Life

The past few weeks have been rather uneventful and I’ve been spending a lot more time is Siena settling into a regular pattern of life.

I love my roommates and we've been spending a lot of time together and with the other people in our program. We've been branching out too and meeting new people although they probably think I'm a mute as I don't speak much in Italian. I understand more than I can say, but only if they don't talk super fast.

We’ve met some of our apartment neighbors including the little old man who lives at the end of the hall. I always see him as I am leaving in the morning or coming in at night. He is always dressed up with a blazer and tie and his shiny white hair slicked back. We say hello and sometimes have a little conversation. Sometimes he’s with his wife who reminds me of my little old Italian great aunts. Anyway Yesterday afternoon Julia and I were reading and we heard the door buzz and were a little surprised since neither of us was expecting anyone. Julia answered the door to see the older man standing there smiling with a package. It was for our roommate Gio, but since we don’t have mail boxes in the building the postman left it on the floor near the boxes. Our neighbor took it in and figured out it must belong to us and kindly delivered it to our door. There’s nothing like the kindness of a near stranger to brighten your day.

We’ve been in regular classes for three weeks now and the culture shock of the academic change has worn off. Teachers here don’t think that grades are important and the passing is all that matters, but IES doesn’t share the same theory and so we have requirements including a research paper for every class. Also we spend a lot of time in class talking about random things like travel and festivals, which may be because we have such small classes but I like it. I’m taking a class on Dante, Italian, history/anthropology of Siena and an Economics of the EU. My Dante professor is really nice but we literally spend most of the class listening to him read his lecture notes word for word out loud. Hopefully this will end soon and we will get onto actually reading and analyzing, which will be less mind numbing. My Italian is ok in class but studying is proving to be difficult as our book is literally a workbook without the grammar rules. Our professor is really into learning the language first by listening and speaking and then learning the grammar, which I feel is more difficult, especially when the tests are all grammar. My history/anthropology class is my favorite since it’s mostly discussion and actually interesting. The professor is really excited about the class, so much so that sometimes she gets off topic for about 15 minutes just answering a simple question and then forgets what the question was. The econ class started off with a brief history of Europe lesson for 2 weeks which was a little boring and repetitive. Now we have moved onto the actual econ section but we’re not past the intro so we’ll see how that turns out. So far it’s a little troublesome as our professor has a difficult time translating some of the technical terms but I’m sure it’ll work out.

Tomorrow begins a few weeks of scattered trips including the Eurochocolate festival, Milan and Barcelona. I’ll try and keep you posted.