Staying Classy

First of all, my apologies for taking so long to update, it's been a hectic past week/week and a half.

Last week was the first week of classes, which unfortunately meant 9am Italian every morning. The bus leaves from about two blocks from our apartment and it then takes about 20 minutes to get to campus so each morning was quite an early start. I'm not quite sure why I chose the 9am Italian class during registration to begin with but after getting here I was determined to switch into a later section so that I could actually go out and get a reasonable amount of sleep during the week. All spots in the later classes were filled so I ended up waiting until Thursday when someone in a 12pm section switched out and I could switch in. This meant dropping my Cognition class and switching into a 9am Intro to Marketing on Thursdays. Finally my schedule is set:

Intensive Elementary Italian - MTWR - 12:00-1:15pm
Sociology of Consumerism - M - 3:00-5:45pm
International Finance - W - 3:00-5:45pm
Introduction to Marketing - R - 9:00-11:45am

I'm very happy with everything so far. I have a friend in my new Italian class and the teacher is about as enthusiastic as any native Italian could be about teaching NYU students how to get by for 4 months. Sociology of Consumerism is very interesting, with some very opinionated students that like to dominate discussion at times, but I guess that isn't too uncommon these days. We had a class trip to the Salvatore Ferragamo museum this past Friday, which was very interesting for me, and that is saying a lot, as I tend to be the one who walks through museums without stopping more than a few seconds here and there to look at a painting/display. The museum was very modern and had a nice variety of interactive displays, including a documentary video featuring a soundtrack of Black Eyed Peas, Katy Perry and Ke$ha. International Finance will be interesting but so far is a lot of review of what I learned in Macroeconomics last semester. The class has 6 students - 4 male, 2 female - none of which, myself included, seem super excited, but the professor is outgoing and has a sense of humor so hopefully he'll make the three hours go by fairly quickly. Intro to Marketing was canceled on Thursday morning, which was unfortunate as they sent out the notification email at 8:35am, after my suitemate and I had already gotten to campus.

The campus is beautiful to say the least. The bus drops us off about 5 minutes down the road from the entrance to the NYU estate, which is made up of about 4 villas, all with their original architecture and everything. After showing our ID to get on campus is Villa Natalia - home to some of the freshmen dorms, a cafeteria, and an espresso coffee machine where you can get an array of drinks instantly for under 1 euro each. Thus, it has become customary to stop off there before class. Across the estate from Villa Natalia is Villa Ulivi, where most of the classes are held. While the two villas are about the same altitude, the land drops down significantly in between which means a steep downhill and then uphill walking each way. Again, I expect to have spectacular legs by the end of these 4 months. I have a couple classes in another villa, Villa Sassetti, but for the most part, I'm walking that stretch a couple times each day I'm on campus. We've been lucky with weather so far with only one day of rain and the rest somewhat cold but pretty sunny. I can't even imagine what that trek would be like in the snow they experienced here last semester.

Altogether it was a successful first week of classes and this week is off to a good start as well! I've written one paper and done a fair amount of reading, but no complaints so far :) Ciao!