Must. Sleep. Now.

Day 2/3

I say this is day 2/3 because of my jetlag.

As soon as I got to AUR, I was told that my orientation would start at 11am. It was just after 10am. It felt good to be here, because the last nearly 48 hours I was on a mission, and it finally came to fruition. It was early morning and the sun was still rising, but my body felt like it was 7 at night. That told me I'd crash relatively soon. After the orientation, where they showed us a funny YouTube video (which is very true of Italy) and talked about safety and all that stuff, they called the housing agency. A guy picked me up and took me to my apartment, where I was eager to meet my new roommate. It turned out that I had five of them. The apartment was larger than I expected, because I know that everything is tiny in Europe compared to American standards, so I was happy. I found the one bed that was still made and didn't have a suitcase under it, and crashed. An hour later five guys woke me up: "what's up dude!?!?" I wish I wasn't brain dead at the time to make sense of their replies when I did the autopilot "Hey guys, my name is Vas, nice to meet you, what are your names" routine. They had arrived a day early with everyone else, as they were supposed to (no surprise there - when I was looking under the beds to see which one wasn't taken, their suitcases had tags from a different airline, I presume one that doesn't delay their customers on time-sensitive trips). They were still jetlagged - not like myself, because they had the one night of catching up on sleep while I was wide awake at the airport. We all took an extra 3 hours of shuteye, and decided to head downtown when we woke up around 7pm.

We hopped on the tram to some large restaurant-tourist-entertainers-hangout area. This was just last night, and I was still so tired that I had no idea how we got there or what it was called. I'll ask my roommates when I get back and update you all. We grabbed some pizza and mused at the magicians who would monotonously yell "Quarta! Quarta!" to get attention as they did a short routine. The "magic" act (if you could even call it that - it was so pathetic that I couldn't tell if he was being serious) ended with him doing a funny lazzi by pretending that there's nothing attached to his head as he rips off his toupee and collects change in it. I could tell how tired everyone was, because the restaurant took it's sweet time to bring our food out, and we were near silent. As our stomachs got the sugar flowing, the conversations flowed with it. I called it a night when two AUR students I had met that day walked me back to my apartment, because theirs was just around the block, and my roommates decided to stay out longer. I had a 7am class and by that point it was past 12am. We were lucky to catch the tram back. Next night, I told myself, I would plan our outings' logistics a little better (no one really had the brain power to do so at the time).

I called home again and called it a night. Tomorrow would be first day of seminars.