Socialization, Speaking, and Library

The day I made banana bread this week, two members of the house I'm living in asked, independent of each other, "so, are you making friends here?" While I don't think that was meant to be a probing question into why I was baking on a mid-week afternoon instead of socializing, it still made me think about how I am adjusting to life here.

One goal I have while here is to meet locals and get a taste of the real Italy behind Florence's all too popular tourist facade. I feel that with the apartment I chose I have done part of that, and I do feel like I'm starting to get to know the city in a very different way than most do. However, in terms of meeting lots of locals and getting to know them, learning what they do with their time, I have been less successful. I'm making friends at school, but most of them are other foreigners who don't quite have the perspective I'm looking for.

The question is, how do you meet locals? If I went to a bar alone tonight, I would be more likely to meet locals, but they would probably be single cassanovas looking for girls to take home, and that's not the kind of person I want to meet. Some 99% of the people at museums are tourists, and while I would probably get along terrifically with that other 1%, finding them is probably an impossible task. Once I start work I hope I'll make friends, but by then I'll be working 60 hour weeks with them during the nights, and I don't imagine we'll have much opportunity to socialize outside of work. Furthermore, I don't want to wait until my last month here to meet people--what will I do until then?

So that's my situation, and I'm trying to figure out ways around it. I'm in need of advice and suggestions about what to do. Maybe I'll try to find a concert schedule and see if I couldn't meet people at those kinds of events--that would probably be a crowd I would get along with, and lots of tickets here can be found for just about 10 euros. That would be fun even if it wasn't successful!

In other news, I'm feeling great about my progress in Italian. I bought Twilight in Italian, just because its something I'm familiar with, and have been reading it, at times without a dictionary. This is so exciting for me! When I would read Chinese, it could easily take a half hour to an hour to get through a page, and while I'm probably reading at about 6 minutes per page in Italian, which is definitely not fast, its still really great. Its helping me a lot with both my confidence level and my ability to recognize verbs despite them being in different tenses and conjugations. Verbs are definitely my achilles heel of romance languages, and so I've been focusing a lot of my studies on them. I'm creating a cheat sheet for verbs, which, when completed, will have one page for every tense, including how to conjugate them, what the tense is used for, and what verbs are irregular in that tense. I'm hoping that by doing that and studying it I can improve how I use verbs...right now I pretty much am doing it in the Chinese style, where I say: "Yesterday I go to the store", speaking in present tense and explaining the actual action through auxiliary words. However speaking improperly is not really the best way to communicate, and so I'm working hard to correct it. Its definitely exciting!

I definitely feel like I'm doing well here, and as if I've found a good groove. I also found a library right around the corner from school, and if I show them my passport they will give me a library card so I can borrow books, CDs, and DVDs. The building the library is in looks like it used to be a monastery or cloister, with very simple but beautiful architecture and a beautiful, large courtyard with some statues in it. You can sit outside overlooking the courtyard at some tables they have, or you can sit inside where the wood-beamed ceilings and comfortable couches make a great atmosphere. Obviously I have found myself a happy place, and will definitely be spending afternoons there when I have breaks between classes!