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☺