And there is heat ... plus the oven works!

I guess I'm just really into blogging now?

I wanted to tell you all some more details about my day-to-day life that seem to be coming together nicely. At first, everything in my apartment was an adjustment - I didn't have sheets the first night, I didn't buy a comforter for a couple of days, my roommates are much older than me, etc. I think it all started turning around with the heat last week.

Finalemente! We each strangely have our own toilet paper and so mine is kept on the heater in the bathroom ... well last week I noticed that my toilet paper was warm because the heat was turned on, whoooeeee! I actually learned this while abroad before: In Italy, the comune or city decides when to turn on the heat for the whole city and the lucky decision day was October 15th. This meant that they couldn't turn the heat on until the 15th and they would decide whether or not it was cold enough or whether they would wait. We had nice weather basically until last week when it turned towards the cold so the heat was a good call, Brescia.

About the same time I realized how wonderful it is having Italian roommates with whom I can speak! Sometimes, I do zone out - but especially the past week and weekend, I have really been present in all conversations and have learned a lot. At first, I was really taken off by Giovanna from Caserta [near Naples] because she partially speaks in dialect cutting off the last two syllables of every word - imag tryi liste to eng lik thi or imagine trying to listen to English like this! - it was difficult. Now, not only do I understand more the dialect that she speaks, but I also know a little bit more about her and so I can understand better what types of things she might say ... capisce? [or her way of saying it capi?]

In the end, I feel more like one of my roommates than the foreigner living with them and now we even have new jokes of which I'm a part. Plus, I finally fixed the mystery of our dysfunctional oven! My first night here, Daniella tried to cook fish in the oven and it didn't get hot enough. Since then I have only heated up goods ... and not even this always turned out well. One dial controls the temperature and we would set the oven to the max of 220 degrees Celsius and it was never hot enough, yet the light would go off saying the oven was pre-heated. Tonight, I wanted to eat frozen stuffed olives from the region of Ascoli Piceno [ahem our name]. So I set it on max and waited a while - not hot. I really wanted to eat these olives from the oven. So I imagined the dial put on backwards or opposite and set the oven to 60 degrees ... this way the non-marked side of the dial was really at the max of 220 degrees and voila! The mystery of the oven solved: the dial must have fallen off and someone put it back on wrong!

Now when I stop at my bread shop in the center and wait in line with my number to buy bread for half off after 6:30 pm  ... I know that I can buy more to freeze and put it in a functioning oven to heat up :)