Siestas

In case anyone was wondering gelato was a smashing success, in fact I had it today too and have decided that my favorite flavor so far is tiramisu...because you were obviously wondering.

Anyway last night I met up with two friends and we found a local pizza place where you pay by weight. It was cheap and amazing, and I finally got some vegetables in my diet since I ordered a cold pizza with tomato, spinach, and mozzarella (because yet in Italy pizza counts as a vegetable). We sat at the base of a fountain while we ate and watched an artists paint with spray paint. We then met up with guys from our program (I was actually starting to wonder if we even had guys since I have basically only seen girls). They had a lovely upperlevel/rooflike patio, which will be amazing when it is colder than 80 degrees in jeans (because I actually looked up the weather and it was a low of 75 last night...at 3 in the morning). Next on the agenda was to find a concert....however once again the adage 'when you are looking for something you won't find it' definitely applied and we finally gave up after walking up and down the same street for 40 minutes looking for a particular bus stop and just went to a pub and chatted more instead.

But now to the title of this album: Siestas. I actually don't know the Italian word for them (its probably the same but with one extra syllable) but that is all I did all day. I got to sleep in for the very first time since arriving in Italy. Waking up started the most lethargic day of my life though, because our room literally never cooled off...not in 48 hours at least (one of the downfalls of living on the 4th floor I suppose).  After eating breakfast and coffee (and no I did not yet conquer the Italian espresso maker, but I did discover that the faucet gets hot enough to dissolve my instant coffee!) everyone in my apartment went back to laying in bed...because it was literally too darn hot to do anything else. Further we needed to go to the market, but guess what? - everything here closes from about 1:30-4, even large grocery stores. So we did as the Romans do, and basically had 'fob' time (which for noncampers means flat on bunk, or resting time) for almost 3 hours. I briefly felt like I was wasting a day in Rome, until I noticed while people watching that literally no Italians were even outside...only tourists. And until it gets colder, I have decided that this might have to become a weekly Sunday ritual....sit in bed and try not to sweat.

In fact it was so hot that I broke my own cardinal rule, I wore nike shorts, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes out.  The only other people dressed like this were the other 20 american girls we ran into from John Cabot and it kind of made me realize why Italians dislike Americans... Anyway it finally cooled off enough to get up and none of us had eaten a legitimate meal all day so not shopping was not an option. We bought a lighter and conquered the stove at least, making our first apartment meal: spaghetti with marinara sauce (we could not find an acceptable vegetable that we wanted to cook, so we substituted gelato instead, I'm sure that's the same thing).

And then the best thing happened while we were getting gelato...it started raining! Thank you God for rain!!! I am currently sitting in bed fully dressed (with socks even!) for the first time since arriving, and I'm not hot!! Rome actually gets as much rain as London, but you would never know it because it rains almost exclusively at night. Plus when it rains it pours and then it is as if it never happened, which I think I might just be able to deal with.

Well that is all the mundane details of my life that I will share with you today but I just had to tell the world that I officially LOVE rain. 

Ciao Belles

P.S. Tomorrow starts my first day of officially learning Italian, wish me luck!