House-Hunting in Bologna: A Saga

            This is about to be a novel. Just so y’all are prepared.

            To explain: The exchange program that I’m in Bologna with requires that we live with Italian students in order to have an authentic Italian university experience. This aspect of the program is one of the reasons it stood out to me amongst all the other UChicago study abroad programs in the first place. UniBo doesn’t have dorms or a housing system like American schools do, so all the students live in apartments.

            Had I stayed in Chicago, I would have moved out of my beloved house (Breck shout-out!) and into an apartment for my 3rd year. However, it’s not exactly the same as finding an apartment would have been back in Hyde Park. At UChicago, I would have gotten together with a group of friends and we would have looked for an empty apartment all together. In Bologna, we instead had to find a group of already existing roommates already all settled in an apartment. The whole process was centered on whether or not a group of Italians wanted you to live with them. Thus, with each apartment I saw, I became less focused on the location and dishwashers and laundry and more on the roommates. My hotel roommate Jackie categorized apartment hunting with job interviews: essentially you are trying to impress your potential roommates like you would a potential employer.

            The process started last Tuesday, when we had a meeting about housing with BCSP. Before coming to Bologna, I was a little worried that being with the BCSP would be too much structure, but man was I glad I had them during the apartment search. Our resident director peoples basically supplied us with a ton of insider tips and experience that made the process a lot easier and faster than it would have been had I done it alone. After the meeting, we pretty much immediately started making phone calls. Calling strangers doesn’t make me very nervous anymore (thank you, UChicago Telefund) but I didn’t take into account how much more difficult it is to understand a different language over the phone. After about 4 or 5 incredibly confusing calls I miraculously stumbled into my first appointment, which was to occur the following afternoon with a student named Vincenzo. 

This is an example of an "annunci." I spent a lot of time pulling numbers off of these during my search. The word "Erasmus" is synonymous with a foreign or exchange student.

 

            I ended up really liking the first place, but I decided to wait and see a few more before telling Vincenzo I was interested. The next two were okay, but I still liked Vincenzo’s the best so I followed protocol and called him back. During the tour/interview I had explained in rather poor Italian that I didn’t know anyone in Bologna so I was looking for friends as well as roommates. Desperate, right? Apparently he understood me though, because he invited me to get drinks with him and his friends last Saturday. They were all super nice and we had a great time.

            You might think now that this story ends with me living in Vincenzo’s apartment. His apartment had two beds in a “doppia,” and as it turned out, he was interested in filling both at once. Noelle and I considered living there together, but in the end we decided that we didn’t want be tempted into cheating on speaking only Italian. So, I didn’t get the first place. After last weekend, I kicked it into high gear and started seeing 4, 5, sometimes 6 places in a day. It was lots more walking that I’ve ever done, and I got myself some pretty hardcore blisters in the process. There were definitely advantages to the process though. I learned how to ride the bus, which apparently all these rural Indiana University kids are afraid to do, so I felt pretty hip. Also, it’s definitely true that you learn the geography of a city really fast when you have to walk clear across it a few times per day.

            Our hotel reservation is up tomorrow (Saturday) so when I still didn’t have a place on Thursday morning I was getting pretty stressed out. One of the toughest aspects of the whole process was that it occupied my thoughts and the conversations that I had with other students from BCSP constantly. For a few days there, it felt like I couldn’t escape the stress of apartment hunting, whether it was mine or someone else’s. I had an enormous streak of bad luck, and in three days of near constant searching I only saw one place I liked, which ended up being taken first by another student.

            Finally, on Thursday evening, when I was starting to get seriously worried that I would be homeless in a foreign country in a matter of hours, I had an interview (let’s call it like it is) that went really well. There were three girls living in the apartment, and I met two of them. They were really nice and calm, and so I told them on the spot that I was interested. Later that night, I had to work on a group presentation with some other BCSP students (by the way, our classes started this week! Somehow that ended up on a back burner) so I went the grocery store with my friend Molly to get some salami (no, not bologna) and cheese to snack on while we worked. At the store, I got a text that from my future roommate, Monica, that said “noi farebbe piacere averti come conquillina” which basically means “we’d love to have you as a roommate!” Then Molly bought me a Kinder Bueno bar to celebrate.

            So, starting Monday, I’m living with three girls named Monica, Elisa, and Giorgia. The apartment is awesome. It’s in an attic so it’s tiny, but it has a cool loft space that serves as one of the bedrooms, and great views of the red roofs from the windows. It’ll be about a 20-minute walk to most of my classes, and I’m planning to buy a used bike. I’ll post pictures of the apartment sometime next week!

 A nice arial shot of my new hood.

            P.S. I apologize if the written English in this blog is of a rather low quality. It's really difficult to switch between languages, and I've noticed that sometimes I have actual trouble coming up with simple English words. I'm not making this up...the other Americans here have reported similar side effects of bilingualism! 

           

           P.P.S. The craziest thing happened this week. Noelle and I ran into (here in Bologna) another student from our UChicago Italian class named Antonio. We had no idea he was planning to be in Bologna this summer. Wednesday night we went out to a bar with BCSP peeps and there he was, sitting at the table next to us! Small world!