Housemates and Erasmus students having dinner in my tiny apartment.

I miss my bike in North Carolina. It's name was Red Bean, and it took me everywhere super fast. Here in Italy, my bike is red, but I can't fly like I used to. On Thursday I was biking to my CILTA course when the bike broke. This had been coming for a long time, and I did not have the right tools with me so I left in in a piazza and headed to class with black oil all over my hands. Drat. So last night on the way to yet another gathering of Erasmus students, or exchange students from Europe, at the Piazza San Stefano I took a pair of pliers and fixed the thing. The pants guard broke off and was trailing on the ground, so I just yanked back some medal and pulled it off the pedal and now the bike runs. However, while I was repairing the bike two Italian students stopped by to ask me to uncork their bottle of champagne. I did so, in the process accidentally spilling lots of champagne on my bike, and proceeded to have a conversation with them in Italian. Both girls are taking the final exams for their archaeology majors here at the University of Bologna, and both were celebrating the completion of one test and gearing up to study for yet another. I finished the glass, said 'Ciao,' and proceeded to the party.

Making friends is very difficult when I do not have a common language with another person. Most of the time I feel like I make people laugh and am pretty happy, but with the Italians I have met on campus or many of the German Erasmus students who don't speak Italian well, there is a very large language barrier. If we could all speak Italian well we would be best friends already, but such is not the case. I took four semesters of Italian language courses at UNC, went to Italian club, talked in Italian to my friends, and have been living in Italy with Italian room mates for two weeks, and still I have lots of trouble getting out even the simplest phrases. I'm sure that it will go better, but by that time there will be lots of students I have met who could have been good friends but for the lack of a common language.

On the upside, my housemates have learned to live with and even make the best of my lack of language skills. I've taught them and they've taught me some pretty awesome phrases I won't mention on this blog, but I will mention my favorite. "Cazza" pronounced "kat-za," is the equivalent of crap or darn or whatever. It is really fun to say; try saying it right now in front of your computer or the next time you stub your toe. Cazza!

My language skill are often lacking in the supermarket or the small shops and cafes around Bologna as well. I want to talk to the baristas or the waiters, but sometimes I get raised eyebrows. This morning I went to buy bread at a place that I buy bread from very often. The store is to the right and then to the left, alla derecha and poi giro sinistra, and the bread is incredibly delicious. The two ladies that work behind the counter now see me as sort of a regular. I get the same delicious bread every time and just point at it. To cut it up and eat it, my housemates work very fast to break off a piece and stuff it in their mouths. We cut the bread like the cheese right on the table cloth and then shake the table cloth off afterwards on the balcony. The bread melts like butter in our mouths, and we tend to eat it with everything. While the store is very nice, it is also pretty cheap and I can get a large loaf of bread for 1 euro. The turnover rate for bread here is pretty fast, so I buy it every day.

I've been trying pretty hard to make Italian friends and not hang out with the exchange students, but many of them are actually pretty cool. While partying with them is fun, I've been making an effort to do other activities as well. Honestly, I'm getting pretty tired of going to Erasmus parties.

So on Thursday night I decided to introduce my room mates to some of the Erasmus students. My room mates are awesome. Their names are:

Marco: Marco works at the hospital as part of three required years of work after obtaining his degree from the University of Bologna. We went running the other day and he has this awesome way of going up the little hills in the nearby park where he breathes out really fast and he starts sprinting. Marco is from a small town of only 600 people and he has a very strong, but very cool sounding, dialect which sometimes makes it difficult for me to understand him.

Davide: Davide stays in the other bed in this room. He is a very nice and patient person and makes the effort to ask how my day went or what I've been doing so we can talk Italian. He plays guitar in a punk rock band called Distance, which I would never have guessed at first glance. Davide has a girlfriend in another city and so goes away pretty much every weekend to see her. This weekend, all three of my roomates have left to visit girlfriends or parents. Sigh.

Giulio: The crazy one of the group, Giulio cooks lunch most of the time and I do the dishes. All my house mates eat very fast, so fast that it is very difficult for me to keep up. At the moment Giulio is studying for an exam next week and has to read a great long paper in English when he knows none. He handles the bills and the technicalities of the apartment.

For dinner on Thursday I made some delicious lasagna. All of my room mates had reservations about my cooking beforehand, but afterwards they agreed that it was delicious. Marco's mom apparently makes lasagna that is much better, and I will probably get to try some soon. Cooking in the tiny kitchen of our apartment is a challenge. I had to make two different lasagnas so that they would fit in the oven. I also made an epic salad doused with salt and olive oil, and when people started to arrive we cracked open a couple bottles of wine and sat down to a 2 hour dinner. All my Erasmus friends had to talk in Italian so that their words could be understood by my housemates, and after several glasses of wine and helpings of lasagna I kicked back on the small brown couch in our kitchen for a while to watch the whole spectacle.

Afterwards I headed out with the Erasmus students to get some gelato and to go to another girl's apartment for a party. After that I headed to Corbo Maltese and danced the night away with four Germans. While at the bar I discovered that another exchange student from Austria used to teach dancing lessons, so hopefully I will gain that skill as well before I come back. That may be a language even more difficult than Italian.