Snow Days

 
It's still snowing in Bologna. This is unnatural. No one knows how to deal with it. And as a result, classes are cancelled for days in a row. I'm almost positive that I won't have school tomorrow. In which case, my last exam, the one that is the most difficult and that I've been working so hard to prepare for, will be postponed.
So what have I been doing with all this free time? The trains are cancelled. It's cold outside. And every time I leave the house it takes three times as long to walk anywhere. In order to keep this blog up to date I have to write about something. So here we have some of my recent activities.

-Throwing snowballs at people on the street from my window: I have not yet succeeded in hitting someone directly on the head. I'm trying to perfect my angling.

-Drinking hot chocolate: In Europe, hot chocolate isn't anything like that warm brown water from the States. Here they drink actual melted chocolate in a cup. Last week, one of my roommates braved the blizzard to buy Ciobar, the fabulous mix that when heated with milk in the microwave produces a cup full of heaven. That was a really nice night.

-Playing Settlers of Catan: I have finally taught my Italian roommates this game and they're now addicted. In the game, you have to collect different resources and the first night we played I was in desperate need of sheep, "pecora" in Italian. I used the word "pecorina" throughout the game, thinking I was asking for a cute, little sheep. "-Ina" usually when placed on the end of the word adds that connotation. They only told me I was wrong the next day when we were looking through my Dirty Italian Dictionary. Moral of the story is, definitely don't go around saying that you want "pecorina".

-Learning to talk with my hands: In Italian, gesturing is probably just as important as the tone of your voice. There actually are gestures that can completely take the place of words or phrases. My roommate Cristina gave me a lesson the other day on how Italians use their hands. I can know say, "Let's go, I'm hungry. He's crazy and stole all the food. There's no more." all without using words. It's quite the art.


-Studying: I put this one on here just to make my parents feel better.


-Ordering pizza: Bologna, as a city filled with college students, has a wonderful Web site called Pizzabo.it where you can go to order a pizza online and have it delivered. Since my hibernation began about a week ago, I've run out of groceries. Instead, I can get an onion pizza for only 4 euro brought right to my door! I always feel a little bad for the delivery guy...You don't have to tip here.

-Watching movies: Dubbing is much more popular in Italy that using subtitles. So when I watched The Matrix with my roommates, I was a little upset. In the Italian version, Neo is "l'eletto" or the Elect, not "the one". That totally messes with the connection between his name and his destiny! Also all Disney films are dubbed over in Italian. Even the songs. In the Italian version of "Aristocats" the song "Everybody wants to be a cat" is changed to "Everybody wants to sing jazz". That's just wrong.

 Hopefully, the snow will stop soon and I can leave my house again. In the meantime, I guess I'll just have to get back to "studying."