed to be just an easy  metro ride from the apartments. However, much to our surprise, we were forced to get off of our train when we were just one stop away from where we had gotten on the metro. We weren’t really sure why until we tried to get back to the platform and were told that the entire line was closed for the moment for an accident. So we had to venture outside, where we were shuttled onto a bus that took us a few more metro stops down to Termini, the main metro stop and bus station for Rome, where we then had to figure out which bus to take to get us to San Giovanni to meet our group. Needless to say, none of us were on time, but we definitely had an interesting start to the day. 

The portion of the wall next to San Giovanni, where we started our day!

The walk itself was exhausting. We started at San Giovanni and walked counter-clockwise around the city. Notable stops included San Lorenzo, Trastevere, the Vatican, Castel Sant’Angelo, the courthouse of Rome, Gianicolo (Rome’s second-highest hill but not one of the Seven Hills of Rome—we climbed the whole thing and at lunch from the top; what a beautiful view of the entire city!), Trastevere, and Testaccio, but really, we circled the entire city (see map above), so it was a pretty eventful day.

The professor who led our tour

Our fearless leader was so knowledgeable about the walls and everything he was talking about, and he definitely kept us motivated the entire day. What I loved about the walk was that we saw parts of Rome that are definitely part of the ancient history (the walls themselves being one of them), but we walked through a lot of modern neighborhoods, too, like Testaccio. Testaccio was built as one of the first low-cost housing neighborhoods in Rome, and it still retains a huge sense of community and identity with a lot of ethnic diversity. We passed a Mexican restaurant in Testaccio—the first I’ve seen since I’ve been here! But even neighborhoods like Testaccio can’t get away from the more ancient history—there’s a current excavation going on of one of the oldest Roman warehouses in the city right in the middle of the neighborhood, and obviously the walls go right through it.

The modern city intersects the walls from both inside and outside of the original boundaries.

Our view from the Gianicolo Hill!

What's left of the ancient Roman warehouse in Testaccio

The walls protected the city of Rome until 1870, when Italian troops finally regained control of Rome from the Pope. Still, they’ve been preserved in remarkable condition, and I am so glad that I took the opportunity to walk the length of them yesterday! It was exhausting, but it was by far the most interesting day I’ve had in Rome so far. 

The last porta, or gate, on our journey! 

San Lorenzo and Universita di Roma

Yay for a three-day weekend! Nobody has classes on Fridays, so today Gianni led us on a tour of the main University of Rome campus! At 150,000 students, it's the second largest university in the world, according to Gianni (who went to school there himself).

But before that, let me just say that I have officially survived my first metro strike in Rome! Apparently it happens quite a bit here, but it's a little different than how I picture strikes in the US. First of all, they scheduled the strike and told everybody about it so that we could plan around the metro not running. Second of all, they were only on strike for certain hours today: 8:30-5 and then 8-10:30. According to Gianni, this is to allow people to get to work in the morning (since the metro opens at 5:30 and didn't close until 8:30) and is open during the evening rush hour to allow people to get back home; otherwise, the entire city would shut down because everybody takes public transportation. And even when there is a strike, the entire metro doesn't shut down because there are around 15 different unions for the public transportation workers, and not all of them will decide to strike together. So today there was technically a metro strike, but some drivers were still out and driving, so you could still take the metro if you were willing to wait for a bus or a train to get to you. Very confusing.

Anyway, because of the strike, we walked to campus (where we met for the tour) and boarded a private bus to the University of Rome campus. Gianni explained to us how the Italian university system works--it's very different from the American system. First of all, almost everybody goes to public universities because it costs only 1,200 euro for an entire year's tuition. That's it. But even the private universities are cheap compared to what we have in the US--they might only be 7,000 euro for an entire year. However, the public universities (like many of the public services in Italy, I've learned) are not very well organized, so there is an advantage to going to a private university. Also, the private universities are organized more similarly to the American system of universities. However, there are no such things as student loans in Italy, so if you can't afford a private university, you don't have a choice.

One of the main academic buildings on campus.
This is the one we went into today!

