The First Full Day

This morning we got up early to find a place to eat breakfast before our orientation. I’m really excited about the place that we found because it’s a really cute café two seconds outside our door that has croissants and other breakfast pastries. I had a small chocolate filled croissant that was unbelievably delicious for all of .45 cents!

We had a short orientation this morning at ten at the Pantheon Institute office. Its crazy that you look out the windows and the Pantheon is literally right there! Some of our elective and Italian classes will be held in that location.

Afterwards some of us headed to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Since an early dinner here is 8 pm, lunches are a lot heavier. It was definitely an entertaining first experience at really being surrounded by Italians and ordering in Italian (luckily the English translation was next to all of the entrees). Many of the other places we have gone, there are a ton of tourists, but at the restaurant we were the only ones speaking English. Its funny how often we question the way we are custom to doing things and if it is the same in Italy- are we supposed to use our hands in a nice pizzeria to eat pizza or is that rude? Do we tip? Do we have to tell them to stop bringing bread? Does wine just come in liters or can we get it by the glass? Eventually we will learn through trial and error, but it’s interesting how even the simplest things we feel the need to question!

The little 'hole in the wall' restaurant that was so delicious!

Going to the grocery store today was also quite an experience! You would think that most things like milk would be easy to buy- a white liquid in a bottle. You forget that there are so many options like protein milk, one percent, two percent (which is not how they list it), pasteurized, and non-pasteurized! Having a dictionary was just too cumbersome because you literally would have to look up a word per option, so it wasn’t worth it. We figured that we would just try items and see whether we would get it again or not!