more rambling:-)

Whew…hopefully I can catch up a bit. Bologna’s beautiful right now. The first big snowfall was this last weekend; huge flakes fell all day…it was gorgeous. And all the Christmas lights and decorations are up. Banners and holly and garlands and lights hang in every street, shops are all decorated and the two big towers are all lit up, too. It’s almost too picture perfect…especially walking around the Christmas market, it feels like a movie set! And the Italians and I are kindred souls in that we both seem to feel that it’s never too early for Christmas to start…for them it’s probably because they don’t have Thanksgiving, for me it’s because I just can’t get enough Christmas music☺ Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get out and wander around as much as I’d like because of classes…I think I should’ve started concentrating on the school part earlier…I guess I say that in Madison too though. This past week was pretty crazy with work and this coming week or two are going to be tough as well. One of my classes ends this week but the test isn’t until Dec. 19…weird, huh? And my other two classes end the 5th and 6th and exams are on those days…throw in a book report and a story to write due in the same time, I’m thinking I might need to hire an Italian to write it all for me☺_
I saw my first opera!! It was SO amazing! The singers were unbelievable and the opera house was gorgeous. The process of getting the tickets was ridiculous though…the regular tickets were all sold out so we decided to try and get the inexpensive ones in the balconies. This meant that first you had to wake up before 6am and get to the opera house (which is luckily only a block away from me) to put your name on a list that they post at 6. Then you had to come back at 9am when they read all the names off the list…any name without a representative there was crossed off. Then they nicely, in the name of democracy, asked us to vote on whether we’d like to return at 3pm and 6pm or just 6pm to repeat the same process. Needless to say the vote was just for 6, so we returned again early that evening and they read the names AGAIN and then put us in line to get our tickets. By the time this was done us girls had about an hour to get ready. But it was all worth it; we got all dressed up and saw an amazing show☺
The night after we had the chance to get dressed up again because the program arranged to have a restaurant reserved for us and a “traditional” meal served for Thanksgiving. It was pretty cute and so much fun. Almost everyone from the program was there and a bunch of our professors and they did a pretty decent job with the meal. The stuffing was a little off and so was the squash and pumpkin pie but the turkey/potatoes/corn were really good…I missed the lefse though!
We made our first BIG meal that same week…we couldn’t think of anything really American and low-budget that could be made in mass quantities so we resorted to stir-fry. Which turned out to be a really good idea because the Italians that ate with us had never had it. It was unbelievably unorganized (go figure with my cooking experience) and hard to do so lots of reasons. One, the metric system. Trying to convert teaspoons and cups into grams was impossible…we didn’t tell anyone that we ended up just guessing with amounts, luckily the food tasted ok. Two, the kitchen is SO small! And the pots and pans are proportional so we had to make small quantities at a time and this threw the timing (which was pretty much gone anyway) out the window. The entire dinner lasted from about 8:30 to 11pm…just the eating part☺ Three, we couldn’t seem to convince the Italians that we knew how to make an American dish (that they’d never tried) better than they did☺ There was a continuous argument about who’s grandma cooked better…they didn’t seem to see the logic in an Italian grm cooking Italian food well and an American grm cooking American food well…so they just kept getting in the way☺ Third, we don’t actually have an oven. This isn’t really that big of a deal most of the time but we wanted to make a real apple pie so it was kind of necessary. We thought that problem was easily solved when the silicians offered theirs, but Krissy went down to use it and discovered that instead of having temperature settings, it just said “1, 2, 3-7.” Right. Either we got really lucky or we’re just really talented, but the food all turned out the only thing missing was the presentation aspect. Everyone seemed willing to overlook that though.
I running out of time so, I hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving and I’ll try and update again soon☺

Wow…this one could get long☺
First: Halloween.
