My First Month Here #HogsAbroad in Rome

First of all, I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. To be honest this first month has been a little bit of a whirlwind, and I’m finally settling in and taking advantage of quiet moments like this to write.

I love visiting the Pantheon

My first two weeks here were by far the hardest. Upon arriving in Rome, I got really bad jetlag. So essentially I divided my time between sleeping, feeling sick, and trying to keep myself awake. Fortunately I was able to fully adjust after about five days. The unfortunate thing is I got sick with some weird virus immediately afterwards, which sent me straight back to bed for a week. Not only were the first two weeks difficult physically, but also being sick in a foreign country created a lot of homesickness. I wasn’t able to go out and explore my new home city, and I wasn’t able to keep myself busy with schoolwork since classes hadn’t officially started.

Upon my recovery and the beginning of my third week in Rome, I had recovered and was feeling more confident in living in this new city. Classes at the University of Arkansas Rome Center were beginning as well, and my daily walk to school from Prati to the Historic Center takes me past places like the Vatican and Castille S Angelo on a daily basis. This semester I am taking 15 credit hours divided between four classes: Art and Culture, Modern and Contemporary Rome, Architecture of the City, and Architecture Studio. I’ll go into them more in depth in another post.

View from my walk to school

Another wonderful thing about living in Rome is that food is so cheap! I can spend €2.50 on a panini for lunch and be full for hours, or I can go to the grocery store down the street and spend €50 for $100 worth of food in the States, and don’t get me started on how amazing gelato is.

Gelato is so good!

I’m eating well, and walking everywhere. My normal apartment-to-school walk in the morning is 25 min long.

While classes occupy four days a week, the other three are filled with traveling, touring, and work on projects. It’s been an adventure! Also, there’s a much greater access to travel here as plane tickets are incredibly cheap, high-speed trains run pretty much everywhere, and going between countries in the Schengen Area is easy and hassle-free.

I’ve been busy planning to take advantage of every travel opportunity I have! There are too many places I’m wanting to visit and not enough time to see them all. Seriously though, I’ll take suggestions and recommendations, especially if they’re related to food!

Keep an eye out for posts coming soon about my classes, trips I’ve taken, and more about my life in Rome. Now that I’m settling into my routine here I will be posting a lot more frequently.
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Read more from Sarah at https://sarahromesitaly.wordpress.com
Check out http://studyabroad.uark.edu/romecenter for more information on the U of A Rome Center options.