Classes/Film Festival

Since I didn't travel anywhere this past weekend, I figured I would blog about my classes and more about my everyday life in Rome. This is my schedule:

Monday:
12-1 Literature
1-2 Rome as a Living Museum
4-6 Italian

Tuesday:
12-1 Archaeology
4-6 Italian

Wednesday:
9:30-11:30 Literature
12-2 Rome as a Living Museum
3-5 Italian

Thursday:
12-2 Archaeology
3-5 Italian

For "Rome as a Living Museum" and "Archaeology", I have a one hour lecture once a week that takes place in the classroom and then for the 2 hour block, we meet on site somewhere in Rome at the Colosseum or a church or the Forum etc. and we walk around and actually see the things we are learning about in class.

My literature class is interesting. We only read excerpts from authors that have traveled to Italy and written about it. So each week we focus on a different author who has written a sort of travel journal on different parts in Italy. Definitely not my favorite kind of reading. We also have to write a journal entry once a week in our own travel journals. I'll let you know how that goes when I start writing mine.

I have Italian every day for 2 hours which gets to be a lot, especially by the end of the week, but I really feel like I am learning the most in that class and my Italian has improved a lot from knowing basically nothing which is helpful when I talk to people in the city.

On Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings I have dinner with my host family. We usually have some sort of pasta dish with bread and salad. On Wednesdays I go the grocery store and get stuff to take for lunch and for dinner that night, or I go out to eat with friends. The grocery stores in Italy are small and the portions of food they sell are small, too. Most Italians go to the grocery store every other day if not every single day because they can only buy small amounts of food at a time.

This past weekend, there was a documentary film festival in Rome. I love documentaries so on Friday and Saturday I went to this movie theater located in a park on the north side of Rome. The theater actually looked very American, which I wasn't expecting. It was a lot cleaner than American theaters though. And there wasn't a place to buy snacks before the movie. The documentary on Friday night was called "The Horse Boy". I saw previews for it before I left for Italy so I was really excited to see it at the film festival. It was in English and it was about a little boy who has autism so his parents take him to Mongolia to see the shamans that live there so they can help him with some of the more severe parts of his autism. It was a really good movie. The next night I saw "Position Among the Stars". It was in Indonesian and it was about the struggle of a poor family from Jakart that wanted to send their daughter to college, but it was too expensive. Luckily, there was English and Italian subtitles so I could follow along.