My first few days...

            …have been awesome! My first impressions of Bologna have been great and I think I’m definitely going to enjoy spending a year here.

            Noelle (another UChicagoan in Bologna for a year) and I arrived here on Monday afternoon, exhausted from a series of delayed flights and about 24 hours of straight travelling. We didn’t want to waste any time napping though, so we took showers and immediately went to the Wind store to buy cell phones. Our phones took a whole day to begin working, so it was important that we got them as soon as we could, because we need an Italian number to search for apartments.

            After that, we wandered around Bologna for about 2-3 hours, just exploring the area around our hotel and the University zone. We found the UniBo version of the Seminary Co-op (see picture below) and started looking for “annuci,” or postings about apartment rentals. At the risk of sounding totally ridiculous, the colors here are really cool. The buildings in the “centro storico” (city center) are orange and yellow, and many with red roofs and shutters. All the sidewalks are covered and made of stone or tile. Also, the graffiti artists here are especially talented—there is a very accurate representation of Dexter from Dexter’s Lab right outside the Hotel Holiday—maybe I’ll get around to photographing some of it soon.

            After wandering through the winding, portico-ed streets for a while, we met with some other BCSP students for dinner. Everything I’ve heard about the food being absolutely amazing is true so far. I’m not going to go into any detail because I’ll get hungry. But, I did get two great “Stupid American in Italy” stories from dinner that first night.

            1.) Hanging out at the table forever because you didn’t know that they won’t bring the check until you ask for it.

            2.) Ordering way way too much wine because a.) It’s cheaper than water and b.) No one at the table understands the metric system enough to know that a liter is quite a lot.

            We drank all the wine. Without any further explanation, I’ll just skip to the part where I got Nutella-flavored gelato and sat in the Piazza Maggiore with new friends. Overall, a great first night!

 Heart-shaped crackers served on Lufthansa to prove that they still love us, even when their planes don't work.

Cooperativa Libraria di Università di Bologna

Portico, nice colors.

With Noelle

Gli studenti BCSP a Piazza Maggiore

Pasta in the vending machine :)

Here is the story of how I ended up in Italy for a year

I wish I could say that this is a dramatic story of some deep desire to escape cultural confines or find myself in a different country. It isn’t though.

This story is actually quite boring, but it seemed like a good way to get the ball rolling. I’ve been to Italy once before in my life. “The Europe Trip,” as we called it, was offered once a year to upperclassmen at my high school in Rochester, NY. Although the trip was only 10 days, I had a fantastic time.

Fast-forward 6 months. During orientation, it just so happened that I registered for classes with the help of a study-abroad adviser named Lewis Fortner. Anyone who’s interacted with Lewis before knows how enthusiastic (almost crazy) he is about study-abroad. I told him that I was debating taking Italian or French. Without much further discussion, he simply said that he was putting me in Italian and that I would love it. He added, “Maybe we’ll even send you to Pisa in the spring.” I thought this was a joke or reference that I wasn’t getting. Nope.

Of course he was right. I loved learning Italian. My whole class was psyched about it too, and a few of us revived CIAO, a campus group devoted to the appreciation of Italian language and culture. Sometime that fall, that Pisa reference came back to haunt me. In class we learned about an opportunity to study/live in Pisa for spring quarter with a host family. A host family. How cool is that? It seemed crazy to leave Chicago (which I loved) for Italy during my first year, but this chance was also way too good to pass up. I applied during the Christmas break.

Only myself and one or two other people applied to the Pisa program. Study-abroad said they would only run the program with at least 5 or 6 students, so in February we learned that the program had been cancelled. I was disappointed, but not overly so, as I’d already caught wind of upcoming opportunities to study in Italy. And in retrospect, I’m really glad I stuck around for spring quarter, what with Scav and the warmer weather.  

Fast-forward again to Christmas break, 2^nd year. I decided to apply for two more study-abroad programs in Italy. The first was the UChicago standard: the one-quarter Civilization program in Rome. The second was called the BCSP, or the Bologna Consortial Studies Program. This one would last for an academic year: roughly speaking, September to June. I applied, and on February 15^th I found out I was accepted. Hooray, life-changing moment, etc etc.

So that, in a nutshell, is the incredibly uninteresting story of how I became so fixated on going to Italy. Hopefully this blog gets better as time goes on…I guess we’ll see!  

 (A picture from the first time I went to Italy, February 2010)