Turning around a mid-semester slump

A month into Florence, I was wondering if I made the right choice by coming here. I'd made a few friends at LdM that went to other universities, but I still spent the majority of my time with fellow UNCers. I thought that I would have more experience interacting with the Italian people and culture, and once the daily 3-hour pre-session of Italian stopped and my classes in English started, my Italian came to a standstill. Nothing wrong with the UNCers, but if I had wanted to hang out with Americans who had similar lifestyles and experiences to mine, I could get in touch with old friends. I wanted the new culture experience, but it felt more like a National Lampoon "Vacation" movie, except college and not family version. So, I did stuff about it.

What I did:

1. Bought Harry Potter in Italian. I know I know, it's a translation and I have yet to hear an Italian talk about how great WB's latest movie trailer is, but it's easier to follow a storyline I know in a language I don't really know. I had wanted to reread the book before the movie comes out, so it's a perfect way to keep the real and fantastical Italian words on the mind. Favorite new word in my Italian vocabulary: Mangiamorte, or Deatheater.

2. Signed up on conversationexchange.com. Mentioned this in the last post, it's a website on which people trying to learn other languages can find each other and meet. Demographic of the people who have messaged me is still primarily 28-year-old males--not 27 or 29, precisely 28--but I've met with another girl from Florence who will speak with me in Italian if she can give me a tour focusing on Medieval art this Friday. Considering I'll have two tests next week that would touch on the subject, I think I'm getting more out of it than she is. There is also another Italian grad school student I'll meet tomorrow to just talk.

3. Hung out more with my Turkish flatmate. Nil isn't Italian, but she's not American either. She's part of Erasmus, a program through which European students study abroad at different universities, and I've gone to events for the Erasmus students. Everyone speaks English and is trying to learn Italian. Perfect. Also, as an individual, Nil is the epitome of dear. Last night I was tired and didn't feel like going out, but I caved under her insistence, put on eyeliner and one of my four outfits and went to a pub with her. I met European students who, unlike many I meet on nights out on the town, I think I'll see again and would like to see again in Florence. On the way home I said I had fun, and Nil said, "I'm just happy to see you happy, because I know we won't have this again after you go back." Wisdom that needs to be prominent on the mind.

4. Signed up for an art class. I've realized with the void of journalism and art classes while taking culture, art history and philosophy in Florence, there's nothing like a class with tangible finished products. When I decided to study abroad in Italy at the start of my college career, I thought I was going to major in art and that it would be the perfect place to do so. In the heat of my battle to go to Bologna in the spring, I dropped the only art class I was taking to add another 3 hours of Italian. Once I let that aspiration go and really started to see the art in Florence, I really missed drawing and painting. So, for the price of half the tuition for the class and art supplies at twice the cost as in the U.S., I enrolled to audit a pastel class. I've only been to one class so far, and the drawing resulting from those three hours is pretty horrid, but my hands were dirty and I was thinking like an artist.

5. Ran. This action verb might be slightly inaccurate, but Sunday, after nearly begging other UNCers to take a day trip to a nearby city or go hiking to no avail, I thought about studying. I packed up my backpack and descended three stairs outside my apartment door, then turned around and changed into my running shoes. I leisurely jogged along the Arno River, and when I was too tired to continue running, I kept following the river. I ended up walking for about an hour. I passed a few parks with old couples picnicking, young couples fishing, a families biking, a venue advertising Italian rock bands, and found a bike trail that I look forward to trying out. Despite the shock of realizing what a toll eight weeks of barely any exercise took on my stamina, I felt like I found what I had been looking for while trying to make plans to go to another city or hike that day: something new.

Running isn't an Italian thing to do in the least, very rarely do I see anyone running, and if I do, 9 out of 10 times they're American. The translated book, conversation exchange, time with European students, and the art class through LdM are Italian-esque actions with American twists, but they help me find my ground in Florence. With UNCers I felt part of a herd, but alone I sometimes felt I was floating into the abyss. These activities make me feel like a grounded individual. A purposeful wanderer, if you will.

Needed a helmet this week

It was a week of frustrations. In bullet form:

• I wanted to add visuals to this blog post, including an awkward picture of me in a bike helmet to go with the cheesy and slightly dramatic title of this post, but my computer isn't loading it. Figures. My Internet crashes at least three times every time I'm trying to use it, and it's about 50/50 whether Skype will work.
• I didn't get to wash down overpriced bratwursts with even more overpriced beers at the 200th Oktoberfest because I made a flight change that didn't go through. All of my flight information was lost. A bus ride, train ride and a 1.5-mile dash to catch the bus to get to the airport were in vain. Plus, on my dash, I fell really hard, and a week later it still hurts to contract my right hand.
• After appealing 6 rejections from the UNC Study Abroad Office, I finally had to cry uncle when the dean of the office told me I couldn't do a program in Bologna, Italy, in the spring that I've been fighting for. I won't have completed five semesters of Italian before the start of the program, but they recommend I look into another UNC-approved program that's a mere $8,000 more.
• The mosquitoes have been awful at night. I wear long sleeves and spray my face with bugspray, yet every night around 3 a.m. I wake up to buzzes in my ear and itchy palms. It looks like I'm in the crux of puberty because I have so many bug bites on my face and neck.

Those are my main complaints. Now for the good.

• Rather than hanging out in Munich, I went on a wonderful bike ride through the Florence countryside, ate wonderful food and tried wonderful wine on a bike tour with Emily on Sunday.
• I've spent more time with my apartmentmate, Nil. She's from Turkey and is doing a program at an Italian University in which all of her classes will be in Italian. She would genuinely want to learn the language anyway, but her urgency because of her classes are in Italian adds great energy. I want to learn Italian too, but not many at Lorenzo de' Medici do. Neither of us know Italian incredibly well, though she speaks English, and it's great to have this common unknown bringing us together. Her country's culture and customs are very different from American, particularly opinions relations with the opposite sex, and I love learning about it as we spend time together. We went to see "Benvenuti al Sud," an Italian film about a guy from Milan moving to the countryside around Naples, and we just barely got the gist of it.
• There was a street market/festival in Florence this weekend, and I ate my bratwurst there.
• I signed up for this website, conversationexchange.com, to find Italians trying to learn English so we can help each other. Of the seven people who have messaged me through the site, six are 28 and male, which I'm not quite sure the proper way to respond to most. But, some of them seem interesting, and I met one who is working on his Ph.D. and seemed earnest in his intentions. We read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" in English and Italian aloud. And, more important than classroom learning, he's teaching me bad Italian words and phrases so I can know when I've been insulted. It sheds new light on past encounters.
• I'm very, very well-fed.

So, more good than bad. More good than bad.