That's Bologna!: November 2009

Gentle readers, sorry again for the delay in this last update. This time around it was solely my own laziness that prevented me from writing sooner. Although we have had quite a bit of schoolwork to do lately, but no tests or anything terribly pressing.

For the last few weeks, our classes have been structured as one three-hour class on Tuesdays and two three-hour classes on Wednesday. I thought we might have a lot of extra time to ourselves with a structure like this but unfortunately there have been quite a lot of projects that we've been working on, so in these last couple weeks I've spent several entire days outside of classes doing work for that. And then when the weekend comes around, of course, we go out!

You may be wondering to yourself, 'Did Justin do anything for Thanksgiving this year? Surely the holiday doesn't exist in Italy'. Of course that observation is correct, but have no fear! Where there is a will, there's a way. Through a friend of mine at school I know another American girl who has been in Bologna for some time. Her brother was coming to visit for Thanksgiving, and they were putting on a big feast to celebrate and show her Italian friends how we do it in America! So they invited me too. She and her brother made a great big meal with two turkeys (they were smaller than ours), mashed potatos, stuffing, green beans, even macaroni and cheese! I brought a couple pumpkin pies (I've gotten quite good at making them!) and we had ourselves a grand ol' time. The Italians really liked all the food, and on top of it all, we even introduced them to beer pong! It was so surreal to be eating the traditional American foods and playing our new national sport, all the while being 6000 miles from home. But thanks to Skype I was able to see and talk to all my lovely family back home. It was tough being away from everyone, this year especially, but I am definitely thankful that I've so quickly found a ton of nice people to spend time with here.

Last weekend was fun. It was the birthday of a girl in our class, so we all got together and celebrated. There was a big annual chocolate festival in the main square, so we all chipped in and bought a bottle of chocolate rum. Yes, it was awesome, you don't even need to ask. So we drank that, went out to a couple bars, and stayed out pretty much all night (the clubs don't close until 5am here). Some pics of the night:

The Sunday after that was nice too. Basketball is HUGE in Bologna, and they show NBA games from time-to-time on some satellite channels, so one of my friends from class invited me over to watch the Knicks-Celtics game. It was a nice little slice of home!

This weekend we had a good time again, of course! No special celebrations, but is that really necessary anyway? No, it's not! So we just met up on Friday and Saturday nights to have a good time. Hopefully I will have some pictures of those nights and from Thanksgiving too, but we'll have to wait and see for now.

Hope everyone out there had a happy Thanksgiving!

It was getting hard to scoop out the peanut butter with the cookies I buy here 'cuz the peanut butter is now way down in the bottom of the jar; so, I finally broke down and bought a big jar of Nutella. We'll see how long THAT lasts... (for those who don't know the greatness that is Nutella, it's kinda like peanut butter made with hazelnuts, but it's sweet, AND chocolate-y. Yeah, game over. PS - you can buy it at most big grocery stores in the US. Try it on strawberries!)

So it's been more than two weeks since I updated! Sorry for the delay gentle readers, but the in-between time has been a mix of nothing much to talk about and massive amounts of schoolwork.

Backing up to Halloween, I didn't really do much to speak of. They DO celebrate Halloween here in Italy, but not like we do. It's really only been in the last few years that it's become popular, and pretty much just with the university-age crowd. Kids don't go around trick or treating, which is a shame! But students get together, dress up, have parties and things like that. There were a couple parties I was invited to but I didn't really have much of an urge to try and find a costume at the last minute. Plus I was wanting to make a pumpkin pie, so I did that instead! I had found a nice recipe online (http://www.pickyourown.org/pumpkinpie.php) for making it from scratch (yes, from scratch. It's next to impossible to find a can of Libby's pumpkin pie filling here!). Although carving pumpkins are readily available here, I came to find out that the pumpkin pie we eat in the US doesn't come from carving pumpkins in the first place! They have all different kinds of squashes/gourdes at the markets here, and I found one that had the perfect taste and already came pre-cooked from the market, which made the process that much easier. Cinnamon, clover, and nutmeg are all readily available here; the only thing I was missing from the recipe was allspice, which supposedly tastes like a mix of cinnamon, clover, and nutmeg.... so I just put more of those things in. It came out tasting great! Trying to figure out the right amounts of stuff to put in was a hassle because of the english-metric conversions. And I couldn't find any evaporated milk so I just bought some milk and evaporated it myself over the stove. The only thing I'll change for the next time I make it will be to use less eggs; I had to reduce the amount of the recipe because I didn't have enough pumpkin for 3 cups, buuuuut I forgot to reduce the number of eggs in the recipe and it came out a little like a pumpkin souffle. But the taste was right on! I may try making another pie tomorrow.

The week following Halloween, I had two final exams. Our classes are mainly on the quarter system, so courses run about a month then have an exam. The exams were in Competition Policy (aka Antitrust) on Tuesday and International Trade on Friday - both difficult subjects. So needless to say, everyone from class including myself were basically holed up at home for the week with our noses in our books. I was really looking forward to the weekend after the tests to finally let off some steam, but of course I began getting sick on Friday so I ended up staying in bed literally the entire weekend. Thankfully, it was just a head cold and not the swine flu, and I feel much better already. On the plus side, virtually every MST3k episode is available on Google Video, so I watched a bunch of those while I was in bed! Laughter is the best medicine, after all. Ernest Scared Stupid is on Youtube, so I watched that as a late Halloween celebration too! It's just not Halloween without it.

I was looking forward to this week being a bit more relaxed, with the new classes and all, but that was not the case. On Tuesday our Customer Value Management teacher announced that we had the option of taking either the final exam in December, OR we could do a presentation/report on a case study instead - with the presentation portion being due that Friday (ie yesterday). Of course no one wanted to do the test, but unfortunately that left little time to prepare for the presentation. So between that and my B2B Marketing class, I spent two straight days working on school stuff from 9am to midnight/1am-ish. So much for relaxing. But everything went well and the weekend finally arrived.

Friday night one of the students from our class was having a graduation celebration (like I explained in a previous post, Italian students can begin their post-graduate studies if they are finishing their undergraduate degree in the Fall term). It was at a community-center type place with a bar and a dancehall, and pretty much everyone from class went. Drinks were free and unsurprisingly we had a lot of fun!

Today I had wanted to go to Rome. A friend from back home that I know through ASU's Italian Club was visiting, and I intended to go hang out for the day. But it turns out train tickets to Rome from here are actually pretty expensive (about $100 round trip). That wouldn't be too bad in itself because I had also planned on seeing a bunch of things in Rome that I hadn't got to in my previous trips there; but it also turns out that the train ride is about 4 hours long, so the first train i could take didn't arrive in Rome til 2:30pm, and if I wanted to take the cheap train back I would have to leave at 10pm, or else get a hotel room for the night. So, I decided to wait for another time to go to Rome when I can get the most out of it. That ended up being ok because I definitely needed the sleep today after getting home late last night from the party!

I've got another test coming up this week, on Monday. It's for my Financial/Management Accounting class, and yes, I am sure it will be as much fun as it sounds. But at least it is early in the week, and hopefully the rest of the week will be much more relaxing (then again, that's what I said last week).

I've been asked a lot for photos of my new friends here, and some have finally become available, so please enjoy!

From last night's shenanigans: