Past 3 days

So on Saturday in the morning we met in the morning and had a little tour around the neighborhood, and we all got to go out for lunch. There were about 4 appetizers, a main course, and dessert. SO FULL. All the food was delicious. They had these fried rice/cheese ball things, another fried appetizer that apparently was fried zucchini flowers, thin bread with fresh mozzarella and prosciutto, and bruschetta. The main course was a pasta in a white sauce with pepper, and dessert was this like, vanilla flan thing with chocolate sauce. So yummy. So later on that night we were able to go on this tour with Andy Steves, who is Rick Steves' son, and it wasn't much of a tour, he showed us a few palazzos, and then he was taking everyone out to dinner. We didn't really want another giant meal so we just came back to the apartment and made dinner. We went out walking around later and went to Campo di Fiore, which was really packed but it was really full of American students. On the way back we ran into some people who were studying abroad at John Cabbot, so that was nice to talk to some other Americans.

Every Sunday there is a flea market in Trastevere, so I got up early and went with some friends to walk around there. It was your basic street fair, tents and stands with random things like underwear and cheap jewelry, bathmats, mirrors, etc. It was ungodly hot, so we didn't spend that much time there. I can back and had to take a short nap. After I got cleaned up my roommates and I went walking around Trastevere later on in the day, it had cooled down a lot and the weather was perfect. On the way to the Piazza Santa Maria we stopped and got gelato.We found a nice restaurant after walking around and I had gnocci for dinner. It was so good! On the way back we stopped and had gelato again at the same place :)

Today (Monday) was our first day of orientation at UARC. We had 2 professors meet us near our apartments and we walked to the palazzo taverna. The building is gorgeous, it's this really old palace that royalty and nobles used to live in. They explained the history of the school, the main rules, how to get there and stuff. They gave us a break at 11 until 1130, we came back and they talked to another half hour, and our lunch break was from 12-2. We found this cute little restaurant near the school and had pizza, and when we got back all the faculty intoduced themselves for about an hours and we were done for the day! I like the Italian's version of a "long day" because it's super short compared to the American's long day. The study abroad director, Amy offered to take us out to dinner, so we went to another pizza place for dinner. My pizza had this spicy salami on it and it was so good. And again, we stopped for gelato on the way back :)