Total Peanut Butter Consumption: 40%

Referring to a Costco sized jar of peanut butter that I brought along with me. I think I'm actually rationing it pretty well, thank you. After all it's now been a month since I left American soil. It's weird to actually think that!

It's been a while since my last entry here. Sorry for the dead air! But not a whole lot has happened. No interesting trips, etc. Last week and this week were spent with my nose buried in books and doing research for a presentation in my antitrust class. Pretty boring stuff. Over the weekend I didn't even leave the house. Practically everyone I know had gone out of town so there was really nothing much to do anyway, and it was F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G cold here (at least for an Arizona boy), so I holed up at the casa underneath the blankets. It was about 10 degrees... celsius, that is. It was getting down into the low 40s F at night though. I think my blood's been thickening up though, ever so slowly. And yesterday was cold AND rainy... so THIS is why people move to Arizona! Now I get it.

Where was everybody? Well one of my flatmates is from Verona, and she usually spends the weekends at home. My other flatmate was in Imola, a nearby city where her family lives, for a wedding and other stuff this weekend. One of my friends from class was in Paris visiting friends (sidenote - you can get flights on an Irish airline, Ryanair, for as low as $10 to some places in Europe. Cha-ching!). Another one of my friends from class went home to Seborga, a town in the North very close to the border of France - in fact he was showing me some pictures from his home, and from the balcony you can see Monte Carlo. He was also telling me about the international curiosity that is Seborga; for all intents and purposes, it is Italian, but most of the citizens claim to be of their own separate nationality. They have their own prince, coins, and even license plates. Founded 1000 years a go as a sovereign state, it seems that in the many geopolitical changes that occured in Northern Italy (between France, Austria, Italy, and the Roman Empire) Seborga was sort of lost in the shuffle. They make an interesting argument for independence: Italy (as we know it today, the Republic) was founded in 1946 from the Kingdom of Italy, itself founded in the 1860s, which was ruled by the House of Savoy, under which Seborga was a protectorate but expressly sovereign (granted in the middle ages by the Holy See). So when the King of Italy peaced out in 1946, the lands he ruled became Italy - but he didn't actually rule Seborga! Interesting stuff.

Yesterday was pretty notable. After we gave our presentation in class, a bunch of us went to have a drink. Our group was about half Italians, half internationals, so there was another fun session of dirty-expressions-in-Italian-that-you-need-to-know. Then after that I hung out with my roommates. There was a student fundraiser going on that one was helping to put on, so we all went. There was cheap booze and a live band playing American music. I am thoroughly convinced that my Italian improves as my alcohol consumption increases, and I think I was speaking pretty well last night. Today, however, was not so fun, as you can imagine.

So that's the bulk of what's happened in the last week+! Hopefully there will be some shenanigans this weekend to talk about.