Day 8: Ciao! (Wednesday January 19th)

So I will start by saying that if you look back at my blog entry from yesterday that you may notice that I changed the fact that I had my marketing class yesterday to I had my class on the European Union yesterday. After I had posted I realized that it was actually Wednesday that I had my marketing class and not Tuesday. One of the drawbacks to writing a couple days after about what you did a couple days before is the fact that sometimes your days meld together, but luckily I fixed it and when I write about the fact that I had marketing today you won't be confused (and also I wont be confused anymore too).

So today in Rome started out like any other day with my Italian class at nine in the morning. It is slowly becoming easier to wake up so early in the morning. My little bit of Italian that I will share with you today is bongiorno (which means good morning/hello/goodbye (but only in the mornings) and buona sera (which means good evening/hello/goodbye (in the evenings). As usual, I enjoyed my Italian class. On Wednesday I have an hour break in between Italian and my marketing class. So like yesterday, we went to the cafe down the street to have a cappuccino.  This time I decided to get a bit of brunch. It was a sandwich with prosciutto and hard boiled eggs. It was very tasty and it was also very nice to have a sandwich that was a little different variety than the normal salami and mozzarella. After our trip to the cafe, we returned to CEA for class. My marketing class started out with a personality test. The test is used all over the world and is used by business managers to help them work better in a business environment and work better with the clients that they have. The rest of the class was used for discussion. So far I am enjoying my marketing class, but I am thinking about switching it to a class that is about the Catholic church and Rome. I just feel like since I am here I should take a class where I get to go out and experience Rome and see some of the different historical sites.

 
A couple of hours after my marketing class, I have my living Italy class (the good thing about living so close to the CEA campus is the fact that I can walk back to our apartment and relax for a few hours in between my classes). I wasnt sure how my living Italy class was going to turn out, but from what we learned on the first day I know that it is going to be very interesting. We are planning on taking trips to Italian markets, to a small Italian town where our teacher is from, and to Siena, which is a town in northern Italy. This is one of my classes that I have once a week and it lasts for three hours. It seems like a long time, but it goes very quickly when we are talking about such interesting things. Today we talked about stereotypes of Italians and what Italy, specifically Rome, is really like, and we also talked about the many different problems and drawbacks to living in contemporary Italy. It was a very interesting class, and I am very glad that I am in it.


After class, we went for a quick dinner at our favorite local restaurant, Stuzzico! Not only do they have pizza, but they have a bunch of other foods, similar to a cafeteria, but with all Italian food. I had a potato quiche type   food and I also had some potatoes. We are beginning to get to know the owners of Stuzzico, which is very cool. After dinner we returned to our apartment, to hang out. Later that night we decided to go out to one of the local college hangouts here in Rome. (It is located in Campo di Fiore, which is just an area near the city center) A bunch of people from our program were going there so we decided to go meet them. We had a really great time, but it ended up being a much later night than expected.

Overall today was a very good day, but it was also a very long day. So until tomorrow! Ciao!