"It's the Italian way"

Whew, so it's the end of day 2! I woke up this morning under the mosquito net that I set up over my bed and while THAT is going to get some taking used to, I woke up mosquito bite free. I wish I could say I'm still in that condition but it's my own fault since I didn't put any bug spray on after my last shower. Anyways, we woke up this morning and went straight to the grocery store since we clearly can't afford to be eating every single meal out for the next month. We ran into some girls that are staying at the house too and were on the back to the house so they warned us about the grocers, but I'll get to that in a minute.

The grocery was store was really big apparently, by Italian standards at least. Glenn, Russ, Jill and I pretty much bought every sandwich meat, cheese, and handmade pasta they sold. At first I was impressed by the plastic gloves that people wore when they were picking out fruit, it makes sense to wear gloves when you're touching something that someone is about to eat, but then when I watched them touch 20 other things with the same glove I realized alright well that's useless!

So, like I said, the girls we know warned us... Italian grocers are very unhappy people. Jill bought her groceries first and handed the guy a 20, the grocer started yelling something at her in Italian, angrily tapping the price on the cash register indicating that he wanted the 25 cents worth of coins from her. Jill of course searched her wallet but her smallest coin was 2 Euro so finally he let out an excessive sigh before giving her change back. I knew he was going to be pissed at me because when I changed my money at the airport I got a ton of 50s and I had every intention of making some change at the grocery store (rather than when I bought a 2 Euro gelato!) so yeah, long story short homeboy was pissed as hell at me for giving him a large bill and like any good American would do, I just shrugged my shoulders.

For my mom: An observation we made during our journey back to the house was that there are a whole lot of really mangy dogs here, none of which are on leashes. They're definitely owned by someone sitting 100 yards away and the dogs have no desire to be pet by anyone (not that I or anyone else would try to since they look pretty gross) but the dogs are really into weaving in and out of your legs as you're trying to walk! Also, they pee on every single trash bag on the street. So garbage-man is job #2 that seems pretty miserable in Italy.

We came back to the house and made some really delicious lunch (I did a prosciutto and formaggio sandwich) and hung out to cool off as much as you can in an un-airconditioned house. Another girl had just arrived so Jill, Russ, and I took her back to Bar Accademia where went went to lunch yesterday so she could eat and we could all get some much needed coffee.

this was the best cappucino I've ever had.

After that we headed over to the Rialto bridge and market, going down a million side streets/alleys etc. along the way the way.

random side canal that I thought was pretty

This is the Rialto bridge, built in 15somethingsomething. Yes, it's very old. And also very packed on Sundays apparently.

the view from the bridge

The Rialto market. There's also a fresh fruit market but we couldn't find it and heard later on that it's closed on Sundays. We walked past a million little shops, 90% of them being Murano glass shops and the other 10% were high-end stores like Prada, Burberry, Sisley, Versace etc etc

I thought this was the prettiest scene between the canal, the gondola, and the adorable dress shop window. I tried to make a mental of picture of it, and then was like no I need to take an actual picture right now.

So we walked around for hours before the heat got to us and we realized we really should get back to the house to do some homework. I think we were all a little freaked out by how much work was assigned for tomorrow until we spoke to the Professors and they pretty much told us that they realized that they gave us too much work so we should go again and "skim, at best" and split up the homework assignments between us! Yay summer school! So yes, like I was saying, walking around here, it's extremely easy to get lost on all the side streets but after 3 minutes of just picking left or right you inevitably see a sign like this and it's like instant GPS.

So we got back, did some work, and had a group meeting for the house. The meeting was actually fun because Prof. Virgil provided us all with some Proseco, which is a pre-dinner sparkling white wine I guess, and basically the two professors here let us know that they are as clueless about Venice as we are, and that we really have no need to stress over class or class preparation for that matter, which is pretty awesome for two law school professors. They are extremely "whatever" about everything and like the title of this blog says, not knowing what is going on is perfectly okay because, "It's the Italian way".

After the meeting Jill, Russ, and I made dinner... tortellini stuffed with prosciutto. Yes, prosciutto is making an appearance in every meal I eat. It was great. Like... so so good. We were talking about how just about everything is better here, food wise at least. We haven't eaten or drank anything we haven't loved thus far. We ate upstairs on what I guess we would call the terrace. It shared one wall with the Guggenheim, and the other with the Grande Canal, so we ate to the sounds of the water splashing against the building, boats passing, accordion playing, and gondoliers singing. We were loving life in a nutshell.

Two bottles of wine, and 5 mosquito bites later, it's bedtime!

Ciao!!!!

P.S. for my family, who seems very very interested: I had two flavors of gelato today, nocciola (hazelnut) and pistachio

xoxo