Ciao from Roma!!
Today is the first day in la città eterna and it was a great one so far.
After dinner and a freezing cold shower last night, I crawled into bed and slept like a rock (if rocks really sleep). Besides our room being a little on the warm side, I almost the whole night through. The only hiccup was around 5am which was like 9pm San Diego time. But after some tossing and turning I was back asleep.
7:30 am: Dressed, prepped and ready for an entire day of orientation. Danielle and I were both ready to go so at 8 we left the apartment and decided to walk to find our meeting spot the Hotel Cicerone.
And we were off... walking the streets of Trastevere which are strikingly similar to Florence. We stumbled across the open air market at Campo de' Fiori and our inner foodies got way too excited. Fresh tomatoes, peaches, apples, oranges, garlic, arugula, candies and pastas were all set up by vendors under tents for the morning's sales. We are going there first thing tomorrow to get fresh groceries for the room.
Next, we had to find our to Hotel Cicerone. No such luck in that department. We met up with our other roommates and as a group struggled to get oriented on the map. Using the river as our point of reference, Caroline and I found out where we were headed by counting how many bridges we had to pass before we had gone too far.
In total, the walk was a solid 25 minutes in the already boiling heat at 9am. We made it to Hotel Cicerone (right off of Piazza Cavour, which has a bunch of palm trees in it...odd) and had just barely missed breakfast.
nooooooooooooo....
We went through each of the orientation segments about Academic Integrity, Personal Conduct, Housing Contracts blah blah boring. STARVING at this point.
1:00pm: Lunch time at the Hotel consisted of pasta and some sort of salad with a mystery meat on top. The pasta was delicious, though its kinda hard to mess up pasta... The mystery meat was some kind of tuna, so naturally I didn't eat it. Fish are friends not food. With a piece of tiramisu down, we went back to the conference room and had two more lectures. Travel and Safety.
The travel lecture was led by no one other than Andy Steves, Rick Steves (Travel book empire Rick Steves)'s son. He too studied abroad in Rome and now runs his own business called Weekend Student Adventure which is super awesome. Basically, in one lump sum paid to WSA, your weekend trip to --Insert city name here-- is booked. Hostels, tours, excursions, tour guides and other accomodations are already figured out in 8th Grade Washington D.C. trip type fashion. Danielle and I are looking into the Amsterdam and Budapest ones.
Here's the link: http://www.wsaeurope.com
Next was the Italian Police Chief of Florence to talk about safety. He was totally stereotypical Italian looking guy who spoke English well enough to understand with few goofs. (Like saying "guy" instead of "guys." "So, ehh, what do you tink guy?"). His completely animated but realistic approach was entertaining to keep most of us from falling victim to impending jet lag.
We were finally released for the day and followed our newfound San Diego friends to check out their apartment in Prati which was GORGEOUS and way nicer than ours. Oh well.
Wandering our way back from the river and already venting about people on our program, Danielle and I turned right on a side street and could see St. Peter's dome. To turn the corner half distracted by a trivial conversation and be confronted by something as majestic as St. Peter's is an experience I feel like will happen very often while in Rome. Love it.
Naturally, we had to go check it out.
Drop dead gorgeous.
So we trekked back to the home land and now are catching up on some sleep before another big italian dinner out and checking out the bar scene later tonight! Ciao!
Devotissimo Suo,
M
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