French Toast in Italy

January 12, 2011

Today was the third day of orientation in the same groups as yesterday. We started the class out with more Italian, and quite a bit of what our teacher taught us was about how to communicate different things in dealing with the train station. She then took us to the train station and pointed out a bunch of helpful things and how to read the signs in the train station, and everything of that sort. Walking home from the train station me and Jackie saw a limo with three people sitting on the top of it..it almost seemed as if they were doing some sort of media thing? But once I got home all of my roommates were already eating lunch and they asked if Jackie and I saw this tree with feet next to it and I was like what?! And I guess there is this one tree with fake legs and feet near it with a sign that says “Don’t climb this tree” in Italian of course. But I thought, how funny!

We had to go back to the school at 1 to finish doing things for our home stay permit and once we showed our passport picture to this official we were free to leave, so me and Marissa came back to the apartment because the rest of our roommates wanted to go shopping for boots and neither of us were in the mood to shop. We were approaching our apartment when we realized there was a man waiting on the outside of our apartment door, and earlier in the week we were informed that if you’re afraid someone will follow you into the building to just walk past and come back in a few minutes. So we walked past our apartment and stood at the end of the street just observing this guy and it looked like he was in no hurry to move. We had no clue what to do so we took a few pictures of different things and walked around this huge block and when we came back we were relieved to see that he had left, but when we walked into our building the guy was inside of our apartment with our landlord…here he was there to fix our toilets and install our internet! We were slightly embarrassed, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Our landlord is this cute old lady who came in our room to talk to us and she saw our curtains and curtain rod laying on the floor (Marissa had tried to swing the curtains open the other day and the rod fell out of the wall onto her!) and she said “What happened!?” And we explained to her what happened and I handed her this wooden piece of the rod that was the part that fell out of the wall and she held it in her hands, looked at it, and said “MAMA MIA!” It was probably the most priceless moment ever and I just burst out laughing inside.

 We had to go back to the school for a general orientation that was held by Marijke Huegaerts (one of the main ladies who seems to run everything) and Simone Falcone (the tech guy who all of the girls are also sad he is married). After that we were met by a doctor who is one of the many doctors at the English speaking clinics we are supposed to go to. He just gave us warnings about drinking and drugs – typical health/doctor advice. We invited Claire’s friend Nick over for dinner – we were planning on making French toast, hash browns, and cinnamon sugar apples. Nick ended up bringing his one roommate Ryan and they brought us this delicious blood orange juice to have with dinner. It was a great time! (I also bought and ate my first chocolate bar at some point during the day and it was DELICIOUS!)

The train station!

I'm madly in love with all of the Vespas here!