Playing Catch Up: Week 1

This week has been absolutely fabulous. We have been so busy and I have been focused on getting to know the neighborhood and my room/hall-mates that I haven't posted since the day I got here. So here I am playing catch up!

First off- a quick low down on where I'm living and who I'm living with.
I'm living in one of the two Villas on campus. These are 14th and 15th century villas that have been restored and transformed into student housing. They are great! I'm living in a triple, so I have two roommates. Rebeka (an NYU student) and Gabby (a visiting student like me). Since we are in a triple, we have a huge room, an extra coat closet, and a private bathroom. We also have a beautiful terrace all to ourselves! (It's the only terrace at our Villa, too!) I'm also close with my hallmates, roommates Liz (an NYU student) and Hannah (a visiting student). The 5 of us are sticking together, so that's who I am referring to throughout these posts. And they are all absolutely fantastic!

Wednesday:
Orientation Day #1. We had breakfast and then walked down the Duomo area and had an all day Orientation session at a local movie theater (The Odeon), where we apparently had rented out the main screen room. It was just a bunch of boring presentations. We had a one hour break for lunch, so my hallmates Liz and Hannah, and I took a walk around the Duomo and Baptistry. It was an absolutely beautiful way to spend our first real afternoon, even if it was just for an hour.

After lunch we went back to Orientation, and I kind of fell asleep. Oops... Jetlag hit me hard the first 3 afternoons. Orientation was over around 3:30, then we gathered with the small group from our dorm to head back to campus and take a tour of the neighborhood. It was starting to get dark once we left so I was a bit directionally disoriented. We stopped at our local grocery store as well, grabbed some snacks and other items for school. Afterwards we went straight to dinner at the cafeteria and did some readings for some other orientation classes we had to attend.

Thursday:

Actually super boring... We had 2 orientation classes, one in the morning and one after lunch. Lunch was not that good. We were stuck in class all day so nothing actually happened. We ate dinner and just stuck around campus.

Friday:
Jetlag was so awful at this point, and I slept through my alarm and ended up waking up over an hour late. I got ready super quick and ran to catch the last 15 minutes of breakfast. I went to my next orientation class, then we had a long break.  We (Rebeka and I) had another separate orientation class downtown near the Piazza San Marco, but shit happened and we got confused with directions and ended up missing our class. I was so mad that I missed it, I felt so awful. But we emailed our Professor who said it was alright and this actually happens every so often since we don't really know the city. The day obviously didn't go very well, so I just had dinner here with Liz and then we watched Hercules in our villa's common room.

Saturday:
Today was good! Got to sleep in, finally. At 12:30 there was the info fair at school, where we got to sign up for a day trip to Lucca for next weekend, a sightseeing tour for the next day (Sunday), bought my Italian phone and get info about bus passes. After we grabbed something to eat Liz, Rebeka and I went down to town to get some books we need for class and other things for the room. We were out for a couple hours, and then came back to get read for dinner with all 5 of us (Liz, Hannah, Me, Gabby and Rebeka). We went back down almost all the way to the Duomo and ate at this casual place called The Clubhouse. We all shared pizza and wine, it was fabulous!

Sunday:
Woke up early and went to the gym with Hannah. So proud of myself for actually waking up and getting down there so early... but it felt good to actually workout since I hadn't been to a gym in a week. After showering, the 5 of us met up to head down to the train station for the NYU group sight seeing tour. It was cold, raining, miserable but we still sat on the outdoor top of the double decker bus. It was quite an adventure! After the tour we stopped for some coffee to warm up. We all got back to the campus in one piece, and now I am here writing this post. Classes start tomorrow, so we are just having a quiet night here. And the Super Bowl is tonight!!! It doesn't start until Midnight here, but NYU has set up a whole big screen watch party for us! I don't know if I'll stay awake for the whole game, but I'm going to try and stay up until half time. Go Broncos!