So the public university system runs on a series of exams. Italian students take maybe 4 or 5 classes at a time (more on that later) and then take exams three times a year. At the end of a class, if they decide they're ready for the exam for that class, they can take it then (or they can decide to take it at any point in the future). The score on that exam is the only "grade" they get, and depending on their course of study, they might have to take 20 exams in a certain area to get their degrees. And if you don't like the grade you get on your exam, you can refuse it--meaning you tell the professor you don't want it and commit to re-taking the exam at some point in the future. Oh, and the vast majority of the exams are oral. Sometimes there might be a written section you have to pass before you can take the oral section, but that's not very often.

A statue of Minerva that stands outside of one of the big academic buildings. On days that students have exams, they are afraid to look into her eyes because it is considered bad luck--Minerva is the goddess of wisdom and they feel like they are fighting her!

It used to be that it could take 5-6 years to finish school, because Italians would combine their undergraduate programs and master's degree programs into one degree. However, Gianni said that more students were dropping out of university because that's a long time to be in school, so a few years ago, the university system changed to be more like the American system. Now, it takes 3 years to complete what we would call an undergraduate degree, and then many students still go on to do 2 years of what we would call graduate study, but some decide to leave with the undergraduate degree. Gianni said it's harder to get jobs with only an undergraduate degree (depending on the field), but the change has led to more students sticking with school and getting at least that first degree.

The classes are also a lot different than American university classes. First of all, some of the class times might conflict--meaning you could be scheduled to have two different classes at the same time, and you're just expected to deal with it. It's not a big deal, though, because it's usually not required that students attend class (even more so than it is in American universities) because all class sizes are huge, and you really just have to be prepared to take the exam at the end. Gianni said that sometimes, friends will split up the classes they are taking and each decide to go to certain classes for the semester and then all share notes. At private schools, this is a lot different--classes are more around 20 students, and you don't have time conflicts built into your schedule.

A typical lecture hall. Students will go to class at least an hour early because there are never enough seats for everybody.

We also ran into a graduation celebration today when we were in one of the academic buildings! It was just for one student, which Gianni said is very common--technically you graduate as soon as you finish passing the exams you need for your degree. So this one person had apparently just "graduated" and popped a bottle of champagne in the middle of the hallway with his friends and family around him.

A museum in the basement of one of the buildings that doubles as a study spot for students.

We also toured the San Lorenzo area, which is the neighborhood around the campus where most of the students live (there is no such thing as on-campus housing). Supposedly it's got a great night life, but we were there around 3 in the afternoon, so nothing was open and it looked pretty dead. I could definitely see how it would be fun at night, though! We're definitely planning on going and checking it out at some point.

San Lorenzo!

By the time we were done with our tour, it was almost 5, so we ended up waiting for the metro to open back up again to get back to our residence. Gianni had prepared us for the worst, because he had told us the trains would be very slow and very crowded since most of the metro had been closed all day, but it was not bad at all--the trains were practically empty! So I've officially survived my first metro strike, but we honestly barely even noticed (except for the fact that the streets had more cars on them). We're dealing with a broken stove in our apartment right now (it's a gas stove and none of the burners will stay lit), so dinner wasn't very creative, but hopefully that will be fixed tomorrow. I'm planning on going to the market in the morning so we can experiment some more with food!

The "study" part of study abroad

I'm officially done with my first week of classes here in Rome! We started on Monday, and everybody has Fridays off. I'm kind of taking it easy for the semester, which is nice, but I'm still taking 14 credit hours. Luckily, my classes are pretty exciting and involve learning about the city of Rome itself, which I love!

Roman Literature: Pretty self-explanatory... so far we've read a couple of plays, and we'll be moving basically chronologically through Roman literature throughout the semester.

Art and Architecture of Rome: My most overwhelming class, but definitely the class that will help me understand the city the most. Each week consists of a site visit and a lecture--for Tuesday's first class, we met for three hours at the Roman Forum. Talk about hands-on learning. We also have visits scheduled at the Vatican Museums and various galleries and pieces of architecture throughout the semester. There's a lot of info to absorb, but I like this class because I get to see a lot of the things in Rome that I would want to see anyway as part of a class where I get to learn all about them, too.

Digital Imaging: Another fun class for me. We meet for four hours once a week and have site visits where we take pictures every week. Today, we visited Piazza del Popolo, a square about five minutes from campus (and where I take the metro every day) and took pictures inside of a church there. Each week will have different exercises and different site visits, but we also spend time in the classroom learning technical stuff and some post-production stuff in Photoshop.

