The Everyday in Italy

Over the last couple days I have had quite a few new ‘everyday’ Italian experiences! Even the mundane things here, take on an interesting twist:

Completely out of clean socks and with our apartment's laundry machine broken, Melissa and I headed to a local laundromat to wash our clothes. Unlike the U.S. where you pay by the load, here you pay by the kg (as in weight). However they don’t actually weigh it... so it's more like washer size as if you had a certain weight of clothes. When we first went in we were so confused as to what to do and what it meant for 18kg, 11kg, 6kg etc! There were mountains of bags of clothes piled around the room and maybe 9 washers and 6 dryers. It was complicated figuring out when it was our turn vs. the attendant's turn for laundry that others had dropped off. Apparently its more common to leave laundry at a laundromat than do it yourself, but there were other American students also doing it themselves. Also it's very rare to have dryers, as most Italians hang their clothes outside the window to dry.

I (finally!) went for a run Wednesday morning along the Tiber River. Here you rarely see people out running- it’s just not part of the culture. However, there is a bike track along the river that people will run along. Due to the floods of the Tiber River, back in the early 1900s the city built up flood walls that completely separate the river from the street. Although completely separated, it is nice that once you go down the two flights of stairs, you can run the length of the city without stopping for cars.  As the river turns throughout the city, you can see the dome of the Vatican, the elaborately decorated bridges that span the river, and the majority of the skyline- definitely an improvement to any run back home!! I’d have to say that running here is a lot more enjoyable than back home because of all the inspirational sights along the way! 

On the left hand side the bike path is visible along the river's edge adjacent to the high river wall