Sono Una Studentessa

The strangest realization has come over me in the past few days: I'm in fact at school. I had been so worked up over being in a foreign country and adjusting to that and missing my Brown life, that it sort of slipped my mind that my primary role of student was still intact.

I have been logging some impressive hours the last few days with my Italian homework. I'm not currently taking official University classes just yet; rather, two courses taught by Brown-in-Bologna faculty that are meant to prepare us for those real classes in a month. I have an intensive language class that meets from 1-3 on M, T, W, and Th and a Contemporary Italian History Course that meets from 10 - 12 on M, W, F. I know it doesn't sound like that much, but let's remember that everything is in Italian. I have to focus so hard in my history class to listen to and understand my professor's lecture. Then I have to be engaging and clever in my discussion-based language class. It's not as easy as I'd thought.

Thankfully, I don't seem to be the only one who has been taken aback by the workload. My housemates and classmates all seem to be spending their nights (and early mornings) with their textbooks. Hopefully we can all get a little bit of a break this weekend when we take a group trip to Ravenna. It's a city east of Bologna and it is on the beach, so the prospect of a relaxing day on the Adriatic Sea is inspiring me to be a good student and finish my work.

Also, I've decided that from now on, with each post will come a new Italian vocabulary word that I've learned recently. Today's is... gonfiare. It's a verb that means "to inflate." I learned it from my italian roommate when I was telling him that I had brought a rugby ball with me, but I needed to inflate it.