Italian: The one class Temple Rome requires of everybody who hasn't previously studied Italian. My professor teaches in a way that I'm not quite used to, but I understand now what people mean when they say it's easier to learn a language once you have studied another. My Spanish classes are definitely helping me out here. There are some Spanish-Italian vocab cognates, but so far, the grammar structure is pretty similar, too. That's nice because my professor barely speaks English for the entire hour that we are in class, four times a week, unless we really don't understand something. So I can pick up on more of the grammar since I've taken Spanish before and a lot of it is pretty similar. I know that in the long run, this way of teaching is probably going to help me learn the language faster, but it's been a little overwhelming so far! It's been fun to practice out and about in the city.

Our residence is about a 40-minute walk from Temple Rome's campus, which isn't bad unless you have class at 8:25 like I do on Thursday mornings. Some mornings I take the metro, which has a stop just a few blocks from my apartment and stops just a few blocks from campus. The metro is really easy to use here in Rome because there are only 2 lines that go through the entire city. One of my professors was telling me that people complain about it all the time, but it's hard to expand the subway because every time they start to dig underneath the ground, the find more ruins and have to stop. What a problem to have!

Most mornings I have breakfast in my apartment, but sometimes I stop for a cappuccino and croissant at at what we would call a cafe (but the Italians call it a bar) across the street from the apartments on the way to the metro. Interesting fact--Italians rarely eat food while they're walking; it's seen as bad form. So you either stand and drink your coffee at the counter, or you sit for a few minutes. In big tourist areas, some places will double your price (at least) if you sit down at a table--not so at this cafe.

For lunch, I usually grab pizza on the way to campus from the metro (depending on the day), or I go in between classes to a place called Alimentari Bucchi--kind of like a mini mart, but with a fresh deli counter. They make some of the best sandwiches I've ever had, and this is a pretty popular spot for Temple Rome students.

On the way home from class every day, I usually stop at the grocery store or the market for food for dinner. It's easy to keep things like pasta on hand for a few days, but most people here buy vegetables every day or at the least every other day. Lessons in Italian cooking #1: You can't go wrong with any vegetable cooked in olive oil, especially paired with some fresh pasta (and all of the pasta here is fresh). So that's usually my dinner every night--pasta and some kind of fresh vegetable (unless we go out to dinner). However, we have an old gas stove in our apartment, and when we got here, only two of the burners worked. And while we were cooking dinner tonight the other two went out... go figure. They're sending somebody up to fix them tomorrow, so hopefully they can do that pretty easily!

Tomorrow we don't have class, but our program leader is leading a tour of the University of Rome campus and area around the campus (which is where he went to school). We're also going to try to go to the market tomorrow morning and get some more produce for the next few days (so I really hope they get the stove fixed tomorrow!).

Todi!

Am I bummed that I wasn’t at Hinkle last night for the Gonzaga game? Absolutely. Everybody’s pictures and updates on Facebook are making me so jealous! I knew that this would be one of the hardest parts of going abroad for me—missing out on so much of basketball season. But I had a pretty cool experience today too—Temple took the whole group of us to Todi, a hill town in the Perugia region of Italy. It was about a two hour bus ride from Rome, and we passed some really beautiful scenery. I missed some of it because I ended up falling asleep (getting up at 3 AM to follow the game + waking up again at 6 AM to get ready to make the bus + JET LAG), but it was well worth the long drive.

The buses dropped us off in a parking lot closer to the bottom of the hill, so we had to walk a bit to get up into Todi. Todi is so old that it is full of both Etruscan and Roman ruins—we passed a few. There is usually a cable car that takes people up and down, and we tried to take it back down when we were done for the day, but it was broken. We had about two hours to ourselves to explore the city, so we just walked around and explored a couple of churches. One was La Cattedrale di S. M. Annunziata, which was in the main piazza in Todi. Fun fact: Todi is used all the time in films because it is so charming and so characteristic of Italy. One of the Romeo and Juliet films was filmed in Todi!

The main piazza in Todi

There were some gorgeous views from the village—we were at the top of a hill, after all. It’s been surprisingly cold and wet in Rome since I’ve been here, but the views were still amazing.

