Little Differences

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Things are going fine here. I feel a little overwhelmed sometimes and i have this amorphous fear of running out of money. I have a very vague sense of what I'm spending and I don't know when I'll start earning...I do have this job but it will probably be a mostly part time affair. Maybe teaching English is the answer for the rest of the time...Its pretty darned hot here, and humid and the italians pretty much don't use air conditioning. So, i sometimes find myself sleeping in the middle of the day wondering what i would do if my fan ever broke.

But on the up side, the fruits and vegetables here are fantastic. They are SO flavorful! All the coffee is great and I must meter my consumption or i will surely become a quivering mass of caffeinated nerves ready to fall apart once the chemical glue wears off.

I'm starting to understand Italian a bit more but I need to practice more formally than I have. I haven't taken a language class or anything like that. I just started listening to tapes the other day. I definitely absorb the info on them faster now that I am surrounded by it all the time. but i hate the idea of becoming a pigeon Italian speaker which is more likely if i don't formalize my education.

Back to the differences: I have a huge bathtub that is a 1/3 longer than US ones, and there's a bidet in every bathroom . There is soft porn, playboy like stuff on regular TV at night. Everybody recycles here and part of what you recycle is food. There are even special biodegradable bags that you buy to put it in.

Hmmm, what else? You have to buy bags at the grocery store. The foods they eat are different and what's available at the market is really different. They have an entire aisle for different kinds of tomatoes. They have a huge pasta aisle. They sell tons of fresh mozzarella and the yogurt tastes really different here. I wonder why its so good here and so relatively crappy in the US?

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