Week One...

I can't really get myself excited to write blogs about how I'm feeling, so I've decided to include parts of a letter I wrote to a friend back home about how my first impressions of living in Rome. Needless to say, I was pretty excited when I wrote this after the first week. Passages have been edited for content...

"Rome is fantastic! If I believed in luck, I’d feel lucky to be here. The city is beautiful and the weather is great. During the day its occasionally warm enough to wear a t-shirt. They tell us that at this time last year it was freezing. Hopefully the weather only gets warmer. As for the city, every corner I turn reveals another amazing piece of architecture, sculpture or some ancient ruin. Sometimes when I’m in my apartment or the studio, I’ll walk past a window and have to stop and admire the views and I remember that I’m actually living here. The majority of my class work involves going to awesome places for hours and sketching, which is something I’d probably be doing anyway. For the most part, the people I’m with are great.
The food here is incredible, everything is fresh and even the food I make for myself turns out great. Most of the time anyway. There’s an open-air market literally right outside my front door every morning, where you can buy just about anything. I’ve been buying oranges and making my own juice, and there’s always fresh bread and meat and vegetables and spices and cheese and all kinds of other tasty stuff. I’m slowly learning how to cook, and I’m finding that even though I have no idea what I’m doing it’s pretty fun. Lots of nights my roommates and I, the ones I like anyway, end up hanging out around the table eating bread or fruit or cheese. I’m hoping with all these carbs I don’t get fat, but I started running with two other kids and I’ll probably end up in better shape when I come back home than I left in. Running down by the river, dodging 1000 year old potholes and stray dogs, is an event in itself and another one of those times when it really sinks in that I’m actually living here, and its really incredible."