I'm here!

Since I arrived three nights ago, I've been meaning to post on here and/or send anyone a message over 200 characters in length, but I've been busy with orientation business and settling in! However, I realized that an actually existant lame post is better than the idea of an excellent, long one. So here this is.

I'm really happy to be in Bologna! Occasionally over the summer, there was the concern that I would be essentially repeating Rome/ there was no point in studying abroad twice, but that concern is out the window*. My Bologna experience has been and will be exponentially better than Rome for many reasons. Rome is amazing, but is like the tourist capital of the world. There are probably real statistics to back that up. Anyway, that caused me to feel like an awe-struck tourist for four months, whereas I already feel like I can make Bologna a temporary home. Not only is it smaller, therefore possible to grasp (i.e. geographically), it has a completely different atmosphere. Bologna is the closest thing this country has to a college town, and feels to me like the Oxford of Italy, which I'm obviously enjoying.

For the most part, people in Bologna will not try to speak English with Americans, the way Romans do. Hearing Italian all day long, including in class and in my apartment, better mean that I get awesome at it.

I really like my roommates, Alessia, Francesco, and Mara. They may think I'm weird because, due to limited speaking abilities, I talk about food 80% of the time and begin 50% of my sentences with "I want..." (there's obviously an overlap). Also they pass my room a lot when I'm in here, looking sweaty/exhausted and eating leftover plane trail mix alone, so I guess there are valid reasons to be weirded out. Plus they may or may not be aware that I've been using a washcloth as my bath towel... whatever, packing's hard and I haven't had time to do real shopping.

My language partner, Irene, is also super nice. Now she definitely thinks I'm a zombie, as I met her when I was extremely jet lagged. I know this because she recently asked me if I was feeling better, which was kind of awkward because I wasn't ill. By the way, I'm still jet lagged and think it's all of the times all of the time.

There are only nine other kids in the Brown program. I knew that was going to be great because it would make us close-knit or terrible because they would suck. Thank goodness it looks to be the former because that makes the difference between this being a fun experience or not. Apparently the number of students usually ranges between 10 and 20, but I'm glad we have the number we do because any more would make it hard for us to play all together, and the creation of sub-groups would ensue.

One of the biggest reliefs in my life is my single room**. Never underestimate the importance of a comfortable room. Being able to control my space, lights, and pajama options without worrying about other people has been lovely. Not to mention the fact that it's the largest room I've had in my life.

I'm going to wrap this up because I've probably lost all readers except for you, mom. Now that I've gotten some general things out of the way, I will hopefully post more interesting news soon!

A presto,

Lauren



*This window (sorry, I'm reposting from Instagram instead of taking 'real' pictures to look fondly upon as lifelong treasures):

**This room (sorry, reposting from Facebook instead of you know):