Hooray for new things!

First things first.  I am staying in the beginner-est language class.  I spoke to my professor, as I mentioned before, and she spoke to the professor of the other class, and then we re-spoke.  (Does anyone reading this like making up words as much as I do?)  The conclusion: without having studied Italian before, the accelerated class would probably move too quickly for me, so I am staying in the slower class.  My professor offered to provide me with extra worksheets and exercises that are a little bit harder than the rest of the class will get, and correct any writing in Italian I feel like doing.  It's very nice of her to give herself the extra work so that I don't feel like I'm not getting as much out of the class as I could be.  And this way I am able to help the other students in my class, which I like because 1) I generously enjoy helping people, and 2) I selfishly enjoy feeling smart.  Call me crazy for that second one.

The new things...
I got an Italian cell phone!  The school sets up an account with a phone company over here to make it as easy as possible for international students.  Unfortunately, I cannot make calls from my phone.  When I try, I hear a recorded woman's voice throwing Italian words at me as fast as possible.  Now I get to back to the phone store, wait in line again, and try to communicate enough to have them fix whatever is going wrong.  So much for easy.
Also along the communication lines, I bought a headset.  Yup, that's headphones and a microphone, so for those of you who have skype...  Just wanted to throw that out there.
New roommate!  When I arrived at my apartment, the person who brought me said my (unspecified number of) roommates would be arriving probably in a week or two.  With no word or notice after that, someone walked into my apartment through the door I had locked and plopped her stuff down on the floor.  I showed her around, we discovered her key to the front gate did not work, and she chose a bed in which to sleep off her jetlag.  And then there were two.  I guess we'll see how many more saunter into my--our--apartment in the next few days/weeks.

Tomorrow is a long class day.  Normally class is from 9:30-11:00, and then 11:30-1:00.  Tomorrow we're tacking on a 2:30-4:00 session, and then some students from my class and I are grabbing dinner with a couple native Italian speakers (friends of one girl's host family) to practice Italian and study for our midterm exam on Friday.  Whew!  I have a feeling I'll be using that handy-dandy Italian-English dictionary I bought today. (Another new thing!)

I am happy to say that I am getting to know some of the people here better.  There are some friendly and interesting girls who seem to be as happy to spend time with me as I am to spend time with them, and I've stopped having to exchange names with people that I'd already met before.  Some of you reading this may know that I believe I have "one of those faces."  People are constantly telling me that I look exactly like their best friend, cousin, or famous person.  Last night a couple girls I had talked with two or three times bestowed upon me the knowledge that I looked "SO much like" a girl they knew from home.  Except, they clarified, she was a "Jesus freak."  I smiled big; I have more in common with that girl than they realized.

They'll catch on.