chapter one...

...in which our plucky young heroine arrives in palermo and begins to see to the business of settling in.

so here i am, in palermo at last, after the longest summer I've ever had (4 whole months, and remarkably I managed to do nothing remotely productive during any of it). really, it was about time. i'd already given into all those guilty pleasure temptations that i'd previously managed to resist for like, my whole life... all six seasons of sex and the city, gossip girl, twilight (the movie, twice in one sitting; all four books in three days). the kardashians were even starting to grow on me. so really, who knows where it would've gone next.

it's funny, i was talking to someone right before graduation about being worried about having nothing to do for four months. she was like, "oh, don't worry, you'll get so bored that you'll find yourself getting into all sorts of amazing things...." she, of course, during her time off from school, ended up teaching herself arabic, learning how to ride a unicycle, teaching herself to knit, and more along those lines. oh octavia, i wish i were more like you. but no, apparently, i'm not at all.

anyway, palermo. i got in on monday at around 8 pm, and i proceeded to sleep from about 11 pm until 5 pm the next day. 17 straight hours of sleep must be a record, i think, even for me. and since then i've averaged at least twelve hours a night.

and during those rare hours of wakefulness, i've been running around dealing with all this bureaucratic nonsense italy requires of people who try to live here for a year. i had to fingerprinted, of course (the fourth time i've had to get fingerprinted here. i mean really, italy, don't you have them on file somewhere by now?). i had to go to some DMV-like office and wait for hours to get some sort of social security-like number, in order to open a bank account. and then at the bank they were utterly confounded when confronted with american money orders.

thankfully i have my dear sicilian friend around to help me with all of this. of course he knows someone at the immigration office, so we walked in right past the poor crowd of africans and middle-easterners who'd been waiting for god-knows-how-long. and then he knows someone at the bank. so as confusing and time-consuming as all this been, it would've been five times worse without his help. plus, he knows someone who knows someone with a spare room to rent, and he knows someone looking to hire an english tutor, so that's great too. ah, the wonders of knowing someone in a country all about having connections.


before i left home i was trying to remember why i wanted to come back here. after all, it was over a year ago that i applied for this grant, and things were entirely different back then. in fact, it's amazing how much has changed over the past year. other than the fact that i graduated from college, i suppose not much is different in a straightforward sense. but psychologically, i feel like i'm an entirely different place now than i was a year ago. a better, a more confident, a more mature place, for sure. but still, why am i in italy? didn't i already do my nine months here? learn the language, experience the culture, all that? i guess i haven't yet figured out the answer to that. hopefully something will surface, in time.

one thing i'd forgotten that i do remember, now that i'm here, is that i really do love italy and italians. i adore the way italian sounds, the way it rolls off their tongues. it sounds so sexy, it seems almost obscene, almost indecent that people just walk around talking like that, in public. like, in front of everyone.

and there are so many other little things. i love the hand gestures and the eye-rolling. i love the way italians say "ciao" like ten million times at the ends of phone conversations. like, "ok, a dopo. allora, ciao. ciaociaociao ciaociaociaociao... ." i love the way they wear metallic shoes. i love the boys' meticulously-shaped sideburns and their plucked eyebrows (ok, definitely more a southern thing). i love the way that italian businessmen are so impeccably dressed that they're simply beautiful to look at. and i love the way that so many young, beautiful girls wear glasses and are still considered cool.

all right, i realize i haven't said a single thing about palermo but i will, soon. i've hardly seen any of it myself, but for the next nine months at least it'll be all palermo, all the time, so you'll definitely hear about it. and see pictures. until soon...