Today the sky has steadily dumped rain on the streets and red roofs of Bologna. This morning I met with a professor who studies floods in Italy and with his master's students, and the whole way to the building I had to weave carefully in and out of traffic on my bicycle with an umbrella over my head. Honestly, when I came here I thought that the weather would be Mediterranean fresh all year, buuut I was wrong.

While the rain does put my transportation prospects in a questionable state of safety and reliability, it does help keep me inside and studying. I have finally accomplished my goal of finding two science classes whose credits I can transfer to UNC to finish my Environmental Science degree as well as two arts/humanities classes which will allow me to explore more fully the culture of this country. Although I had to explore and attend several classes which turned out to be no good, all of my professors now are very helpful and willing to work with me, whether I am one of several exchange students as in my Dante class or whether I am the only exchange student, as in all the other classes. Finding courses to take has been the most difficult part of my year so far, and now it is over and I can breath again.

Last weekend I took off for my room mate Marco's house in a small town called Monte Cerignone, which is close to Urbino near the coast southeast of Bologna. The days I was there we spent at least half of them in the kitchen. I ate amazing food cooked by his mother with names I can't really pronounce, but I will try to relate some of them to you right now. The first night I was there we had tripa, which is basically cow stomach. It smells awful but tastes wonderful, and one side of the strands of stomach has these cilia-like brushes with a slightly chewy squid-like texture. I mopped this up with bread that was either from a local bakery or had been baked by Marco's mom.

Basically all the food I ate last weekend came from close to Marco's house. Unlike in the United States, where there are many environmental groups pushing for people to eat local, in Monte Cerignone it was completely normal. Much of the food was even scavenged from the surrounding hillsides! It reminded me of the farmer's market in Seattle this summer where people would sell greens they had 'gathered' from the woods at very great cost, but here it was the usual. Marco's mom was in the kitchen probably 70-80 percent of the day, either cleaning up or cooking or eating.

The first morning I had a bowl full of hot milk with coffee poured into it and a heap of locally made lemon biscotti which I broke and plopped in the milk and then scooped up with a spoon. After breakfast Marco began to give me a tour (un giro) of his amazing country. We started with a trip to La Repubblica di San Marino, which like Rome is an independent state with its own citizens. We somehow found a place to park and walked up to this castle on the top of the hill. To get to the castle, we had to pass shop after shop selling all kinds of tourist goods to the groups of visitors in the cobbled alley ways. We made it to the top of the hill near the castle, and I could see the country stretch out like a carpet all the way to the Adriatic Sea. A little bit of rain came down but it was clear enough to make out monuments and towers in the towns lining the coast. One of those swivelling telescopes allowed me to figure out which towns they were, and I could see all the way to Rimini and the bars and discos which line the sandy shore.

We headed back down the hill a different way and Marco drove us back to his house. Like all other Italians, he drives fast and kind of crazy, but everyone was driving like that so it was okay. Often I think people are insane in this country when they have completely normal conversations while swerving in and out of oncoming traffic, but when everybody does it I would have to call it normal. Back at his house, we had passatelli with very densely packed heavy whole grain bread (pane integrali). Passatelli is amazing and very easy to make with the right ingredients. More on this later.

Marco's house is more of a tiny villa placed tightly next to other flats on a steep hillside. We had to park by a storage shed where Marco's dog stays, cross a bridge over a stream that looked like it had seen better days (like, 2000 years ago), and walked up a steep cobbled street past doors of neighbors all of whom Marco knew. Monte Cerignone only has a population of 600 people, and they all seem to know each other and to wave or smile.

After lunch we headed to Urbino so that I could see the Palazzo Ducale (http://www.palazzoducaleurbino.it/). All of the streets and alleys reminded me of Bologna except that they were all steeper and more narrow. The palazzo had a large collection of paintings from the 15th century when Duke Federico da Montefeltro brought Urbino to its greatest time of artistic growth in the Renaissance. My favorite painting was the ideal city (la citta ideale), a beautiful symmetric depiction of a piazza devoid of people.

Saturday night I went out on the town with Marco and his friends, all of which have lived in this small town their whole lives. We started off getting in a van out of the cold night and drinking plastic cups of beer in the back while the driver wound up and down hill to another nearby tiny town. I got to meet Marco's friend Fabbio ('Oh yeah!') and we had a two hour long dinner with some weird rice dish and pasta and wine under a heated outdoor tent at a table with 50 people. Afterwards we walked through throngs of Italians while Marco and his friends called out to people they knew. At the end I was very tired and happy to go back to my cold room in Marco's house and get under the layers of warm sheets.

On Sunday I went to a soccer game between Monte Cerignone and another small town. Marco expressed his disgust for both teams and then told me he was definitly going to see the game. It was cold, and rainy, and although the teams were rivals there was very good sportsmanship. There were less spectators than players, but when Marco's team lost at the end of the game (Porcha Troia) and after every goal there was an incredible celebration. By incredible, I mean that the players came from off the field to tackle the player who scored, and at the end there was a definite mosh pit. Most of the time I was silent and did my best to understand what Marco's friends were talking about, but it was very hard because they spoke so fast. I learned how to say bad words in Italian the right way, which is important.

The train ride back was long, but I got a lot of reading done for my Dante course and got to see the sunset (tramonto). Last night, as I have done every two weeks, I made another dinner for my housemates and friends, and this time I made passatelli! The recipe, like many others for Italian dishes, is very simple in preparation, but the key was getting the right ingredients. I had to have a special kind of crumbled bread from Marco's town to put in the batter or it would not have come out correct. I put this together with eggs and a heap of grated parmesan cheese, and rolled it all up together on my kitchen table, which we have to use for a cutting board sometimes, in front of all my friends. It was like one of those Chinese restaurants where the food is made right in front of you! After this I put the dough through a ricer, which makes it into a pasta-ish shape, and then boiled it in broth for three minutes. It was delicious, I did good.

We talked last night and drank wine and beer and ate cheese, bread, and grapes until after midnight, then Marco and I waved goodbye to a group of very nice German girls I have met and made jokes while we cleaned up our devastated table. Yesterday, before I made the dinner, I had to make a rather miserable trip to Florence (waking at 5:30 AM after going to bed at 1) to Florence to get a letter for fingerprints. The fingerprints are part of my application to the Peace Corps, and while it was very easy for me to get them in the United States it has been quite difficult to obtain them here in Italy. But, like all other plans, they will come with time.

It is still cold and rainy outside on this Friday night, so I think I will stay home and read Dante and wake up early to go back and see the Uffizi in Florence tomorrow. My Italian is coming along: I can read a paragraph straight through and get the idea without having to read it again. But with matters like this where a task depends on me I am not a very patient person, and I wish I had studied Italian more hard core in the United States. Now I have to take a semester of French for the Peace Corps, which I had kind of wanted to do. I leave you with a phrase I already know in French but continue to mispronounce to my friends, and which I think holds for my state at this point in my Italy adventure: C'est la vie.