Post-Turkey Ramblings

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!