Respect

Five days. In five days you can put in a 40-hour work week, sell a car on Craigslist, or even drive from one side of the United States to the other. You cannot, however, live without the world wide web. Before you insert some anecdote about how you "walked uphill both ways to and from school" and whatnot, it's not just that I can't use my social networking websites. I also cannot check my email for important school messages or even do research for my upcoming group project. Or procrastinate by downloading free movies. We've had to take advantage of school office hours to use the computers and are spending the weekend in and out of our professor's basement for wifi. It's probably some form of karma, forcing us to "get out" and "enjoy the fresh air" or something. But since this week has been one of constant showers, it seems rather impossible. You're wondering, "Have you done something about it?" Funny you should ask! Italian companies are apparently even worse than American ones about house calls. We can call Monday about getting help but I think we are expected to be indefinitely patient. 

The rest of the week has been great! We had a faculty-in-residence event where we brought our own meat and all grilled out together. Danielle and I brought hamburgers and fixins -- you don't even know how exciting it will be to be able to eat real beef. There's such a difference, you don't even know. Our professor played her iPod the whole time and it kind of turned into karaoke night. Some of the students got some footage and I will be super embarrassed when it ends up on the group video at the end of the semester. If you know me at all, you can imagine what my lipsync to Aretha's Respect probably looked like. Processing? Yeah, it was too far. 

Today we participated in OU's Big Event from here in Italy. It's a day dedicated to community service of different kinds. We spent the morning attempting to clean up our sister campus, The University of Siena in Arezzo. We started at 9am and were given trashbags and brooms. I don't think I ever mentioned this but Italian brooms don't look like the ones we buy at Wal-Mart. They look more like the Wicked Witch's broom or a Quidditch broom with all those twiggy, disheveled branches for the sweeping. We were walking to our designated area when the downpour started. It's been one of those weeks where the rain comes in 15 minutes spurts with 10 minute breaks in between. Needless to say, there was a lot of repetitive starting and stopping with little actual progress. It was nice to spend some time together considering we only have 22 DAYS LEFT HERE!!! That seems sooo unreal.