Yesterday I experienced Torino shopping. It was quite the experience. I don’t think anything went overly bad and I even bought some goodies from the pastry shop. I went with my two new friends, Andrea and Kim, who both go to Idaho State and live about three blocks away.
andrea and kim in front of the giant angel statue
In addition to all the shopping, I got to meet my 6th roommate yesterday. His name is Brad and he’s an interesting fellow. Thankfully, he’s vegetarian too and I’m hoping he can show me some of the ropes for cooking without meat in a foreign land. We went out to grab a bite to eat last night and he seemed real cool, but when we came home he kind of morphed into super defensive kid with a desire to create conflict. Weird vibes, hopefully they will pass.
Today we took our first italiano quiz. It was about the verbs that we have learned so far. I made a few stupid mistakes, but other than that, I feel fairly confident about the written part of this new language. When I try to speak, that’s an entirely different story. Tomorrow is Saturday and we will be visiting the biggest open market in Europe… coincidently a few blocks down the street. There I hope to improve my skills. It is somewhat remarkable to think about how far we’ve already come. I can recognize a lot of words, and say most of them semi correctly, but a lot of Italians don’t understand me because I don’t have the accent down yet.
This evening I started with Seth and a pub down the street called Migillicuddy’s. This was my first pub bathroom experience as well. FYI, all pub bathrooms in Europe are coed and consist of stalls without a toilet, but instead a hole in the ground. This bathroom was rather clean, and I was told not to expect that everywhere… scary. We’ll see how conditioned I can get my bladder over the next five months.
After that we met up with the rest of the USAC kids and then two that I sort of knew, Neva and Kyle, sort of got separated because a group of indi rockers stopped us on the street to ask for directions in English. It was amazing, turns out there was a band playing on that block and Kyle was ecstatic about a band, so we ran in there and soon left because there was a 5 euro cover. Once we finished that adventure we were pretty far apart from the rest of the group, so we just went back to their place (about five blocks away from my apt on Via Dalmazzo) and watched Out Cold while eating french fries. I haven’t watched any movies since I’ve been here so it was a welcoming and relaxing evening. Kyle is going to try and go snowboarding tomorrow. We have all heard that the snow is more like ice, so it might not be a good time. Therefore, I’ve decided to visit the market, catch up on rest, do some homework, and see more Torino over the weekend before I go hog wild everywhere else.
Well, I suppose that’s all I can manage right now. I am pretty tired from all the activities and I’m sure tomorrow’s will be even more fun and exciting. Ciao!
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