These past few weeks have been pretty busy and exciting! There's been a reform constantly going on against the government to protest against the new law being passed to take away more funds from the schools here. This means that there's been countless manifestazioni's as well as occupations as well as autogestioni. As I said last time my school was doing an autogestioni week which was really fun! I learned alot of new things and made a ton of new friends. After autogestioni week the other exchange students from Bologna arrived for the weekend.

The students came to Rome last Thursday for their first visit. I'd never met any of them before but with exchange students you can easily become friends within a second. I think it's because generally they have the same mind set as you and are interested in alot of the same things. They arrived on Thrsday night and we took a tour of Rome in the car with our personal tour guide Paula. It was raining, which wasn't to abnormal because it rains almost every single day in November. I only remember two days where there was no rain. My hair has been in a permanent afro every day this month due to this weather. On Friday I was the tour guide and took them on a tour of the main tourist sights in Rome. My tour was not as good as Paulas im sure. I'm working on learning the historic part of the sights , but she can do tours in five languages so I think i'm a little behind in that section. We went to see the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps and Piazza Venezia (If you dont know what this is I suggest you google it, it's very pretty). Afterwards we finished our tour off with a nice pit stop to get Pizza from a place called Rosso Pomodorro, which means red tomato. It's a typical neopolitan style pizza with thicker crusts than normal as well as buffalo mozzarella cheese in some cases. Italians are very specific and precise when it comes to Pizza or Pasta. I put capitals on these two words because I think they get the same respect here as names do in the english language.  I learned thast cooking pasta can be more stressful than babysitting  a 6 year old if you're not careful. There's a certain amount of minutes that the pasta has to cook for and if you go one or two seconds over these time limits youre pasta will not be "al dente" which is frowned upon in this country. Al dente is when you bite into the pasta and just at the very center there is a little bit of denseness, not crunchy of course, but dense. We ate Italian food as well as a Brasilian roast with the exchange students. Saturday it was raining hard so we stayed in for a while and then went out at night to the disco. Anna and my first time in a Roman disco! Very exciting night for sure. It turns out that the disco we went to that night was actually hosting a private party for someones eighteenth birthday. We were having a great time dancing and having fun, and then the DJ points his microphone at me and asks me to make a happy birthday shout out to the birthday boy. There was just a few problems with this because number one i dont know how to make a birthday shout out in Italian, and number two I didn't know the birthday boy or his name even if I did want to make a shout out! I told him this and then he started laughing/shaking his head and did a normal Italian hand gesture meaning what are you doing(and or saying)?! On Sunday we went to the Vatican, and it was still as breathtaking as the last time I was there. We went inside the forum afterwards and then the colesseum. Paula told us all about the history of the forum and old ancient Roman life and we all learned a ton of new things. Old Rome is actually eight meters underground of the new modern Rome. After they took their train home I watched Gladiator to learn more about the Romans during the early common era.

This past weekend I celebrated American Thanksgiving at a friend of Renato and Paula's house. She's an American and has been to our house a few times for dinner as well, once she found out I was Canadian she invited me to come to their house for thanksgiving so that I would at least get one even if it wasn't Canadian. It was nice, we ate turkey and stuffing but the rest of the food was not the same as a normal Canadian thanksgiving. It had an  Italian twist for sure but was still nice.

At school i'm reading about the history of western civilization in order to get a better understanding of Europe and one of the most famous cities in the world, that I live in right now. I've also found a book for children around the age of 12 in italian that i'm trying to read. So far I've kept my dictionary close by because i need to use it alot. It may sound like I've been doing alot of things for fun here, but I learn way more than the recommended one new thing per day. I'm really enjoying this experience and it's opening my eyes up to so many new things that I would never have seen before. I can see now a different side of view of some topics. I have completely differnt opinions on certain things and every day I think that this is the experience of a lifetime. It's really extremely hard to live surrounded by things that you dont understand and be able to cope with it and become apart of a new society, but it's such an amazing experience to learn so much and meet so many new people that I think it's worth all of the difficulties. It's amazing how different a country can seem from a quick visit to when you live there for a year. In my first blog I remember writing about how I got to see what Rome was like from the film Eat Prey Love. But I realize now that everything you see in movies is a really different scene than what it's actually like.