Roommate Date

Between Anne and I we have a crazy next couple of weeks. We both have visitors coming and midterms, not to mention a 3 day trip around Umbria with our program and to top of the month, Spring break! So, in preparation for all of these festivities, Anne and I decided to go against the tradition thus far of going on a trip every weekend, and stay in Ferrara. The plan was to study for our first midterm on Monday, read ahead for our classes, maybe take a walk or two, and RELAX.
Friday we went looking for the country side. From our apartment on the seventh floor, we can tell that it is relatively close, and it didn't seem like a big deal to get there! Little did we know! Good grief, somehow we got ourselves lost, and not in the country side. We did however find two very cool places. The first was this wonderful little neighborhood full of old people and their dogs! The whole place just had the nicest atmosphere and I think what I liked about it the most was the smell. It no longer smelled like a city, as Ferrara does... it felt borderline rural! It probably helped by the fact that it sat along our nasty little river. As we walked up the street we found things like restaurants out of people's homes and little old men greeting us from their gardening work.
The second place we found was amazing and disturbing! It was these three buildings that were so beautiful in their own, dilapidated way. We decided it necessary to do a bit of light trust passing. One had a tree growing out of where the roof and wall once had been. The other had all of its windows busted in and there was a thick layer of grim and dust over all the broken chairs, tables and bathtubs. It felt like such a strange juxtaposition to have this piece of property right next to apartment city!!! There were two creepy things about this place. One, even though it was obviously not touched for years, there were still things like a couple of razors perched on the edge of the sink and a wash rag on the edge of the bathtub. The other, there were dead pigeons all over the place!!! And these pigeons did not look like they had been killed by stray cats... creepy.
To celebrate our adventure, Anne took me to Indian food and we laid us down to sleep!
Saturday we went to a lovely antiques market, explored a huge cemetery and walked around our city's wall! There was this lady at the market who was having the best time haggling and speaking in Italianglish with us! She kept saying how this and that was very mod and the big style of the year. But in all honesty, I don't think she believed that we could understand her, because then she would turn to an italian lady and be like, 'these are americans... watch me practice my english!' Plus she enjoyed telling us things like, the Americans only speak english and how during tourist season she liked to swindle money out of them! It was all very funny... especially since she would ask if we understood her and then ignore our answer in italian!!! Oh, the people you meet at market!
Little did I know that when staying in Ferrara for the weekend, it would actually end up being the best ones yet! The weather is getting nicer and there are buds on the trees! Spring is on its way!!!