Creative Musings

Before my room-mates and I arrived in Italy, we were very skeptical about an apartment having 3 separate bedrooms each with their own bathroom and TVs. Well, when we arrived here we found that it is possible! Oh, and we have 11 ft ceilings. Our apartment is fantastic!

We live in a narrow yellow building between two streets right off a big, I can't think of the English word! The circular thing in the middle of a bunch of streets that all traffic has to go around in one direction! Oh yeah! A "Roundabout". Anyways, since we are in a narrow building, we have windows on both sides of the apartment. Also, it is a major road heading out of the city to nearby suburbs, so we have many bus stops close by. The buses that we take home from school drop us off directly in front of our apartment!

The apartment is on the first floor, which here in Italy means the first floor above ground level. Our front door is quite amazing. First off, there is a crazy shaped key, which is the only way to get in the front door. There is no knob to turn. Our door is locked from either side with the key, which slides 4 steel posts into place. So we are very secure! Our neighborhood is full of local Italians, which is nice for us and speaking Italian. I am quite glad that we are not in the center of the city. We have only a 5-10 minute bus ride to most parts of the city.

Our kitchen is good sized, with a nice big dining table. Somehow there really is no living room though. Just a couch and small blue table. I won't complain though, because we all have amazing bedrooms. We spend a lot of time cooking in here, talking, and doing homework together at the dining table. All around our kitchen there are little stickers with the Italian name for something and the phonetic spelling above it are. So we will never forget the word for cup - "tazza", or salt & pepper - "sale e peppe" are. We also put up all the maps that we had with us on the walls for decoration, so we have maps of Italy/Switzerland/Austria, a planning map of Italy, the United States, Barcelona, Tuscany, and Florence.

There is a long hallway that leads to the 3 bedrooms. Mine is first on the left. Now don't get me wrong, last time I was in Italy I absolutely loved my cute little apartment, but this time my bedroom is just a little bit smaller than my entire apartment was before. I have 2 twin beds, a decent sized window, desk with a massive amount of shelving taking over an entire corner of my room, huge closet, full length mirror with shoe closet behind, and.... the worlds narrowest bathroom! No joke, I have never experienced a bathroom narrower than this before. It's so narrow that I almost couldn't get a picture of it! You can barely see 1/2 of it on each side in the photos that I put in my album. It's a bit annoying, but in all actuality pretty funny.

I'm settling into my room more and more each week, getting things organized and not looking like a temporary room. In an attempt to fill up all my shelf space I am putting up little areas on it dedicated to the places that I have traveled. So far, I only have a corner for Barcelona, with post cards and an espresso cup that looks like some of Gaudi's mosaic tiling.

To see all the photos of my new home, CLICK HERE.

Labels: Florence