Sunday, 18th

Today is a pretty quiet day so far in Frascati. It's pretty wet and sticky today, so we (the roommates and I) are just staying in town, going to the grocery store, using the internet cafe and cracking open our textbooks. Our classes officially start tomorrow, but the weather outlook for the rest of the week also predicts wet and rather dismal weather. Despite that, we'll probably still have a great time as long as we have umbrellas!

The internet cafe is also a dollar store of sorts (or rather, euro store) and they have lots of cheap and very useful items here, cleaning supplies and shampoo and Q-tips. I had bought a 4 euro hairbrush at the regular grocery store, and when I saw they were only one euro here, I was like, RATS! At the moment, there are four Russian or Hungarian boys here, in their twenties, and they're playing obnoxiously loud Lebanese music. It's kind of amusing though, it's like annoying people back at home playing really loud rap music.

This morning, we woke up a little bit late, around 9:30 AM, although most of the other people in the hotel were still dead asleep, and probably still are now even though it's noon. Sunday is breakfast buffet day, and it is a very luxurious assortment of bland, prepackaged pastries and cereal and dented fruit. Still, the coffee here in the hotel is REALLY good, even the self serve coffee. There's really no such thing as bad Italian coffee, and the roommates and I have decided it's completely unnecessary for us to go and buy coffee when the stuff at the hotel is perfectly good. A cup of coffee in town or in Rome costs about 2 or 3 euros, which is equivalent to about 4 or 5 dollars. It's actually more expensive than a generous amount of gelati, which is hysterical because we Americans fork over so much money to get ice cream from a shop. The average gelati store charges about 1.50 to 3.50 euros for varying amounts of gelati, but even a 1.50 portion is pretty decent.

Going off subject for a bit--gelati here is really seriously good. It's a lot creamier than regular ice cream, and apparently they make it fresh every single day. It's just really delicious, but it melts a lot more quickly than regular ice cream too, so you have to eat it really quickly.

Back to this morning, the person who took care of setting up the breakfast and dealing with cleaning the rooms was a woman, Julia, who is from Romania. This particular hotel hires a lot of Romanians, and they actually come from Romania and get jobs here and learn Italian. Now, Julia is in her 50s or so, and she was really sweet. She was utterly baffled at my being barefoot in the hall, and couldn't understand how I wasn't cold. The Italians here are a bit thin-skinned, they think 70 degrees is freezing weather. We did our best to converse with each other, and we were trying to tell her where we were from, that it was hot there, but this didnt translate well. So I beckoned for her to come with me to the front desk, where there is a large world map. I pointed to the approximate location of Louisiana on the map and flapped my hands, indicating how hot it is there. Even at this point, she kept looking at my feet, so I thought maybe I better put on some socks to placate her. I didn't want her to keep worrying about my bare feet. It must be some cultural thing here!

Julia was absolutely wonderful! She wrote down that she was "50 ani" (50 years old). I told her, "No!!!" and she shrugged and said, "Yes, yes." We really were genuinely interested in learning how to speak each other's languages, and she set aside her duties and sat with us in the room for about a hour, and Kate, Mica, Julia and I conversed and looked in our dictionaries and told each other how to say the name for a certain thing in Italian or English. Now I can say, piache sperce, and amo sperce, "I like your shoes!" and "I love shoes!" Bwaha. We couldn't figure out how to tell her that Louisiana has a very sort of swampy climate, so I drew a picture of a stereotypical swamp with cypress trees, alligators, storks and a Cajun shack. It just sort of went on like that and again, there was lots of body language involved. Julia was very patient with teaching me where to put the stress on a particular word--for instance, piache, "I like," the accent is on the second syllable--and it usually is for most Italian words. It's pee-AH-chay. I also picked up "buono/buona."

Running out of minutes already, so I'll just focus on having a relaxing day before our intense classes begin.