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.