After we were done exploring, we all met back down in the parking lot. The buses then drove for about a half hour to take us to Titignani, which is an old castle that is now used for a lot of events like weddings. It’s a fully functioning farm, and we were there for lunch in the castle’s banquet hall, although lunch is a bit of an understatement. We actually had what would be considered a traditional Italian wedding feast with at least ten courses. I was good and tried a little bit of everything, but it was all delicious! Everything they gave us had been produced on the farm, including the wine and olive oil.

The courses:

• ·      Antipasto (different types of breads and Italian pizzas)
• ·      Bread
• ·      Red and white wine
• ·      A selection of cold cuts, including salami and prosciutto
• ·      A salty cheese pastry
• ·      Risotto with asparagus
• ·      Pasta with wild boar sauce
• ·      Venison
• ·      Potatoes roasted in olive oil and chicken
• ·      Fresh salad tossed in olive oil and vinegar
• ·      Fruit
• ·      Almond biscotti
• ·      A delicious and chocolatey dessert—I’m not even sure what it was called!
• ·      Dessert wine (meant for dipping the biscotti)
• ·      Grappa-a drink made from the leftovers from pressing grapes into wine (this wasn’t my favorite—it was very very strong! I could only take a sip of it.)
• ·      Espresso

Salami and prosciutto

Pasta with wild boar sauce

Dessert!

Needless to say, I was completely stuffed by the end. Everything was so delicious (even the wild boar and the venison, which were both firsts for me). I don’t think I would have been able to eat all of it except for the fact that the portions of each course were reasonable and they were pretty well spaced out. That’s why it took us over three hours to eat everything!

Panorama of the view from the castle area

I’ve officially been here for five days, and today was the last day of our orientation. Tomorrow we start classes! I start with Roman literature and then finish with Italian I. I am definitely excited to start taking Italian just so I can try to understand some of what people are saying around me (or at least be able to read signs and menus more easily). I’m also taking art history and digital imaging. I’m really looking forward to my classes, especially because art history and digital imaging will take me out into the city to learn from my surroundings rather than in a classroom setting. Those start later in the week. I’ll post an update once I start everything!

Italian Cuisine

Okay, I could go on and on forever about how amazing the food is here in Italy, but for now I'll just highlight a few of my favorite parts about eating here, like shopping for food, cooking it, and dining according to Italian customs.

The Markets
Italians are really, really, really into fresh food. In the states, sometimes produce is more expensive to buy than prepackaged food, but it's exactly the opposite here, because the merchandise at the open air markets turns over every day, meaning there's no cost to store produce for the vendors and no cost for preservatives. So for things like meat, cheese and vegetables, Italians go to the market nearly every day and buy only what they need. There's one just a few blocks from my apartment, and it's huge. We went there yesterday morning to pick up a few things for some pasta recipes that one of our professors gave us. I still haven't started class yet and haven't learned very much Italian at all, so there was a lot of pointing and gesturing going on between me and the vendors!

Alimentari
An alimentari is like what we would call a mini-mart, except it has a fresh deli counter. We've found that these are great places to eat lunch, because the deli counter will make paninos, or sandwiches on rolls, with anything you want. Yesterday, I tried one with salami, mozzarella, and pesto... it was delicious! So I got the ingredients to make one for myself at home. The best part is that you can usually get one made for one or two euro, which is pretty cheap. An alimentari will also sell basic things like bread, milk, juice, etc.

Aperitivo and Dinner

An aperitivo plate. This was the second course!

Italians eat dinner late, like around 8 or 9, but they have something called aperitivo that starts earlier in the evening (usually around 6:30) and runs until dinner. It started in northern Italy and is super popular in places like Milan, but it's getting really popular in the evening too. The best way to describe it would be like a happy hour with unlimited food. So you go to these places, order one drink and get unlimited "appetizers." It usually costs around 9 or 10 euro, and the servers will keep refilling your food plates until you tell them to stop. One portion was more than enough for us, and we had to remember that most people who go for aperitivo actually go out and eat an entire meal for dinner afterward. It was so much food and it was all delicious! They started us off with a plate of warm, seasoned cheese, and then they brought the platter of aperitivo snacks. At this place, we got a lot of mini sandwiches, some mini pizza, and rice balls with vegetables inside (called arancini... these are a big snack food!). More and more places are starting to serve aperitivo and offer specials like it, so we are definitely looking forward to exploring more places!

