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.