Devotissimo suo, Sarah: Pigeon Love

Sometimes I feel like my life here is just a constant series of unfortunate events. We continually make mistakes and often find ourselves being "those Americans." We make grand efforts to speak in Italian, but usually I find myself resorting to slow English, mixed with a few "Si, si's!, questo's, and dov'es, and hand gestures. Then I am reminded that I am in Italy, and if my daily struggles consist of figuring out the trains, deciding between pizza or pasta, and which country or city I would like to visit next, then I'm doing pretty alright.

Nonetheless, I figure some of you may enjoy reading about a few of my mishaps that make life so interesting:

Since I was completely mistaken about what the weather would be like here, (remember in the beginning when I was ranting and raving about how it was practically t-shirt weather...well I must have adjusted too quickly mixed with a slight temperature drop) and it is just freezing. So I bought a warmer jacket. A few days after I bought this jacket the buttons just started to pop off (maybe too much pasta, let's hope that's not the case..poor quality I swear!) Friday I lost the final button to keep the jacket shut. So now I just walk around with an open jacket. Sometimes I'll belt the thing but then it just looks a little ridiculous.

I went out to a small bar in Sesto the other night with a few friends and ordered a beer (this is an exciting occasion since usually we have wine with everything..seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if Italians had it for breakfast) Anyhow, as I'm drinking the beer out of what appears to be a very large wine glass, I must have done something, because at this point I have a chunk of glass in my mouth and a huge bite out of the wine glass. It was just a very strange occurrence. Luckily, no beer was spilt...or blood shed. But mostly, no beer was spilt.

Italian class is just a struggle in general. But to top it all off, my professor told me not to ask questions. I think she was half kidding, but then the day before she said this to me she told a fellow classmate she was going to kill him. So I'm not really sure...

I hope that was sufficiently entertaining for you. Now I can briefly update you on what else is going on here:

On Friday eight of us took a day trip to two small towns, Arezzo and Cortona. They were so beautiful. We really didn't do any site-seeing, besides one church we went to in Arezzo and walking by the Duomo. It was just a day of relaxing and hanging out in these fantastic Italian towns. Arezzo is where some of La Vita E Bella (Life is Beautiful) was filmed and Cortona is where Under the Tuscan Sun was filmed (cue ooh's and ah's).

In Arezzo besides the minimal site seeing we did, most of our time was spent hanging out in a park. One of my fellow travelers, Grace (she's from Mississippi, or as she says it's pronounced...Missssippi. She reminds me of my Georgia days) is an avid rapper. Colt 45? She knows the entire thing. In addition to every Disney song ever created. This means an great portion of the day was spent in song. And doing the Single Ladies dance in the middle of what appeared to be a fighting ring. Oh! And the most exciting part of the day (where the title of this blog comes from) was witnessing a full courtship of two pigeons. In the beginning we were narrating a love story between these two foul birds, then low and behold, we were correct! The started kissing? Beaking? Whatever. And finally did the deed (keeping this as PG rated as possible). Okay, that really wasn't the most exciting part of my day, you would think I lead a boring life here in Italy, which really is quite the contrary. But it was fascinating.

Then we took a 20 minute train to Cortona. When we arrived there, we realized it was nap time for all of the Italians. Those of you who don't know, Italians check out of life from approximately 12-4. This makes things somewhat difficult. I'm not sure actually when any Italians work, since things are always closed. Every other Thursday of every third month? Closed. Mondays? Who wants to work anyway! This may be a slight exaggeration, but really, things just always seem to be locked up. So anyway, we arrive at the train station and are confronted with a huge mountain. Since we are all mountain climbers back home, a brief thought was that we could climb to the top where the city of Cortona lies. This was false. We realized this soon enough and found a bus that would bring us to the top. After weaving around the mountain for ten minutes and feeling slightly nauseous, we were there. It was stunning. So we stood entranced by the view for a solid fifteen minutes, then realized we were cold, found a wine bar and had a fantastic meal. After eating, we walked around for a bit. We started to walk down a hill, but after realizing that we would have to walk back up it, we decided against walking to the end of the road and turned right back around to avoid any sort of additional exercise.

So that pretty much sums up Arezzo and Cortona. Beautiful. Relaxing. A wonderful day spent with some really great people.

Saturday I slept a majority of the day and I refuse to feel guilty about it. And I discovered a place with Nutella gelato. I know it sounds like all I do is eat here, and actually that's fairly accurate, but I promise not to come home a giant blob. We walk everywhere! And occasionally, I go on runs. Shocking since it takes serious motivation for me to even go running at home.

Today I have plans of being very productive (I am writing a blog afterall), so we will see how that turns out. It's a bit rainy and cold (as it has been for a couple days now) but I intend to go to the vintage market and the Uffizzi in Flotown. And of course catch up on homework! (For you mom and dad) So...off to get things done! But of course, a few pictures first.