Day One

Somehow I have survived weeks of tedious preparation and uncertainty, 10 hours of sleep time combined in the past week, terrible airline accommodations followed by terrible jet lag, all the while wondering if this semester in Rome was going to be more of a headache than a joy... somehow I survived all that and I have arrived. I'm in Rome...for four months... and its beautiful and breathtaking and overwhelming and HOT (no air conditioning whatsoever). I have a bright, friendly roommate named Jessica. Our room is on the second floor of the Rome center and right across the hall from the bathroom. Our flight got in around 8:30 this morning and we made it to the Rome center around 10 and got checked in. I wandered around a bit, finding my way...I went to Rinaldo's, the cafe in the basement of the Rome center and I was delighted to find that the attendee was not a disgruntled Chartwell's employee but a funny little old man actually named Rinaldo, upon whom I launched my first round of "come si dice..." (the name game) and pointed to various objects in the cafe who's Italian titles had escaped me.
Everyone here is really friendly, and I've met a lot of people already. There's actually a lot of students here from SLU, which I had no idea of. I ate lunch- pasta al pomodoro con Broccoli e insalata per la prima piatta- with some girls who were really great and who, like me, needed to find a store to buy some basics. So we set out with just a map and decent Italian speaking skills between the three of us to find hair dryers, straighteners, Q-tips, towels, alarm clocks, batteries and hangers. It was certainly a learning experience, kind of a guess along the way of which stores might carry what, learning certain vocab words like "asciugacapelli" for blow dryer by describing a machine that heats hair and embarrassingly acting out the motion of drying my hair while making a "shhhhh" sound... but needless to say, after a lot of embarrassing scrambling for words we got everything we needed and learned a lot along the way. I lost a lot of my Italian over the summer, but I think it will come back quickly.
The area around the Rome center is very cool. The streets are very windy and there are many hills. There are many high rise apartment buildings in this neighborhood, but they are more like the type you'd find in Miami rather than New York, i.e., pink stucco, covered in vines with wrought iron railing surrounding white stone balconies. Theres a mixture of palm trees and pine trees which is pretty cool. The cars are extremely tiny and people drive pretty recklessly but with my driving record I'm not one to judge. There's a lot of graffiti all over which at first I found ugly but then I started reading it and 90% of them are love proclamations, which is actually kind of sweet.
I am so tired but it's only 4:09 here so there's no bed time in sight. My plan for the evening is just to mingle and wander around, maybe try a cappuccino from Rinaldo's...
Tomorrow we are going to Ostia, which is a historical site- lots of ruins- to learn some history. I hear its very beautiful and we were told to bring our bathing suits. Yay.
So far I am very happy with my experience, though I could really use a good night's sleep. What I've seen of the city so far is more than enough to get me hooked. Theres a bar (cafe) on every corner with an outdoor patio filled with well dressed people.
I am overwhelmed with the possibilities.