Over the Hills and Far Away: pictures!

thanks to val, i now know how to post pictures on here, so im going to go crazy now.

first of all, tammy (who no longer sends me personal emails..hint hint tammy) requested that i tell her more about the food and the people here.

as for the food, there is simply too much and it is simply too good. my breakfasts usually consist of bread and gnutella, fruit of some kind (usually DELICIOUS peaches, apples, or pears), and these wheat cookie/cracker things that my host mom buys, God bless her soul. Lunch varies from an entire margherita pizza, which I ate today like the fatty I am, to sandwiches on bread called panino, usually with some kind of cheese and meat. I have found that the prosciutto cotto (cooked ham) and pecorino cheese are quite good together. honorable mention: turkey and mozzarella with pesto sauce.

then come the hours before dinner, and there are many because most nights we eat at 8 or 8:30, but tuesday and thursday my mother has dance lessons til 9 pm, so i pretty much starve until then. (shout out to ashley, who would die as well). The food totally makes up for the starvation period, however. There are always at least 2 courses followed by a dessert, usually of fruit. Cori and I cannot stop eating bread, and will be 200 pounds by the time we leave here. The meals we have are pretty much determined by what is in season here, vegetable-wise, which is a little different from America. Right now melanzana (eggplant) is the hot new veggie, so we have that A LOT. kind of funny considering I dont think I'd ever tried eggplant in the U.S. Most things we eat are either cooked in heavy olive oil, salt, etc. but taste amazing.

As for the people, kind of a vague request, Tammy. The people in the program are, for the most part, cool. There is the group of sorority girls who are rather exclusive but appear decent enough. Then there's everyone else: all nice people, as far as I can tell, some were friends before the program but it's fairly easy to break into their world if you hang around enough heheh. The few guys in the program (8 or 9 out of 35) all kind of do their own thing, most likely enjoying the odds here. Most of the Stanford people who are here I have met in the past or at least heard of-- most often we share mutual friends (funnily enough, often sigma nus).

I haven't gotten a handle on the Italians here yet. The ones we meet through the language partner program and Aron/Cameron seem to be real nice people, mostly guys, and not conform to the sleazy stereotype. However, the "Ciao bionda" creepy-type guys are ubiquitious as far as I can tell, especially at night. Such a change to go from Stanford, a really safe place where you can wander around alone at 4 am and be fine, to come here, where I felt really unsafe walking 10 minutes alone the other night at midnight and decided to go at sort of a power walk/slow run home haha.

and now, the pictures. i posted a lot of these on facebook but anyway..

our room at our host mom's apartment