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!).
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