Home Sweet Home

I can’t believe we’re over ¼ of the way done with the semester already!! We are having so much fun and the time is flying by! The girls and I decided to go to Florence for a weekend and tour around the city. It is so big and there is so much to see. We are going to go back another weekend to see things we didn’t have time to see this time! We had a blast, probably the best weekend yet! It made me appreciate Siena so much more than I did before. Florence is full of people all the time. It can be overwhelming but we were able to find a hostel out of the crowds, which was nice. Siena is a lot more laid back with less tourism and though you can find a good amount of people who speak English here, Florence is very “Americanized” compared to Siena. I personally came to learn the Italian language and in Siena this is possible. Florence is a beautiful city, the buildings are unbelievable and you would never be bored there. However, everyone speaks English there. When we arrived back in Siena it felt like home. We had such a great time but we all decided this is what we considered “home”. We have become partial to Siena and the people here.

While in Florence we went and saw the Duomo and Baptistery. Words cannot explain how beautiful they are. We spent most of the day on Saturday at the leather market! What a great place to get gifts for family and friends- even yourself! We had lunch at the food market for a great price and the food was so fresh and delicious! For dinner we went to a bar and had “aperitivo” and we were so full! It was a great mini-vacation for us and it’s such a great time to visit other cities in Italy and see what else is out there. You learn so much from traveling.

Earlier on in the week we took a cooking class, paid for by CET! That was also an amazing experience! The chef was so nice and we were able to get the recipes to take home so we could make the food ourselves. This was a great experience for all of us. My roommate had been talking about wanting to learn how to cook since we got here and she finally was able to learn some tricks and has been making food more and more. We all are excited to get home to cook a true Italian feast for our families now!

We also got to meet our Italian Language Partners this week! We are partnered up with an Italian student who wants to learn English and it’s up to us to see each other again. You can speak Italian for 30 minutes then English 30 minutes…it’s up to you two. It’s great because it’s a one on one and you learn Italian as they learn English. It is great for both parties involved! I can’t wait to hang out more with my partner and get to know her better!

Overall this month has flown by. We have classes every day but I don’t feel overwhelmed with homework and reading. We have time to go travel on the weekends and meet up for dinner together at least once a week. I personally am staying in an apartment but two of the girls are doing a home stay. I feel so welcome to go visit them any time I want which is nice to feel so welcome in someone else’s home! Having free time and feeling welcome by the Italian people mean a lot to me. It has helped the adjustment of leaving my family and everything back in the States. Siena is a smaller city, it’s not as big as Florence but I truly feel as if I’m apart of the community here now. We’ve met a lot of people and see them on the streets and they always stop to say hi!

I was told to say how I feel both positive and negative in my blogs; however, thus far I haven’t had a complaint yet. If I ever needed anything I know I could ask anyone corresponded with CET and if that person couldn’t help or didn’t know the answer to my question, they would find out or direct me to the person I needed to speak with. I have strongly been thinking about staying another semester in Italy and one thing I really appreciated was receiving an email from a CET worker that was a graduate from my college back in the States. He was so helpful and told me things, both positive and negative, about staying in Italy. It meant a lot to have everyone go out of their way to give me one more person to help me make this major decision in my life.

Aimee Crouch, University of Iowa
CET Siena Student Correspondent