Tomauroooo

So, as my first day of classes was today I am officially an Italian student. My vocabulary has been expanded from greetings and drinks to simple sentences, apartment words, and a few others. Not too bad if I don't say so myself. Today started "intensive Italian week" which is a week for us only to do Italian class to help us to get oriented to the language. We have two sessions a day and they flew by quickly today, so I am hoping for the same thing the next three days of class.

Next week starts the rest of my classes which happen to include at this point Elementary Italian, Photography I, The History and Culture of Food in Italy, and Contemporary Italy: Society and Culture. All of which, I am excited about. I may drop photography though, because I didn't bring the really nice camera which is probably what a photography teacher might want.

A big accomplishment in our apartment has been completed in the past two days, we have cooked! This doesn't seem like it would be that big of a deal, but in Italy energy is very precious and too many appliances/lights at once makes everything short out and clearly that scares me, Emily, and the other Molly. So yesterday we made a delicious lunch of pasta and also made a discovery about Italian bread. Perugians enjoy unsalted bread, which we failed to remember when we were in the market in the first day. Unsalted bread is the absolute opposite of delicious and we now lovingly refer to the loaf we still have as "the crouton" as it is not only not that great but also a little hard and slightly stale. No worries, a little pesto and salt does the trick with this. Tonight's dinner was a little more elaborate. Emily cooked some Gnocchi with pesto and I made some mozzarella, pomodoro (red sauce), and prosciutto bruschetta. I must say, I was impressed with our cooking and so were some of our program directors that came in to check out some maintenance things while we were eating.

This city is just absolutely beautiful and I love just wandering around it (not alone, of course) to see what I can find next. Also, they have this great holiday season going on currently. You can currently see "SALDI" written on every door and shop window, meaning sale of course! They have a sale holiday. It started last weekend and apparently goes on for a few weeks. I think it may be time to find a new pair of boots considering I brought one pair and may be the most cold natured person alive.The proud cooks.