Day 5

Orientation is finally over! Day 5 began with the last of our sessions: a crash course in basic Italian. I’ve always loved learning new languages, so it was actually really fun for me. And already knowing some Latin and Spanish proved to be quite helpful. The prof seemed to like me, too (once a teacher’s pet, always a teacher’s pet). So now I know the Italian alphabet, numbers, and some basic phrases. Well, it was kind of a lot, so I’ve probably also forgotten a lot of it, but I’ll just have to keep practicing.

So that took up the whole morning, and then we decided to have lunch right across the street where they have really good sandwiches and fruit cups. After, Katie and I booked our trips to the Amalfi Coast and Florence—or, I should say, attempted to book. By the end of the day we were successful, but we hit a lot of road bumps along the way. Katie’s card got declined by a Swiss website, I thought my card got declined on hostelbookers.com, but it turned out that the website just sucks, so then I had to book that through a different website, etc. I keep saying, though, we live and we learn. That is constantly happening on this adventure so far.

We spent the later part of the afternoon exploring the area along and around the Via del Corso, the street with all the shops. We saw and climbed the Spanish steps, tried to enter the Pantheon but were stopped by 5 o’clock mass, browsed in the Disney Store, and looked at the Trevi Fountain through glass since it’s STILL under renovation. It’s had scaffolding now for at least 14 months, and that is not okay. It better be done before we head to Seville!

Sad because Fendi is under renovation (yes, I'm actually in front of the store).

But anywho, we saw lots of pretty buildings and things and had a very pleasant afternoon. On our way back to campus for a rest/rehydration, we saw a big boat docked along the Tiber at Ponte Cavour called Lian Club that advertised live music and food. Naturally, we decided to go there for dinner and to listen to the live music later.

I think it was probably the least touristy thing we’ve done so far. I’m pretty confident we were the only non-Italians there. The menu was super small and not at all in English, but we somehow figured it out and got some extremely delicious food. Mine was eggplant AND zucchini parmesan. YUM!

In typical American fashion, we thought the band might start at 9:30 or so. We quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen, but were enjoying the beautiful night and the same 10 disco songs they kept playing over and over. Finally, sometime after 11, we got our live music. And it was great! Lyrics were 100% Italian, but it really didn’t matter. They were so talented and I think even wrote their own songs. Actually, I should say the lyrics were 97% Italian…they ended one song with the ending of “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” which was super bizarre, but appreciated by us. Our waiter was cool, too. We spoke mostly English to him, he spoke mostly Italian back, but we made it work and really had a wonderful experience.

I feel like I understand the locals so much better now! Yet I know there’s so much left to learn…