First, I really do love my apartment! It has a small kitchen with a stove top, microwave (although even that operates much differently!), and refridgerator. I have basically been eating only pasta for dinner at my apartment. I have now branched out to buying some packaged meals that you put in a pot, add water, and let it boil for awhile.. things like risoto with mushrooms, seafood, and even picked up some soup. I love pasta, but have been trying to think of different ways to make it bc after my first two or three days I realized I would get tired of pasta VERY quickly if I didn't change how I made it! Since then I have tried a few ways to cook it and have found a serious favorite!! One way I'll cook the pasta is just plain, add a little bit of olive oil (of course!) and add either cheese, garlic, or garlic and red peppers. One time at the grocery store I picked up some crab meat (you know the fake kind that is orange and white?) and decided I'd try putting that in the pasta. I was super excited and thought it was going to be really good! I cooked up some pasta, added olive oil, boiled some carrots to add, put in some mozzerlla cheese, and added the crab meat. Oh, I should add that in the middle of cooking this meal my power went out!! The circuts are easily overloaded and I am usually very careful to turn things off if I'm not using them. This day I was not! Well, anyways, that pasta meal turned out to be a flop! Even after adding some spices to it. So now for my favorite pasta meal, I try to to make it all the time bc I'm scared I'll get sick of it, but I really do love it!! I picked up some little packages of cubed meat at the grocery store one day thinking it was prociutto (very common here) and I'd add it to my pasta. I brought it home and translated the package and found out it was actually bacon, but was still okay with that. I cooked some pasta and put the bacon and mozzeralla in with the pasta. I thought maybe I'd have to add some spices to give it flavor, but figured I'd try it without first. It definitely did not need any spices.. it was pack full of delicious flavor!!! Their bacon doesn't taste like ours, it's a little different, and I still have not really been able to describe it, but it was DELICIOUS!!
This is a picture of my fabulous meal, accompanied by a glass of vino (again, of course!)
Second, it's not really a daily thing, just a funny story. So I wanted to buy vino (wine) at the store one day but realized I didn't remember seeing a corkscrew at the apartment, so held off. Well I couldn't find a corkscrew and was at Porta Portese (the flea market type thing) for the first time with the girls and someone pointed out a corkscrew to me. I decided to buy it, and she jokingly said "Oh, you'll probably use it once and it will break". Well I think she jinxed me.. I didn't even finish using it and it broke! The screw part was in the cork, with nothing attached so I had no way to get it out. Finally, after about 30 minutes and using pliers I got it out! Since then I have bought another corkscrew (a better one) that has not given me any problems!
Third: Laundry... I will be so happy to go home and be able to do laundry in a washer!! I have no washer in my apartment and while there is a laundromat down the road from me I decided it would be easier (and MUCH cheaper!!) to do wash by hand. For the most part this has not been a problem, but I have discovered that pants are the hardest to wash by hand! I have a medium size bucket (pictured below) that I put water and detergent in to wash the clothes. Then I fill the sink up with clean water to rinse the clothes out after washing them. Then I need to wring everything out (I never realized how much water the washer wrings out of clothes!), and then hang them on the drying wrack. The drying wrack has become a permanant fixture in my living room (luckily it's a relatively large living room) and so have all the towels that I strategecially place around the bottom bc my clothes are usually still very wet and drip on the floor. Although, I guess I can be grateful that I have a large drying wrack bc the other girls do not have one, and are constantly being creative to find a place to hang their clothes, although they do have a washer. Washers are tiny, if you have one in your apartment, and pretty much no one has driers in their apartments.
My laundry station
Finally, the coffee maker here. Now, I am fortunate to have a bar (what they call cafes here in Roma) at school so I can get any sort of coffee there during the day, but I still sometimes like to start with a cup of coffee when I first wake up. So I found the coffe maker, shown below, and was very confused on how to use it!
Finally after much research I figured out how to use it, and was able to share my knowlege with the other girls (they had one and also had no idea how to use it!) So it comes apart in three parts. You can see the first divide at the bottom, that unscrews from the top part. That larger, top part is where the coffee ends up after it's made. The smaller bottom part is where you fill up the water, and there is a metal filter that fits in the top of that and that is where you put the coffee. Then you put it on the stove (as you see), turn the stove on high and wait for it to whistle like a teapot. It was an adventure the first time I made coffee, but have got it down to a sience now!!
Hope you enjoyed the fun little information about my life here, more updates from Firenze (Florence) and others will be up soon, although don't know how much this week bc my family just arrived today!!!! :)
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