Blog #2

I spent the first day in Calgiari being in awe of how beautiful everything was and also wishing that I spoke some Italian. We arrived in Calgiari on Thursday, and one of the first thing I noticed when I walked out of the airport was the trees. The palm trees were short and thick compared to tall and skinny ones that I have seen in California, and the bark on most of the trees looks smooth instead of rough. Later that night we walked down to the square near where we are staying and had pizza and gelato for dinner. I had forgotten that water is not free at restaraunts in Italy, so when I was looking at the menu I was surprised to see that each bottle of water costed 1.50 euros. After dinner, most of us went back to the guesthouse to sleep to try and get rid of the jet-lag we had from traveling.

On Friday, we walked to the University of Calgiari to meet students who study there and visiting students from the Università di Padova. We talked with some of them while the professors were setting up the activities and lectures, and I was surpised to find that most of them were 23 years old or older. We listened to students from each University (including Northeastern) give presentations about the history, the engineering cirriculum, and the student life at each school. Northeastern University definitely had the most to offer in terms of student life, because we have so many student groups, but the other universities were much older and had a very interesting history. At the end of the class we split up into groups of six (two people from each univeristy) and had a debate on four topics related to school and lectures and exams. The topic that my group was debating was that written exams were better than oral exmas. Tests in the US are mostly written, so the four Italian students in my group explained to Laruen and I how oral tests operate. At the beginning of the debate I did think that I would like taking oral tests, but after talking to the Italian students I started to see how it could be very beneficial. I was very impressed with the Italian students because they knew english very well, though they kept telling us that they did not think that their english was good. The Sardinian language is very similar to spanish, so some of the people on the dialogue who knew spanish tried to communicate with them that way.

That night for dinner, we experienced a multiple course meal that was primarily seafood. There was some food served that I have eaten in the US (like tuna, shrimp, mussels, and calimari), though they were cooked in different oils and spices so it still tasted different (some were more flavorful in my opinion). Some of the local food/drink that was served was the Sardinian lobster (which was very small), Sardinian bread (which was very thin) and a berry liqour that was served after coffee. One of my favorite parts of the meal was a lemon sorbet that was served between the last food course and the coffee course to clean our palates. 

We had Saturday morning free, but in the afternoon we were invited to the professor from the Università di Padova's beach house in Geremeas where he and his students were staying. We were picked up by the students from Padova, and on the drive over Marco, one of the students from UniPD, told us that the reason why Italians have smaller cars is because the streets are narrow, which did not stop him from driving very fast! While we were at the beach house I learned two phrases in Italian from some of the students: Mi chiamo Erika (My name is Erika) and Sono Americana (I am American).