Jess 1-20-08

Ciao!

Just a short update today. Bill and I, at the suggestion of my roommates Kim and Daniella, went out to a bar called "Loch Ness Cultural Club" last night and it was great fun. It's behind a simple green door and you have to buy a membership card for the year to enter, but once inside it's quite a close and cozy community. At it's core, of course, it's just a bar. But unlike many of the bars and clubs around it, Loch Ness feels much more private and more about talking than about getting drunk, which I like. Due to the green door and the shiny blood-red interior paint job, it does feel quite literally like entering Miss Nessy's belly. There was live acoustic music, even a pool table and a foosball table, which Bill and I spent a lot of our time at. We played a few games with some fellow students from Palazzo Rucellai and then with some older Italian men who were very nice and very, very good at the game. That was the most fun, stumbling through our only English-speaking translator (one of the men) and our broken Italian, playing a stupid table game together. I hope maybe we can meet them again, they were genuinely nice, and didn't give off the "creepy vibe" that a lot of the men at the bars exude like a musky cologne.

In any case, it was much more fun than a normal bar, which can be so very drab and boring, and it was nice to meet some real people. I suppose that's about it for this entry. I'll have to figure out what to eat tonight because I forgot nothing is open on Sunday... not even the local supermarket. Sounds like pasta with butter tonight!