Erin Miller

Il Fumo Uccide: Smoking kills — it is what is written on the front of all
cigarette packages here. Much different than our American warning which seems
to say something along the lines of “someone, somewhere once found out that
smoking might be bad for you.” Along those lines, two days after my arrival in
Italy the Italian government banned smoking inside all public places. A study
came out finding that living in some major Italian cities, without smoking, was the equivalent of smoking ten cigarettes a day, and so the government
banned it. Pretty cool, I think. My clothes no longer smell after I leave a bar.. I have heard several Italian bar tenders complain about the measure. The
police have flocked to the cities, including Perugia, in order to enforce this
new law and have been fining bar owners. You know you live in a rough area
when the biggest crime in town is smoking in a public place.
An interesting thing about Italians is that they actually eat a lot of Italian
food. Pasta, Pizza, Pasta, pasta, panini, pasta, pasta. It’s weird but I
thought that Italian food was this weird American conception, but it seems to
be pretty true to form. Not a whole lot of vegetables, fruits or dairy in your
diet unless you work for it. There are fresh fruit markets around, but a lot of
people here seem to go days without vegetables. As I was eating all of the dried cranberries off our cheese and meat platter, I told an Italian that they were the first fruit or vegetable I had had all day. He looked at me and said “just one, just one day….oh you’re ok.”:)
A note about politics and the Iraq war.
One of my good friends here is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She
told me that she, and most Argentineans, did not really like Americans. Not
that they had anything against individual Americans, like me, but that in
general they really didn’t like them. She said that she could not believe that
Bush had won. I told her me neither. She explained that in Argentina, they see
shots of bleeding, dieing children and mothers screaming as their houses
burn to the ground at the hands of Americans on the news. She said that her
other American friends had told her that most of that stuff was censored in the states. I guess that those kinds of images would make it hard to like us. She also commented on the irony of our country’s generosity and willingness to help the victims of the Tsunami, when our country had killed half the number of people killed by the Tsunami in Iraq.
Anyway, just something to think about.

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ciao,
So, I’m in Italy. It’s awesome. Yes, they will serve alcohol to anyone over 18
on international flights. I spent my first day in Rome. I met some English
kids at the hostel and we went into town and saw the coliseum, forum etc. We
spent the night drinking cheap beer and wine out of a box playing 21 on the
roof of our hostel in down town Rome.
I arrived in Perugia on Friday. Perugia is a city on a hill. The city center
is on the top, which is where we live and take some of our classes. There are
so many steep hills around town that on one side of town there are escalators,
to take you from level to level of the city. On the other side, the incline
was too steep for escalators, so there is an elevator with an up button and
down button. The city is full of history; there is a wall in the city that was
built by the Etruscans in 300BC. Everyone around here speaks this weird
foreign language, and they expect us to speak it as well. They become offended
if we cannot answer their questions in their language. I started taking my
Italian class today, I’m in level two and I lost our professor right after
Buon Giorno (good morning).
My apartment is terrific, there are 6 of us and five bedrooms, so only two
people have to share and there is a couple living with us. We actually have
control of our heating as well, our landlord is very nice and only asked that
we turn off the heat at night. Most of the other student apartments cannot
control their own heat and the apartments are kept at around 55 degrees.
One of our roommates lived here last semester and she is almost fluent in
Italian. She has been showing me all of the good bars and hangouts around town
and introducing me to her friends, some of them Italian. I met a guy named
Davide, his English was about as good as my Italian so our conversation was
fun but challenging. We finally realized that we both spoke Spanish the best
and did a lot of our communicating in it. Davide = Italian Stallion:)
Wine here is cheaper than water. A gallon of high quality wine goes for about
8 Euro. But a beer will cost you about 5.

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