apartments, round 2

confession: i haven't been to school yet this week. so i was sick, yes, but it was only a cold, and since you need a massive fever to be considered sick enough to miss school in italy (in fact they don't even say 'so-and-so is sick,' they say 'ha la febbre,' or so-and-so has a fever..), i exaggerated it a little bit.

i mean, it was a fairly bad cold, but still i felt guilty when antonella showed up at my door to pick up the exams i graded for her over the weekend, with an equally bad if not worse cold herself, but full of anxiousness and concern for me and my fever. oops. i fully expect to be struck down by a bolt of lightning any minute now.

the truth was, as they say constantly here in italy, che non ce la facevo ad andare a scuola questa settimana. non ce la faccio is a conveniently vague expression that can mean anything from i can't do it (there's some serious obstacle in my way) to i'm not up to it or i don't feel like it (for no other reason than my passing fancy). and, especially if you're like me and like to pretend to be immune to social awkwardness in a foreign language, you don't really need to follow it up with any specifying explanation.

anyway, as you could probably tell from my last post, i've been in kind of a funk lately, and i took my cold as an excuse to become essentially comatose for the past five days. i crawled out of bed all of two times, once to attend my first spanish class and see an apartment directly across the street from the high school, and the second time to see another apartment. both of the apartment viewings, i'm ashamed to say, were entirely coordinated by paola and italo, who've taken over the reins of my apartment search after i sort of ran out of steam.

also i discovered, unfortunately for my work ethic, that on kindle there are all these books available for free that can be downloaded within seconds to my ipod touch... so i've spent the last five days sleeping, subsisting on soup and tea and these dreadfully good little tea cookies i've been consuming in obscene quantities, and reading no less than four victorian novels. sending occasionally text messages to my co-teachers that while i was getting better and there was no need for concern, i wasn't quite well enough yet to go to school.

but it's done, don't worry. with the end of my last wilkie collins novel my coma is officially over. this morning i actually took a shower (which i haven't been doing much of, both out of laziness and fear of getting reprimanded by my roommates for excessive consumption of hot water) and blow-dried my hair and everything, and i'm waiting for paola to pick me up to go see another apartment, and tomorrow i'll go to school, and by next week i'll have the first of a series of black-history-month-themed lessons planned out to a T. i even get to interview an italian applicant for brown, which is absurdly exciting.

anyway, the apartment hunt is coming to an end, i think, only it's not clear yet what kind of an end it'll be. basically i should get out of here before i have to pay another month's rent, on the 1st, and since paola and italo are both going to be around this weekend, paola's plan is to take the place by storm saturday morning, and with all three of us, plus paola's suv, to have my stuff completely moved in a couple of hours. then paola plans on "handling" my landlady over the phone, which promises to be dramatic.

only that i don't yet know where i'm going. by now it's come down to two places, the last two i've seen, which are the only acceptable possibilities i've come across. but i don't know which i ought to choose -- they both have their pluses and minuses -- and any confidence i may have once had in my apartment-choosing abilities has been completely shattered by my experience with this place, which i was substantially excited about in september.

one of the two is right next door to the school where i work on tuesdays and thursdays, galilei, and as i mentioned, right across the street from the other high school where i'm taking my spanish class. it's also even further to the north than where i am now, which means further from the city center, and deeper into this largely residential area. there'd be two roommates there, of whom i met one, and she seemed very quiet, low-key, a little aloof maybe. the other one is apparently hardly ever there. they're both gone on weekends. the apartment is plenty big, fifth floor, lots of storage space.

and then the other one, in via costantino nigra, is practically next door to my other school, CEI, where i work monday/wednesday/friday. it's also across the street from the apartment of paola's sister, whom i met when we went to see it. it's a bit of a hike to my other school, but it's much closer to the city center, a more lively area, close to the port. there'd be 7 people (including me), of whom i only met two: the one who showed us the house, very energetic and thorough, and an english girl. the available room is pretty small, and one of the walls is essentially a piece of cardboard that divides it from the next room, the english girl's. basically the same situation i have now, where it's a former living room converted into two bedrooms, and you can hear absolutely everything that goes on in the next room. only now i don't have to worry about what i say on skype, etc., since i know alessia doesn't understand me. whereas in this other room the girl would understand me. not that i'm divulging state secrets in my skype conversations or anything. i don't know. it's by no means a big place; the kitchen is teeny, there's no living room.

but in both of these places there's both a washing machine and heating, which makes them infinitely better than my current place. so i don't know, it's a tough call. in both places i'm next door to one school and far from the other. one's next to a mountain (the galilei one); from the other you can practically see the water. i guess it comes down to whether i want to live with two people or six people. in bologna we were in six; same with the red house last year at brown. in both cases i loved coming home to a place where there was sure to be somebody at home, something going on, someone making tea, wanting to chat. but in both situations they were mostly, if not all, americans. and another consequence of this stint in my current place is that my confidence in my odds of making friends with sicilian girls has also been shattered. it'd be unfair to sicilian girls to imagine that my experience with these two is any reflection on the population as a whole, i know, but i can't help but feel a little pessimistic.

paola also told me, as a way of being comforting, that her mother came to palermo from veneto (the region venice is in, up north) at 19 or 20, the spitting image of grace kelly, and never her whole life managed to make any female sicilian friends. the implication being that they were all jealous of her, as an outsider, and a pretty one. now, clearly i'm no grace kelly, and paola was just flattering me. even if i accept the comparison, it's a reassuring excuse, but it's also pretty depressing. anyway, who knows.

so, feedback! i'd like some, as always. which apartment should i go for, if either? no, i'm pretty set on leaving this one, so it's between the two. give me your thoughts.