la dolce vita

a lot of people have asked me "how do you like rome?" and to be honest, at first it's decently intimidating. however aside from the heat, the entire city is pretty damn sweet. and it's never been hard to like a place that takes 3 hours for lunch, encourages j-walking, and can eat a sandwich/smoke a cigarette/talk on the phone while holding their helmet around their wrist (don't want to mess up the hair) and transporting groceries between their legs on a scooter.

that being said, i am doing my best to acclimate to the roman way of life. i now look for open pockets of traffic to cross in with a certain degree of confidence i never knew, all the while being ready to jump back if they're not gonna stop after all. i can order a cappuccino from the bar in the morning, or an espresso later on in the day. i know gelato is readily available at any time and that pizza shouldn't, for the most part, ever come sliced. all in all, i'm adjusting.

i start my italian practicum tomorrow which will help in doing things like ordering (food/drink/gelato/etc) and yelling at traffic which can get a little too close at times. i attempted to get a martini in search of what i had in france and ended up with a glass of red vermouth, not exactly the best stuff around.

my program is mostly girls (not bad) and a surprising number of which are from ucsb. my roommates are good guys, two go to sb and the other two go to berkeley and uci. i'm in a triple and the two sb guys are in the double next door. our apartment is a good one with 3 air conditioners, 2 bathrooms, and wood floors. however in true italian fashion, 1 air conditioner drips water, the shower's broken, and the washing machine's door won't latch. we're working on getting those fixed.

i forgot to mention the rare occurrence on my first flight. that was a fully grown/sane man coming back from the lavatory with a toilet-paper tail. i didn't think that happened! the goofy part was he exited the plane with it still there, i later saw him getting on my connecting flight and it was gone though. how embarrassing!

i'm so far so good and excited for the weather to cool down and rome to wake up from its month-long holiday known as ferragosto. pictures hopefully will be on the picasa page soon, it was uploading pretty slowly. otherwise there are some on facebook (for those of you with it) and are soon to be on picasa.