Move In Day

Move in day is always an interesting day. There is always this awkward shuffle type thing that happens when you meet a roommate for the first time and you are moving in to the housing. It its like an attempted show of power to see who will get what room, who gets what shelf in the fridge, where the heat will be set at... all of this is very important and seems quite highly correlated with your enjoyment (or saddness) in the living place. All of this is intense and stressful even before you add in small factors like foreign countries and things of that nature. When today started, I simply wanted to move in, meet my roommate and see how the next four months was going to play out.

 

The view this morning from out our hotel room

I got up pretty early this morning. I dunno if it was the time change or what but i could not get any decent sleep last night. I expected the hotel we are staying at (the Hotel Roma Rocca Cavour) to be fairly loud because, as you will be able to see in a few moments, the main train station in Tornio is just down the road, within a minute walking. So i woke up at about 430 or 5 and tried to get back to sleep until about 6 or 7 when i finally got up and bathed, starting my day. The Hotel is fairly nice with the room being very tall. Our room looks out on Via Roma, which is one of the major roads in Torino. I find it funny that its a major road because of the shopping that can be found on it and the Piazzas that sit upon it, not because of its usefulness a road. Im going to have to take some time and get good pictures of the road because its a very cool road. the 'sidewalk' is marble and is covered, the two piazzas that sit on it are very cool (one is the 'living room' of torino, the other has the Savoy residence). Me and Chris, my roommate for the night, went down to the first floor for break fast where we met up with more USAC people and ate our faces off. Like literally, we made the most out of that free meal. I had 3 plates of food, a bowl of cereal and two bowls of fruit and wasnt even close to eating the most at my table. Another kid next to me had like 5 or 6 plates of food, put Nutella (which is made in torino) on everything from bread to eggs to peaches... kinda crazy... it was a fun breakfast though. after an hour and a half of eating fresh fruit, cereal, eggs and whatever else was there that i dont know what it was, we came back to our hotel room to relax a little bit before out housing meeting at 10.45 where we will be taken, by bus, to our homes.

Our tall room with two beds inches apart

Porta Nuova in Torino from the Hotel Room

Even now I still find the housing set up a touch strange but very cool. When we arrived at the hotel, we got a packet that had everything from class schedules for the semester (which change from week to week so we literally have a huge packet with each week lined out. Looking at the Schedule, it seems like time will fly by and before you know it, ill be headed home). But when we arrive, here is what i knew/had heard about the housing:

1. there are three parts of town, downtown, midtown, and uptown/school

• The downtown part of town is the happening place but it also the oldest part of town. apartments here may be refurbished if you are lucky but tend to be the smallest and have the fewest accommodations
• Uptown/school tends to be the nicer/newer part of town but is the farthest away from the downtown area. apartments tend to be newer and more spacious.
• Midtown its a mix and match of the downtown and uptown areas. some of it can be kind of shady but isn't a terrible part of Torino.

   2. Apartments vary... greatly

• some people have 3 roommates and two rooms, a single and a triple.
• some people get a couch
• some people get internet
• Others dont
• Apartments can be over 10 stories high
• Some apartments have Elevators, most dont

So all this makes for a quite bit of stress before you even add in a roommate. So at 10.45 I went down to the meeting knowing that i was in the uptown/school group and wouldn't leave until 1.30 pm so i was in no rush.


The meeting was just general safety type things- dont get super drunk then try to walk home all by your self and fight whoever you pass by, or dont meet someone in a club then take them home with you because of std's or they may be more interested in the material things lying around your house that they can steal on their way out type thing (not really my cup of tea, and i hope the same can be said for my roommate)It was pretty much what you would expect out of a meeting like this. I found out that my apartment was in the School/Uptown district which wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for but it could have been much worse.

So after the meeting concluded, I got to go back up to the hotel room while Chris went off to his apartment in midtown. This is when I got to get a good start on this blog. Little did I know it was likely that last time I’d get to work on the blog until today (when its actually getting posted). It was a nice moment to relax a little after running around for the last few days.

After about an hour of enjoying the internet, I went down stairs and finally met my roommate. My roommate is from New jersey and he got caught up in the recent east coast snow storms and couldn’t make it out on the group flight. He had literally just arrived in torino so that made things even more stressful. It was a step into the complete unknown which isn’t something that you get to do very often and its pretty intimidating.  So we get on the bus and head for the school district. We went down Via Nizza (which is the road that we were on when I took the sunset picture from a couple days ago) and drove for about 5 to 10 minutes. We turned down to head toward to Po river and stopped very quickly. Nate (my roommate), and 6 other guys were off the bus to walk toward our apartments. 

This walk took about an hour because at every apartment, she had to show the people who live there how to turn on and off the gas, hot water, lock the door… as well as any other things that are strange about the house. The person who was showing us around is the person who is going to be my Italian Conversation professor (Simona) and she has a tendency to be a chatterbox. We got to the first house which was on the back side of an old church and looks pretty cool. The two people who live in that apartment and Simona went up to their hotel and the six of us got to hang out on the street with our bags talking for about a half an hour.  As we conversed in the street, I noticed something that made complete sense but was still a little strange to be on the other side of. As all Americans would do when foreigners are in their neighborhood, every Italian that passed by or was on the other side of the street couldn’t help but stop and stare. At the meeting in the morning, Alyssa Nota (the program director) told us that no matter what we do, people in our neighborhood will know we are Americans, because the make up of the housing that we are in rarely changes and everybody knows their neighbors very well so we will stick out like sore thumbs. Because of this, people will stare because they are curious. Oh by is this true! It was like being in a fish bowl at all times. Kind of unsettling but you (kinda) get used to it. 

Simona finally made it out of the first apartment and we began the walk to the second apartment, the the four other guys would be living.  She went through the same things about the apartment with the four of them, which took a while and we just got to sit outside and chat. This was the first time I got to really talk to my roommate because the other two people from the first apartment were talking about their apartment. We did the usual break the ice type questions, like what do you do for fun, where are you from… that kind of stuff and it was pretty awkward. So since the first two people were so close to each other, we assumed we would be real close as well.

View Down Via Genova, looking toward the open air market

Wrong, had to cross an open air market, a bunch of big streets… its was a lot farther than I excepted it to be, especially carrying bags. But oh well. We’re at the very edge of the school district and the midtown district. We got into our apartment and, as you can see, its pretty tiny but its pretty nice. The key, which ill send you a picture of next time, is pretty legit. Reminds me of the under the tuscan sun key. Its pretty cool. We share a room but its all good. The bed is like strangely soft but its not too bad. We have to turn on the hot water and have no control of the heat (or lack thereof) but have a balcony over looking the street. Its not too bad. So as we moved in, unpacked and what not, we got to talking more and the awkwardness left. Nate is a pretty cool guy, definitely glad he is my roommate over some of the others.  

Ill continue more about the first night for dinner in a couple days but the university (the one place i can get internet for free) closes in 5 minutes and i need to be out the door by then, so until next time, Ciao!