Getting Started

So here I am in Firenze, Italia! I’ve been here about a week now. Sorry for taking forever to start this thing. The plane trip here was LONG!!! I am not looking forward to that flight back across the Atlantic. Luckily I was able to sleep for a little bit, but I kept being woken up by food being served, hahaha. I was able to meet up with a friend of mine that also goes to Carroll in Chicago. When we landed in Germany, we found a bunch more people who were also going to FUA or Apicius (which is the wine and culinary school that is associated with FUA) through the SAI program. I met one of my apartment-mates in Germany. A small group of us went to the gate where we were suppose to take off from, but it was really early in the morning, like 4:00am ish, and when we got down there, some people that were down there all of a sudden looked at us and said “How did you get down here!?” we were confused and said we just pushed the door open. Apparently the gate wasn’t supposed to be open to the public until 7:00am and they had gotten locked in. hahaha. A worker had come down there and found them and was very confused as to why they were there. He had to take us back upstairs to wait for it to open and when he opened the door to let us back out, he said “well that’s Germany”. We all thought that was funny. I slept for the whole trip from Germany to Florence. Woke up once and saw clouds, next thing I know I open my eyes and there is the ground, so that was really nice. It took us a while to finally get registered and everything. Once Laura and I (my apartment-mate I met in Germany) got dropped off at our building, we had to find out apartment. Now our sheet said 4th floor, and I hear someone say that they count their floors different and they count the first floor as zero and then go up from there. Well I thought that the landing was zero and then the next door would be one. Each floor only has one door (except ours, it has 3). So we counted to what we thought was the 4th floor and we are lugging all our bags up, trying so hard to get in the door, and our keys just aren’t working at all! We were getting frustrated. We called our rental agency, they weren’t answering, finally we called the SAI program housing coordinator, and she was trying to help us and ended up telling us that the directions, which I had thought were directions to the land lord’s apartment, were actually directions to our apartment! Which just so happened to be up another 2 flights of stairs! Yeah, this numbering system is weird! So we are on the top floor here in our building, it’s a lot of stairs. Well she and I got settled in and we ran around the apartment finding all these doors. We have a kitchen off of our entry way, and then two doors going off the living room. One led to a big bedroom (biggest of the three) and the other led to a hallway that had two more bedrooms and a bathroom. We thought that was our only bathroom until we went into the other two bedrooms. Two of the rooms have bathrooms attached to them, so each room basically has their own bathroom! Which we all love. Well we both took a nap and waited for our other roommates to get here so we could all decide together which rooms we wanted. I ended up with a room down the hall with a bathroom. That night we went out for dinner and I had my very first real Italian Pizza! It was exciting. Hahaha.
We’ve all just been hanging out, getting to know each other. We all get along really well. Some of my roommates are encouraging me to dress more European because I said that I wanted to try to and not stick out so much. Therefore, I now have skinny jeans and leggings and am looking for boots. Everyone here wears that style. There was a welcome party at a club in town for all the SAI students and I wore the leggings with a longer shirt that I have here. My roommates were all giggling saying how I looked so cute. Hahaha. The party was a lot of fun. Me and another roommate of mine, Giovanna, were dancing all night. It was nice to end a long week of orientations with that on a Friday night. Then all weekend it was quiet around here, we were all tired. Hahaha.
Today I had my first class! I had my advanced drawing class. There are 4 students in the class! We went over the syllabus and then the teacher tells us that she is going to give us a placement test to make sure that we are at a good enough skill level to stay in advanced drawing. All four of us looked around slightly worried. We all passed though.
And that’s all I’ve been up to so far. Ciao!