miscellaneous exploits in expatriatism

For the most part, I lucked out on the housing front. Namely, I had an apartment found for me without having to do absolutely anything. Add to that the fact that I essentially live in Bologna's Adams Morgan. It feels shockingly like home, from the hints of late night prostitution outside my window, to the drunk Italian kids drag racing through the streets.

Considering my flights over here were canceled, delayed, and delayed again, I was prepared to be in a terrible situation for housing. SAIS doesn't assign housing, but they work relatively closely with a man named Salvatore who owns a vast assortment of Bolognese apartments. He has red wired rimmed glasses, rarely smiles and generally walks around as if someone just made a particularly crass your mom joke. When you arrive in Bologna, you are supposed to immediately go to the center and sign up for a housing tour. At your assigned time, they load you up in a big white van and drive you around until you find an acceptable apartment.

This means two things: 1. Competition is fierce amongst students to get on an early housing tour. There have been accusations of alleged sabotage and one incident of intentional food poisoning.* 2. There are also some very bizarre pairings of apartment-mates, since people tend to end up living with someone on their tour, if only because they both stubbornly want the same apartment.

However, I was lucky enough to meet two nice girls in Washington DC who managed to arrive in Bologna two whole days before me. They found a nice three bedroom apartment in the SAIS "ghetto" (to be explained soon), and were lovely enough to offer me the third bedroom. They both warned me that they had taken the two larger bedrooms as part of a finders fee, but my room is still larger than my one in DC. There are nice tall windows and hardwood floors and I broke out my very refined artistic eye to pick out some colorful posters from a nearby shop. The shop makes me happy because it could be in any college town in the world, lots of old posters of Audrey Hepburn movies and the standard collection of Eschers and Van Goghs. All insanely overpriced and the colors a little off. Just right.

Anyway, my room is nice and cozy and it has somehow turned into our second living room, despite our actual living room being about five feet away. My roommates have taken to hanging out with me in there, trading stories about the day and watching old episodes of Arrested Development. (That picture up there is the night of our first party. Yes, we have already thrown a party. No, there weren't jello shots. Kristin is on the left, Karen is on the right.)

The building itself is referred to as the SAIS "ghetto", since the building of 10 apartments is 80% SAIS. There is a very nice Peruvian family on the first floor who swear they find us all charming, and a local company owns an apartment on the top floor, though we have never seen anyone go in or out. So that leaves about 24 of us spread throughout the other 8 apartments. The building has a large courtyard in the middle, and all of us have balconies overlooking the courtyard (which is boring, concrete, and under construction). This does mean there tends to be a lot of yelling from one apartment to another, and some of the guys are trying to work out the logistics of a 20 foot beer funnel. You can see what everyone is up to from your balcony and hear all sorts of gossipy things when people forget to shut their windows. Basically, it is like the Henle fishbowl all over again. People tend to wander in and out at all hours, which is nice but definitely something to get used to. At least once or twice I've started cooking a late night dinner and before I know it there are about 8 people waiting to be fed. Good practice for the cook off. (Over there we have our balcony, overlooking our neighbor's apartments. There are no Home Depots in Bologna, so I'm not quite sure where they will find long enough tubing for that funnel, but they are resourceful and dedicated young men.)

My neighborhood itself is really so similar to my one in DC. Most of Bologna is closed off to cars but we are on one of the few busy streets in the city center. The lull of ambulance sirens and speeding police cars is mostly comforting, after three years of getting used to similar noises at home. Also just like DC, there is a supermarket in the basement floor of our building (which is getting its own post shortly), a pharmacy across the street, and six late night pizza places on our block. (None of which, have their own disco ball a la Jumbo Slice) We are in the university district, so there's an abundance of bars (including our favorite pirate bar), clubs, and restaurants also nearby. We even found a decent Chinese place about three blocks away, and a sketchy park is just up the street.

So all in all, I'm definitely not suffering, and my life in Bologna is nowhere near as different from my life in DC as I was expecting. Which is a good thing. For now.

*No, I'm being silly. That's false. Mostly.