Cooking
Temple provided a cooking demonstration for us the other night, and the professor who led it gave us pamphlets of his favorite recipes that we should try while we are here. I got ingredients to make an asparagus sauce with tagliatelle noodles (not realizing, of course, that asparagus isn't in season and so was actually one of the most expensive things at the market yesterday), so I think I'll try that tonight. There's enough in there to keep me busy for the whole semester, so I can't wait to experiment with that.

I made it!

Well, I've officially been in Rome for about 18 hours now. My flight landed around 6 pm (or 18:00 as they say here! That's going to take some time to get used to), and the shuttle Temple arranged for each of us to take to the Residence Medaglie D'Oro took about an hour to get to the apartments. I was completely turned around by the time he finally dropped some of us off, because the streets in Rome are crazy! I guess that's what you get when you have to build roads for cars around an ancient city... lots of things were already in place, so the streets are very different from what I'm used to. A lot of them are very short and dead-end into each other, and most of them aren't very straight.

I was the last of my roommates to arrive at the apartment, and my flight was so late that everyone had already left for the Temple campus for a pizza party, so one of my roommates (who had also arrived late) and I ventured out into the area around the Residence to find some food and get some essentials. It was already dark by the time we got outside and we didn't want to get too lost, but we managed to find some Italian "white pizza" (like foccacia bread... delicious!), some wine (of course), and a European hairdryer!

My apartment is a lot different than what I expected. For starters, it's a lot bigger, but I've learned that our apartment is bigger than a lot of the apartments within the Residence (they're all a little different). The Residence actually functions a lot like a hotel with daily maid service, weekly linen changes, and a front desk, but it's a lot like an apartment building, too.

The view from the front entry. This room doubles as the kitchen
and living room.

Our very small kitchen!

View from my bedroom door. I share it with one other
roommate and there's one other bedroom in the apartment.

The rest of the bedroom... we both have to share that
closet and we don't have any drawers!

View from our balcony... the rest of the Residence buildings.

 We actually have a lot more closet space than I was expecting, but almost no hangers (apparently they're very expensive here!) and no drawer space! So I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do with all of my clothes. There's one central closet that has shelves in it, so we've stacked some clothes on the shelves for now. It's also a lot warmer than I had expected. They had warned us that Italians have a lot of environmental regulations about how much heat they can use in the winter and that most landlords turn off the heat at night, but our apartment was surprisingly comfortable last night... let's hope that lasts!

I've tried to go out and do a little shopping, but the thing about Italian shopping is that the stores are very specialized, so you have to guess what kind of store you need to find if you are looking for specific items. So far, I've been able to find everything I need except for sponges for doing dishes! Maybe they don't use them in Italy or maybe we've just been looking in the wrong stores. Wherever they are, they're not where we bought the dish soap, which is where I was expecting to find them. Whoops.

Tomorrow we have a walking tour of the Temple Rome campus and a cooking and wine demonstration. Friday we have a technology session for setting up computers with internet access on campus. The way our coordinator described it is that Italy is about ten years behind in almost all technology (except cell phones), so internet is definitely not what I'm used to. It's a lot harder to set up than it is in America, and in a lot of places it's not as fast.

We start classes on Monday, and I am definitely excited to start learning Italian so that I can at least read all of the signs and labels! Lots of people do speak English, but some words are hard... like when we were trying to find a hairdryer last night, nobody knew what we were talking about. I'm also taking photography, art history (and the first class meets on-site at the Colosseum... go figure!), and Roman literature.

Oh, and I had orientation this morning on campus and I had to figure out how to use the metro all by myself! They split us up by alphabet, and I was the only one of my roommates who had to go this morning, and normally I would walk (it's about 45 minutes). But it was pouring down rain this morning, and I had no idea where I was going (street signs are hard to find!) so finally somebody gave me directions to the metro and I had to figure it out. There are only two lines in Rome, A and B, so it's really not that hard once you figure out what direction to go.

So far, everything has been a bit of a shock to get used to, but I'm having a blast and later today I'm headed to the open air market that's near the Residence to stock up on some groceries! We walked by it earlier and everything looked so good and fresh, so I'm looking forward to that.