Roma First Few Days

My first few days in Rome have been very low key. Gabby, Zoe, and I decided we should discover our neighborhoods and the area around our school to get our bearings straight before we do major sightseeing on our own. But, our neighborhoods (mine is Trastevere) are very residential parts of Rome, and unlike the city center, most people speak only a little English. In my Fodor's guidebook it says people who live in Trastevere call themselves the real Romans, because tourists, foreign residents, and people who move to Rome from the rest of Italy all stay around the center of the city.
My apartment is on Viale di Trastevere, which is a main road with a tram and a bunch of stores, markets, and caffes. My apartment has 3 rooms and 5 beds, and being the only one from AU, I got myself a single room. Two roommates know each other from BU and two know each other from their home in Fairfield, Connecticut (holla Tim Foley and Jackie) one goes to UMD and the other to a school in Ohio.

My bed

Another view of my room

The view from my private balcony on Viale di Trastevere

Another angle of my view! It is so pretty.

After I got here, and settled into my apartment, one of my roommates and I walked a bit around the neighborhood. We then stopped into a caffe for cappucino and a pastry.  The Italian men working in the caffe decided to have a little fun with our drinks:

That night, Zoe and Gabby walked about 30 minutes from their place to mine. I gave them the wrong address at first so it took an hour before I decided to try and use my calling card to reach Zoe. Luckily they were just down the block. We walked a bit and found a small restaurant. I had Pasta Carbonara. It was delicious! Then we found the cutest gellateria. I had nutella gellato and something the guy working there suggested to us. It's amazing though, I thought I would have issues with my supposed food allergies (gluten and dairy) but nothing has bothered me here. Not to mention, the closest supermarcato to my apartment has an entire aisle of gluten free foods, probably a bigger selection than Whole Foods in the states. But it seems that the food here is so fresh, I may not even have these food allergies, just maybe to American processed food.

Yesterday my roommates and I walked to AUR for orientation. Streets here are very confusing, so we got lost at first, but the school is really only a 15 minute walk away and is so beautiful.

The stairs leading up to the school's library

Zoe, me, Gabby on the patio outside the library

The top floor of one of our buildings has this huge deck overlooking Ancient Rome

Close up view of Ancient Rome

We then went with some girls we met to this restaurant whose chef teaches cooking classes at AUR. We had bruschetta, bean soup, and lemon cake with two pitchers of white wine for only 10euro. Food here is not as expensive as you might think. I have also had pizza for under 3 euro and espresso is .80.

Finally, today we had a lazy day. I met Gabby and Zoe for a late afternoon gellato snack and trip planning. Hopefully we'll make it out to Florence next weekend! We also made proschiutto tortellini with mushrooms. Then, headed back down to my neighborhood to explore the area more. We stumbled upon the picturesque Roman alleyways one always hears about that lead to a mini piazza. 

A picture of what we stumbled upon

A little boring for a first blog post, but I plan to comment on little differences I have noticed in the future.

Ciao!