I'm In Italy Right Now. How Did That Happen?

Yup. Here I am. In Modena, Italy.

I'm by myself. There are no other students from my university here. In fact, there are no other students here. I'm in a massive residence style building, with the staff that works at the desk. And they're barely ever around.

My building is the taller one on the right. It's huge, right? Well, I have the place to myself.

So yeah. I'm alone. Getting kinda lonely over here. But I have been making some progress each day I guess.

I took an overnight flight here on Monday with a layover in London. As I sat there, I thought, "wow, everything is in English here. Everyone has a cool accent. Everything makes sense. What the hell am I doing going to a city where no one speaks English?" I'm currently still in that mindset but I'm trying to work myself out of it.

I asked for red wine on the plane for the heck of it, and they gave it to me! It tasted bad, but I still found it exciting.

This is what the water looks like in London. I accidentally bought six 2-liter bottles of "frizzante" water at the supermarket in Italy thinking it was still water. It's like drinking seltzer every time I want water. Blech.

One of my first adventures (after trying to navigate the public transit system and then giving up and getting a taxi the first day) was to go to the supermarket, realizing that I did in fact need to eat.

Look how cute the little carts are!

My second day here I went to the market above the supermarket to buy boots after soaking two pairs of shoes. It's been snowing like crazy here! And they apparently don't shovel any walkways either...

The best I could find were mens shoes that are too big for me, but they do the job.

Today was a little more exciting. After visiting the campus a second time (still snowing), I discovered a really cool market that I guess comes on Thursdays? My favorite was the vendor guy selling vacuum cleaners. Who would think to buy that at a farmer's market-type thing?

I got a vegetable and cheese panino. Yummy! They were confused by the fact that I didn't want meat (They have hamburgers and hotdogs as options to put on the panini--I guess to please us Americans). I wonder how many vegetarians there are in Italy...

And I went to the supermarket again only to find pineapple, orange, carrot, and lemon juice. It was exciting. I'm mixing it with all my god-dammed fizzy water.

More tales to come. Hopefully I'll find a friend at some point...

-Meri