A very slow day

Hello world, so I feel like I'm letting you down with my completely UNINTERESTING posts. And today was another very slow day. So I don't even really know why I'm posting this. BUT, this post follows a post for one of my classes. The post about the Pantheon, below, is an essay I wrote for class. Feel free to skip it.

Anyways, today started off bright and early skyping with my favorite sister, Sarah. On her new computer Vinny. And then it was off to our Islam class for a few hours where we basically just examined paintings (I thought we weren't in art history class?) for Eastern influences and what things meant and so on and so forth. It didn't last too long, though, and even ended early! But, school wasn't done that soon--we had to meet with our group for our Migration class and plan out our project and draft a proposal to send to Kathie. Our project centers around volunteering at the Joe Nafuma Refugee Center (I've mentioned it before--it's where I taught English to the refugees). We're going to essentially create a map that shows their "journeys" to Italy, including what's going on in their home country (civil war, political intolerance, or whatever reason they left), how they got here, what languages they speak, and really anything they want to tell us. This I'm actually kind of excited about. I like making maps and graphs and those sorts of things. Much, much better than writing another essay, let's be real here. After that, we were free to go! Our other classes had been canceled because of the holiday--not because they like to give us free time but because the places we were going to explore were closed.

So, we headed home where I drafted our project proposal and sent it off to Kathie and proceeded to waste the rest of the afternoon. Well, I made lunch, a delicious caprese sandwich, which was fairly productive. And I tried to plan our trip to Florence! Which you probably don't know about.... Here, I'll fill you in: so, we have a three day weekend in honor of the fourth of July (way to go, Americans! get that independence!) and we also really want to go shopping. Putting two and two together, we decided we should go to Florence. But then there's the drama of what train to take, when to leave, how long to stay, what to do, and so on. Planning a trip for 20 is quite the ordeal. But it looks like part of the group (the part that I'm in) is going to leave early Saturday morning and explore the city for the day! Hopefully getting lots of good shopping done in the process. We're trying to make a reservation to see the David, which is basically the coolest piece of marble I've ever seen. After spending the day there, we're probably going to head back to Rome on the late night train. I'm excited for the day trip and I'll keep you all informed as to my whereabouts.

Anyways, after planning that, all I really did was work on my paper (see below) and make sure there were no glaring editorial mistakes. My roommates and I took a gelato break sometime in the afternoon and I uploaded a few more pictures to facebook. We also made dinner, chicken with vegetables, as usual. It was quite delicious.

I feel like I need to include something interesting in this post. Hmmm....

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(me thinking)
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PICTURES OF MY APARTMENT! Perfect. I'll give you a taste of where I live!


Here's our kitchen! It's mildly temperamental, like a lot of the things in our apartment. But our plumbing situation has been fixed (hopefully permanently) and we no longer have water backing up into our second bathroom! Success! Now we can actually use our kitchen sink without everything we put in it coming up in the bathroom.


Moving on to our bathroom, here is our bidet. Obviously very necessary, right? Actually, it's really handy for washing off your feet after a long day wandering around Rome because it's much easier to put your foot in there than waist-high in a sink.


Here is our shower. Well, the key part of the shower. Notice how the shower part where water comes out that's normally mounted on a wall is not mounted on anything. This implies that you have to hold it over your head while doing the best you can to scrub the shampoo out of your hair with only one hand. Anyways, at least our water gets warm, which is more than some apartments can say.


My bedroom! I share it with Sarah, one of my three roommates. My bed is on the left. I know the beds seem strangely close together but it's not weird at all in real life.


My bed, again. If you could see my little night stand you could see our very strange lamps with a weird hole in the middle.


Here's our door. It's hard to tell but there is a ridiculous lock with four deadbolts (you have to turn the key four times to open it) and these bars that go up into the top of the door frame and the floor. It makes you feel very secure to have that hefty of a lock. Now, what kind of key might open that lock??


Answer: a ridiculous one. Compare the size of that key with the other, normal sized ones on the key ring. It's large. And heavy. And crazy looking. But honestly pretty cool so it's all okay.

And that's where I live! I like it a lot, we live in the neighborhood of Trastevere (I have probably said this before, I don't know) very close to a market and our favorite cafe. Personally, I think we have one of the best apartments even though it's a bit of a walk (ahem, 20 minutes) from the Rome Center.

So, really, that's about all I have to say. I hope my apartment pictures made this post a bit more exciting that it could have been. Tomorrow we're going to a huge market in the immigrant community and have two different art history classes so it's going to be a long day but it should be very, very exciting and I should really have something to blog about! So look forward to that!

I miss you all!