Settling In

I have had a productive couple of days. yay!

First of all, I moved into an apartment yesterday! It is incredibly international. There are people from Argentina, Cuba, France, Ukraine,and one Italian. It is close to Piazza Bologna (about 10 minutes and not far from the second mayor train station, Tiburtina). Yesterday the only people in the apartment were an italian and a yugoslavian and let's just say their english is very broken. However, it was a lot of fun to play charades and practice by broken italian as well. Eventually they got it and actually the more I hear it the more I can reproduce. Maybe I will learn it to a decent degree before I leave. Romanian, however, I heard is a hard languange but they speak much better english than the italians. Anyway, it is close to the University (about a 20 minute walk)and Wenjie also lives nearby. I am surrounded by students so at least in that sense it is a little more familiar. My main concern is that it does not have internet access and like Wenjie said , we have been seriously spoiled at Emory for having internet at all hours of the night. Even you want to go to an internet point, they typically close around 9 so it is impossible the countless hours that I am used to.

Two days ago I have talked to a profesor (Alfredo Coppa) at La Sapienza who knows George. Even better, his english is the best I had heard in Rome besides the tourists since I have been here. He has been a huge help in helping me to contact the right people to find the collection I wanted to look at. We were at it for over two hours in his office while his students were taking exams. However, as we were talking he mentioned a collection that he has in the nearby town of Tivoli. (about 30 km away which by the way has a beautiful villa called Villa Adriana) On monday he will be accompaning me to Tivoli to start working. I will be having more direct communication with Dr Mauro Rubini. It would have been today but it will be raining so most likely the people that we need to see in Tivoli will not come in to work. Wouldn't it be nice if I could base my going to class or work on whether I considered it good weather or not. Today there is a bus strike so many students will not be able to reach the school. Typically professors cancel classes. However, from what I could understand the student knew of the strike a week in advance which to me sounds a little fishy.

Two days ago, Wenjie got tickets to go to the Forum/Palatine/Colosseum. It was amazing! I was speechless. I think I could easily go back a couple of more times and find something I had missed from the time before. I tried to imagine as we walked along how it must have look a couple of thousand years ago. Not to mention we were walking on the roof and since the whole complex is still being excavated there is still much more that found buried beneath it. It was an anthropologists dream! By the time we arrived we could not get any audio tours and they make it very inconvient to locate. It cannot be efficient for business. This was the only thing that annoyed me I think of the whole day. My goal is that next time I go I will have to get one so I have a more in depth explanation of the place.

For all of you that have not heard of MBTs - look them up! The shoes are fabulous. They are based on the stride of the Masai people. They have saved my knees and my lower back the last few days. However, I have one complaint. The streets in Rome are not flat. I know that it is the city of the seven hills. But, I am constantly tripping over myself! I put my regular tennis shoes on just to see the difference and within a half hour my back was hurting so from now on I am going to wear the MBTs. They are getting dirty though. Rome is not the cleanest place I have ever seen. I think that in a lot of ways it still reminds me of Maracaibo. The condition of everything I mean. There are beautiful buildings ancient, old, and new (but still old) but they are covered in soot. You should look into the condition of Napoli at the moment aperantly they have not had garbage removal services working for some time and there are just piles of garbage lining the street due to bad politics. I do hope it gets corrected since I was planning on going there with a friend of mine and Said Saab later on. Also, I have been told that it is a damaging there image when typically the people are very nice and its a lovely place to see.

The only other thing I will say is... Italian guys do not understand the concept of NO but as long as you keep at it with a stern look they eventually go away.