Day Twenty-One.

Today was Laura's birthday!

We had class, as per usual. Today we had Cinema and talked more about the "crisis" of the early 60's where there was a feeling of emptiness caused by Italy's rapid industrialization and the Italians' quest for affluence. We watched a couple of clips and analyzed them and tomorrow we'll watch a movie.

We went to the Mensa for lunch as always and then after lunch I headed over to the video game store to look for a charger for my Nintendo DS because the one I brought from America wasn't working. Luckily the guy spoke a little English (couldn't find the word for charger in my dictionary!) AND they had one in stock! Only 10 euro! Yay! So that was a triumph.

Italian class was normal. We're working on the past tense. In Italian they use the present perfect to express the past tense so we are working on mastering that while simultaneously learning a lot of grammar we were never taught in school. Lots of identification of sentence tenses/moods/voices/etc. I like that stuff and I'd like it more if it didn't also include learning another language but maybe linguistics will be another chapter in my life.

We came back to the apartment after class and Erin and Jordan went to the travel agency to book our day trip plans for this weekend: Genova! Genova (or Genoa) is the main port of Italy and the industrial products from Turin and Milan get shipped out there. Also, it's beautiful, warmer than Alba, and on the water. We're going Saturday, leaving Alba at 7 and coming back around 8. 25 euro roundtrip--pretty good. We're all excited. Staying around Alba for a whole three day weekend is kind of rough.

For dinner we got all dressed up and went to VinCafe for dinner with the boys. Dan had paid for wine for all of us for Laura's birthday so that was fun (the wine was too strong for me!). We had similar stuff that we'd had there before. They pick what we eat when we go as a big group. The pomodoro was very good.

Afterwards Erin, Paul and I went and got gelato and then met everyone at the boys' apartment for drinking and music playing. There was a lot of drinking since it was Laura's 21st and she wanted to get "blackout drunk." Eventually we went downstairs to the bar under the boys' apartment and everyone ordered absinthe. Kiki wanted to go home around 12 because she's sick and wants to get better so she wanted sleep. I went back with her because I was pretty done and things were going to get messy once that absinthe was done. There will be stories, I'm sure. Kiki and I made bets on who would hook up with who. We shall see.

Tomorrow is normal again--a movie in Cinema and then Italian class. Dino says he'll have another exercise for us so we can practice for the test on Thursday. Other than that tomorrow looks normal but I'm sure there will be stories from tonight--if people can remember!

Signing off!