The first order of business before relaxing was heading to the police station to quickly fill out a form called the "dichiarazione di ospitalità". If you are a foreigner living and working in Italy, you need to go there along with your host family or landlord and basically declare that they are providing you with a place to live. My host mom is super charming, so in no time the young police officer was using his own personal machine to make photocopies of the form and our ID's. It really is helpful to have a veteran of Milan expedite some of these annoying beaurocratic things that I might have botched on my own.
After getting that out of the way, we headed home and I got to check out my room and bathroom. I don't have to share either of them, which is heavenly. My host mom's daughter is actually doing a high school exchange program in America during my entire stay here, so I am in her room. I've been told that the only restriction is that I can't take down any of the pictures of her and friends that are taped to the wall. I can live with that.
She has another daughter who is around my age and lives in another part of Milan. She's offered to show what night life here is like, so I'm all set in that department. Finally, she has a son who is in his last year of high school and lives with us. He's a boxer so I'll probably go see a match one of these days. We've got two dogs- a 1-year old extremely energetic pit bull named Niki and an old and fragile beagle named Lola. Niki can get really persistent when she wants to play and that makes me a little nervous sometimes because her body is 99% muscle, but I am really looking forward to having dogs for a year.
I'm really sleepy so the order of events here is getting a little jumbled, but at some point I gave my host mom her gifts that I brought from America- peanut butter and jelly, brownie mix, and a cookbook called "America's Favorite Food". I got the pb and j and brownie mix because those are typical things you'd find in a lot of American houses and even though you can find all that stuff here, it is not too common and always much more expensive than it should be. Therefore, people barely ever buy them. The recipe book is great because my host mom likes cooking. Lucky me. ;)
She also helped me out with getting my train tickets to Ferrara and signing up for a Cartafreccia which makes ordering the train tickets online a lot easier. I think most of my friends know this, but my boyfriend Giuseppe lives in Ferrara and I'll be heading down there a lot of times over the weekend. So the sooner the route to get there via public transit becomes automatic for me, the better! Finally, we took a walk so we could print out the tickets and so my host mom could show me how to get from the house to the high school I'll be teaching at. It is less than a 15 minute walk and is basically a straight shot. That's about as convenient as it gets.
Other things that are near her house:
*A huge supermarket so if I ever run out of any toiletries or if I want to stock up on snacks, I just have to take a 5 minute walk and I'm there.
*A dorm where there are a bunch of foreign students studying abroad in Milan who apparently pop up all the time in the grocery store. I might have to accidentally run into one of them and makes friends...
*Stops for the tram and metro.
Good first day. Tomorrow, I'm off to see Giuseppe for the weekend and then Monday I have to be back to get my health insurance and "permesso di soggiorno" all squared away. For those of you who will never plan on studying or working in Italy, don't worry about what that is. Just more paperwork I've got to get it done within 8 days of my arrival, so sooner rather than later is best. Tuesday, I meet with my contact at the school. Wednesday, I am told that I'm going to start teaching. I'm just going with the flow!
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