16-Jan-06

I didn’t write yesterday because I was busy writing the article that I have to write for Tech. I’m not sure if I mentioned that before, but I am getting paid to write articles every week about my experience in Turin. They are then published in the parent e-newsletter. I’ll add the link when the first one is published.

I started a new class today. Italian Culture seems like it will be a very valuable class to take. There will be a few papers and presentations, but those don’t scare me, so I’ll be all right. My professor talked about culture shock today. I didn’t really take the Tech study abroad people too seriously when they told us about it but now I understand. Casey, Jeff and I were pretty frustrated yesterday. Now that we know some of the words in Italian, we try to get around the city, through stores and stuff, but our accent is so different that still no one understands us. I’m hoping it gets better soon.


this is where the olympic medals ceremonies will be held... at the end of my street :)

tests, so this is fairly key. I’m not guessing it will be too difficult. I feel I am keeping up fairly well with the pace of the class. I should probably be studying right now, but I wanted to get some thoughts out first.

At 7pm I am headed to the Internet café to talk on skype with the family. Speaking of the Internet café, I can finally say that I accomplished all of my goals. I bought a map yesterday for 7 euro (holy expensive) and it’s in Italian. Not as cool as I wanted it to be. So I definitely need to set some new goals… I’ll work on that.

This weekend one of my roommates, Jeff Simpson, is trying to put together a trip to Switzerland to snowboard and just see a different area. We figured there would have to be at least 30 signed up to make the price reasonable and after just 6 hours today, there were 36 people on the list. Hopefully the trip will work out. I would love to use the snowboard that I lugged half way across the world.