This is kind of a new holiday for the Italians and I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that that is the reason they don’t go all-out for it…yet. They are slowly but surely discovering the joy of searching for that perfect and completely unique costume, consuming copious amounts of “dolci,” and hanging up scary decorations. The weekend started out kind of slow, we weren’t sure how to go about celebrating over here, it was impossible to celebrate “Madison-style” (we described how big of a festival it is in Madison and the Italians were astonished at the number of people involved), so we ended up checking out the Halloween party thrown for foreign students. I don’t know what we were thinking because everyone had costumes but us so; we jumped back on a bus, went to the nearest person’s house (Luke) and dug through all the closets for costumes. Luckily Luke’s a big soccer fan so I stole his soccer stuff and went as “Francesco Totti”…big name over here I found out. All night people were yelling “Forza Roma!” and “Tooootttttttttiii!”…or the contrary☺
The next day we bought our pumpkins (because what is Halloween without carving faces?!?!) but we didn’t even get them as far as our door! The Sicilians were pretty fascinated by the fact that we were going to carve these pumpkins so we decided to do the honors at their apartment. We made our designs and started carving…it was SO much fun!! Definitely a nice tradition from home that we could do over here! The whole time the Sicilians walked around us, watching, sometimes teasing. We asked them if they wanted to try carving but none of them wanted to. However, when we were done and when the pumpkins were all lit up, the Sicilians loved them! They were asking us to take their pictures with them, it was pretty cute☺
Second: Classes.
I didn’t have as many actual lectures this week because there were these huge demonstrations on campus (new reforms taking place that the students are happy with) and students were occupying the buildings so that classes couldn’t be held. They were crazy! They made Madison protests look pretty mild…you literally couldn’t go to class, banners were hung up everywhere (inside and outside), and they’d graffitied everything-inside and outside! Nothing violent though…just pretty interesting. I also still don’t understand half of what my prof. says…still working on that☺
Third: this last weekend.
I met up with Joe in Florence and, after going on a wild goose chase to find this church that I had to take pics of for class, we jumped on train going to the Dolomite Mountains. 4hrs by train and 45min by bus later we arrived in a semi-secluded town of Merano. Wow. I guess I keep saying that the place I’ve seen most currently is the most beautiful but, in the case of Merano, it’s true. It’s a pretty amazing city. Granted the weekend we chose was like the low point of the season (being in between the summer hiking and winter skiing) so there weren’t a lot of people there and not all the stores were open, but at the same time we got to experience the city more like locals so it was cool. I think it’s the only place so far where I could see myself living in Italy…no worries, I am coming home, the city is just THAT beautiful☺ We got up early sat. morning, set out hiking and found ourselves on like a 2mile hike to see all the castles in the area. The only problem we had with that was that the map we had wasn’t exactly to scale so we had no idea where we were most of the time. So we hiked and hiked and hiked…”borrowed” some fresh apples we found along the way (we needed the nourishment and they were SO good!)…hiked some more and finally made it to the top, to the castle. You all have to step in my shoes for a minute: my ego’s huge for having found this castle, I’m tired and hot, we turn the last corner, walk to the entrance (I can see the towers!), and read “chiuso fino ad aprile”…closed until april. ☹ dang. And then a big dog came out and barked at me (if you don’t know yet, I don’t have a huge liking for dogs) so I jumped and turned and pretty much ran back down the mountain☺ I wasn’t very brave☺ The hike was still worth it though for the fresh apples and the cute German restaurant we found on the way back down. This area is almost more German than Italian…we were greeted with “guten morgen (sp?) and buon giorno”…I almost had Joe convinced that I spoke German as well…all part of the heritage right!?!? So we got to break away from the Italian food for a bit (I can’t believe I almost complained about too much Italian food!) and try some good ol’ meat and potatoes☺ Overall the trip was great!
Fourth: language update.
I’m sure I’ll say all year that it’s coming slowly because that’s the way it always feels. Understanding gets easier a lot faster than speaking. And I still make stupid mistakes…the other day in the market I wanted and pointed to a banana and I asked for a pineapple instead…the guy just looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. And I had huge problem saying the word “aereo” for the Sicilians the other day…we chuckle at their english, I guess it's only fair that they laugh at my italian:-)
Lastly….nope that’s it for now and that’s more than enough, right?!?! Miss you all☺!
wait! all the picture links are posted on the left under links now! THAT'S ALL!