Un Piccolo Gelato Per Favore!

Here is a small little post.  Mostly to send you all a link to my photos (if you haven't already seen them on Facebook.)
Italy Days 1-4
You will have to log into Facebook to see these but after that you should be good.
Ciao!
p.s. I will post again tomorrow a typed update, tonight its just pictures.

Ciao!

Well, I made it to the villa today! There is wifi here, but unfortunately there is no air conditioning.  For those of you not following current weather conditions for Genova, it has been 90 the last four days.  (Thankfully they said it should cool off by Thursday.)  The rooming situation allowed me to room with my roommate from literally a year now (since he also went with me to Buffalo this summer for our internship) so that is nice and familiar.  We have one other guy in our room, one of the three people not from Clemson, a guy from Illinois Institute of Technology or IIT.  Our room is on the front side of the villa, so we have a wonderful view of the port of Genova and the surrounding hills and mountainous terrain (see picture from last post, almost that exact picture.)  After we moved in, we had lunch, which consisted of rice (with tomatoes, ham, onions, olives and mozzarella) which was pretty good, but the best part of lunch (their big meal of the day) was the caprese (tomatoes, and mozzarella) and I have to say, which those of you who know my hatred of tomatoes, that it was REALLY good!! It was so fresh that it was amazing!! Definitely looking forward to the next time we have that!! After that myself and two others went on a jaunt across the city in search of this store named Saturn (or Saturna as the locals say) which is their equivalent of Best Buy.  We found what we were looking, which for me was a large occilating fan.  Twenty euros later, I had a fan that makes the lack of A/C bearable.  The rest of the day we just hung around the villa and I tried out the cappuccino maker, which I must say works marvelously!! So far, it is going well, and it keeps getting better! Looking forward to the rest of the semester.  For now though, Ciao!

Buon Giorno

Well, here it is, I blinked and three days have gone by already. Tomorrow we move into our villa where we will live and have classes, and we will have a few days to get accustomed to that before we start classes on Wednesday. The flights were ok, however the Paris airport was the biggest, most confusing airport I have ever seen!! It took us an hour and a half to get from one side of the airport to the other... Two not-connected terminals later we finally got to our gate, thankfully with some time to spare. We arrived into Genova midday on Thursday and met up with our friends for lunch. We then walked around the city the rest of the day and had a wonderful dinner. I now know what good Italian food tastes like. The next day, after some great debating over what the plans would be, we decided to travel to the nearby seaside town of San Margherita Ligure where we spent the better part of the day walking around and happened to come upon an Italian Opera school with a voice lesson occurring (Very Cool). After a delayed train back to Genoa, we arrived back to our hotel and hung around waiting for some more friends who were coming in that night. Once they arrived we walked around the port, which has been transformed into a pedestrian only area full of shops, restaurants and a cinema. Sunday morning we got up and were intending on meeting everyone for breakfast, only to find out the cafe in mind was closed on Sundays, so maybe we will get it another time. Also, today we were able to tour the cathedral across the street from the hotel, due to it being Sunday, which was very, very impressive. We continued walking around Genoa today and found the house of Christopher Columbus, a very cool way to spend 3 euros. We also went fountain hunting and found a very cool piazza and fountain at the Piazza Ferrari (no connection to the car, that I know of). For dinner we went to an outdoor restaurant again by the port that we had seen the night before and enjoyed being all there and appreciating the view up the mountains where you could see the villa and the rest of the city lit up in the night. Tomorrow night we will be enjoying the view from the other direction. Until I get a more reliable Internet connection to post pictures, I can only post the view that I've taken with my phone. So, until next time, ciao!!