La Vita è Bella: The Stereotypes Are True

Greetings from Roma! After an entire day of travel without much sleep (ok, more like any sleep) which blended into another straight day of arrival activites, everyone in the program is more than a little exhausted. We wandered off from the plane bleary-eyed and confused, and our whole experience at Fiumicino consisted of 30 American kids shuffling blindly in a herd through the airport in our North Faces and Uggs and Notre Dame apparel..."here come the students, it's that time of year again..." Also, does Italy even have customs? And by customs I don't mean the one man who stood in the middle of an aisle while everyone rolled their suitcases right past and out the door.

My re-introduction to Italian culture wasn't necessarily the smoothest transition, as the morning was essentially one giant exercise in patience (of which everyone knows I have none) and inefficiency which left me and my fellow exhausted travelers standing out in the rain for ridiculous amounts of time at more than one location. More than once the thought of how much smoother any of the morning's tasks would have been in America occurred to me, but by the afternoon we were settling into our new home. I'm living with six other girls from the ND program, and our apartment is uncharacteristically spacious, especially by Italian standards, and chock full of decor that was right at home in the '70s. After a day of walking more than three miles throughout just a small section of Rome, being great tourists at St. Peter's Square at the Vatican (it really was even more spectacular than I remembered, and I get to make that walk every day as a part of my trek to school), and finishing up some legal paperwork, we finished it up with, of course, take-out pizza for 4 Euro a piece. Before you start comparing this to my Sbarro tendencies at ND (ok, it's a fair point), I promise to step it up in the Italian cuisine area from here on out, or once I'm no longer jet-lagged and just want to lie on the couch all day.

So, in regards to the lessons learned...

-Italy is loud. I can hear literally every word of conversations being yelled on the streets as well as cars honking as clearly as if the window were nonexistent. Which reminds me:

-Italy has crappy windows. My roommates and I have been wearing our sweatshirts and winter coats, and I pathetically holed up on the floor in the dining room next to the radiator. It is absolutely freezing in this building.

-Italian men are perfect caricatures of Joey from Friends, right down to the "How YOU doin'??" that we received twice today.

-Vespas will kill you. Ditto for Taxis. And probably also true for our bus driver today who narrowly missed umbrella woman.

-Rome is absolutely beautiful. There's a reason it has been so romanticized and glorified - it deserves to be. And I can't wait to experience more of this city, country, and continent every day for the next four months.