Never take for granted: Towels, electricity, warm water, grocery stores, clean produce, owning a car or an American citizenship.
These are things that have caused me great grief since I moved to Italy.
The first item - towels - has quite a story to accompany it so I will save that for last.
Electricity: I can NEVER get a full charge on my laptop. I don't know if it is the power in my room or what but I have had to use my roommates charger since I have been here and I would really like to be independent please!
Warm water: Supplies enough for a shower and a half. So unless you like a serious wake up call during your morning shower, schedule an oddball time during the day and dedicate it to hygiene (which btw I am a constant sticky mess over here.... hello humidity!)
Grocery stores: For the love... no one speaks English... and we were given these poor people meal tokens to use in grocery stores (which grocers don't know how to use)... long story short... I ended up having to purchase three 2 liter bottles of water in order to compensate (total scam, whatever) and then having to walk about a mile home with all my groceries plus tons of water. Oh and did I mention my plastic bags nearly ripped and my food almost spilled all over the road? As terrible as this sounds this is one of the stories we tell people and can't stop laughing over.
Clean produce: So my roommate bought a pepper last night and guess what surprise she found in it! Maggots. Yes, we almost puked. I guess they don't regulate imports here so you have to be very careful when picking out produce... YUCK.
Owning a car: We have blown so much money on the metro. We applied for our month pass this morning, but won't receive it for 15-20 more days. (And we even saw the passes sitting on the desk ready for use.... Now I know how the metro makes their money!)
BUT I don't know if I would want to own a car here anyway.... the traffic is bloody mad I tell you. If I come home with a missing limb, this is the reason why.
American citizenship: As residents for over 90 days we had to apply for a permit of stay which is basically just another way of taking 140 euros right out of our pockets.
Last but not least.... let me just tell you how difficult it is to obtain a towel in this city...
Half of our group did not pack a towel (because seriously, who had room in their luggage for that!?) So we took several detours around town before figuring out the only possible store which might sell towels would be good old IKEA. Little did we know as we left, we would trek for 5 hours before finding any towels! To get to IKEA we had to take two different lines on the metro, a train, and walk a 5K. Oh yeah, and the walking part.... on the freeway. No, I am not joking (Sorry mom&dad). Haha how nuts is that?! I am sure we looked like a bunch of orphans walking on the side of the freeway with all our belongings on our backs. It was crazy because we finally figured out which train we had to take because by some miracle we found a lady who could speak partial english (bless her soul) and as we were riding we eventually passed the huge IKEA sign... but the train kept going and going and going before it stopped, all the while we were pleading for it to please let us off! Haha anyways so we start walking back to where we had come from when we realize the only way to get there is to cross the freeway. So we hopped on the road and followed it while cars were zooming past us. A little scary but a crazy story! When we finally got to IKEA we looked through the whole store and to our devastation we did not find any towels. However, we found some very rad teeny baby towels (which I wasn't even mad about haha) until we got to check out and mahalla! There we came across some seriously dingy, but useable towels. This story doesn't even compare with the experience, but I hope you can imagine how my feet felt as I went to bed that night. Take that back... Imagine how my feet feel every night! I am a girl in serious need of a foot massage (and I hate people touching my feet).
Okay so this sounded like a rant, which it partially was, but I want to remember every experience, good and bad! And as bad as some of this stuff was, it has kept us all laughing from day one.
As my motto continues.... "It's all chill because we are in Milan".
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