Living in Italy
Monday, March 12, 2007
I have classes starting at 8:30am every day and amazingly, I'm not struggling to get up eventhough I still go to bed around midnight. Wonder if I can keep it up for the rest of the semester. Hehe. The classes here are more technical and some of them involved programming. I have only started installing the necessary development tools and have yet to get my hands dirty. The projects are due in the end of the semester so there's time for me to learn Java and OpenGL again.
It's very inconvenient to do shopping here as the shops are closed in the middle of the day for lunch (usually 3 hours) and then closed for the day at 6pm or 7pm. In addition to being closed on Sundays, the shops are also closed either on a Monday mornings or Wednesday evenings. It's a great place to work! Also, there are no department stores here so it's quite difficult to figure out where to buy stuff and things here are more expensive than Germany.
Food here is nice. Even at the Mensa, you get a complete Italian meal with bread, pasta or riso, meat or fish, salad, fruits or dessert, and water or coffee. After taking lunch at Mensa, I'm still full in the evening so I usually just have bread or fruits for dinner. I haven't been cooking much either. So far, I've only been making pasta and frying up some fish fingers and chicken nuggets at home. I also found instant risotto packets with various flavors that cooks in 15 minutes. There's only one small pan and 2 big pots in the kitchen and it's difficult to cook the stuff that I wanna make with those. I also feel like I need to cook fast since my flatmate would want to cook next. Had a cooking session with a couple of friends for Friday's dinner. My contribution was abc soup and stir-fried veg. Hehe got others who can cook the meat.
Since I don't have internet at home, I think I would be more productive at working with school stuff. Sometimes I would bring my laptop to school for the internet since there's wifi and stay in school till 8pm or until I feel hungry. Luckily the school lab is also open on weekends so if I need internet, I can go back to school. The bus runs every 20 minutes Mon to Sat or can also walk down the hill for about 20 minutes. At first I did thought of getting internet service but found out it's expensive to hook up the service on my own as it'll cost about 50€ a month for both phone and adsl. Without internet, only weekends would be boring if didn't go anywhere. I thought of getting books to read but the bookstores here don't carry English books. I have yet to check out whether it's possible to change the language of the DVDs here to the original English version, not the dubbed Italian version. If possible then can rent some DVDs to watch.
It's very inconvenient to do shopping here as the shops are closed in the middle of the day for lunch (usually 3 hours) and then closed for the day at 6pm or 7pm. In addition to being closed on Sundays, the shops are also closed either on a Monday mornings or Wednesday evenings. It's a great place to work! Also, there are no department stores here so it's quite difficult to figure out where to buy stuff and things here are more expensive than Germany.
Food here is nice. Even at the Mensa, you get a complete Italian meal with bread, pasta or riso, meat or fish, salad, fruits or dessert, and water or coffee. After taking lunch at Mensa, I'm still full in the evening so I usually just have bread or fruits for dinner. I haven't been cooking much either. So far, I've only been making pasta and frying up some fish fingers and chicken nuggets at home. I also found instant risotto packets with various flavors that cooks in 15 minutes. There's only one small pan and 2 big pots in the kitchen and it's difficult to cook the stuff that I wanna make with those. I also feel like I need to cook fast since my flatmate would want to cook next. Had a cooking session with a couple of friends for Friday's dinner. My contribution was abc soup and stir-fried veg. Hehe got others who can cook the meat.
Since I don't have internet at home, I think I would be more productive at working with school stuff. Sometimes I would bring my laptop to school for the internet since there's wifi and stay in school till 8pm or until I feel hungry. Luckily the school lab is also open on weekends so if I need internet, I can go back to school. The bus runs every 20 minutes Mon to Sat or can also walk down the hill for about 20 minutes. At first I did thought of getting internet service but found out it's expensive to hook up the service on my own as it'll cost about 50€ a month for both phone and adsl. Without internet, only weekends would be boring if didn't go anywhere. I thought of getting books to read but the bookstores here don't carry English books. I have yet to check out whether it's possible to change the language of the DVDs here to the original English version, not the dubbed Italian version. If possible then can rent some DVDs to watch.
