Introduction

I don’t know how many times I started to write an entry, and I just couldn’t find a correct place to begin. First I thought I’d do a short introduction of my roommates, the school, classes, and how it’s impossible to buy notecards in Rome. Then I thought I’d write about the recent Italian victory in soccer.

Then I realized that probably the best beginning would be to talk about something that wouldn’t mind being talked about. Namely, my apartment and the one eye patch guy working downstairs at the pizzeria. I’m still not yet at the point with my roommate where I can write freely about their bra size and booger problems, so I’ll leave that subject until I’m safely stowed away in another country at least 2,000 miles away from them.

We live on the same street as the school, which is extremely convenient for me because I know that if I lived on any other street, I would never make it to class. The more I walk around, the more variations I accidentally find to get to a place. This way, I can just roll out of bed and hit the road in the morning to go to my...

Two classes: "Multimedia Introduction to Italian" and "Bernini and the Baroque." I thought my two hour Italian class was bad until I went to my 4 hour art history class. After two hours of sitting in the class, I started imagining was being smashed against a wall like a squashed fly and being rhythmically pounded with baseball bat. By the third hour, I was imagining drinking an entire bottle of nailpolish remover and then my pulpy carcass being set aflame, and by the 4th hour my brain had gone entirely numb. A single hour has never gone by slower. On-site class isn't so bad, but then it's standing outside for 4 hours in the heat, or standing in a stuffy museum where you can't lean against anything and have to stand up straight as a flagpole. By the time I get home from classes I'm generally exhausted and I just want to sit on our couch for a while before doing anything else.

Ok, the original post I wrote totally didn't have that interlude of complaint, but I guess it slipped. At LEAST I feel like I'm being set afire in Rome, and not in Santa Clarita, CA. It could always be worse.

You’ve probably always wondered what it would be like living 100 feet away from a maximum security prison. Unfortunately, kind of like massage chairs and perfumed tampons, it loses its novelty. But it’s still pretty exciting to go home at night and wonder which escaped convict will be joining you for dinner and maybe a chat over a glass of wine about the latest issue of Vogue.

We live like queens here in our apartment above the pizzeria. The leaky washing machine only adds to the charm of the angry threats of one-eyed pizza man from downstairs. And here we commence our visual tour.

Welcome to our humble abode! Would you care for some cheese? Rock-hard bread perhaps? Crackers? Maybe a stray cat?















Our sitting room tastefully decorated with my drying unmentionables in the foreground.















This is the temperamental washing machine. I just had to put my clothes through the spin cycle 6 times for the water to get the sloshing water out. I think it is endearing, but I can see how it can get irritating. Especially for one-eyed pizza man downstairs.















My bed is the one on the right. I like mattress with a firmness factor somewhere between a plank of wood and a slab of rock, and this mattress fits those requirements beautifully.




















The kitchen. There is not much to say about it, except that it is so narrow you have to suck in your stomach when you’re doing dishes and it would really be as difficult as riding a camel through the eye of a needle if you felt inclined to, well, ride a camel through here.




















This is the shower. I would not wish the experience of showering in here upon my worst enemy. In the first place, it supposedly leaks, further endearing us to the pirate downstairs. The walls are moldy beyond repair, and there is a nicely situated window opening upon a sidewalk where people walk past at the most unexpected moments and never fail to peer in. One does not shower with the window open, but yours truly has started showering with it open several times. Shaving legs in this shower is an exercise of patience, endurance, and kung fu or yoga positions. It’s impossible to get a good angle because it is so narrow that unless you stick your leg straight out the window or straight up in the air, which is kind of impossible unless you’re a gymnast, you would throw your hands up and admit defeat if you could, only it's so compressing in there that you can't really throw you're hands up. So you’re left with just trying to cram yourself into some unrecognizable shape as if you’re putty or a sardine, and then with a sharp razor graze over those hard-to-reach places.















That goes up to my roommate, Libby's, loft. There is only room enough for a queen sized bed, and then you can't sit up in bed. Not much air reaches up there, in spite of our ceiling fan's most hearty efforts, since it's so high up and the atmosphere kind of thins out, and so Libby is left to breath shallowly in hot, stuffy air when she goes to bed, kind of as if she were being buried alive in her tomb.




















Leaving so soon? Well, don't forget to shut the entrance door...