Monsieur, with these Rocher you are really spoiling us

Hello, apologies for the long absence. I've been mostly running around trying to sort things out.

So, I've moved into a really nice apartment in Villa Pamphilli, a green and leafy area of Rome. It's lovely, but does have the disadvantages of being on the wrong side of the river and a long bus ride from the centre. Yes, that's right, I located the East Dulwich of Rome...ha.
(apologies for my messy room)



The view from one of our TWO terraces...love it. There's an enormous park right at the end of the street. I am living with Diego and Valentina, an Italian couple - he is a researcher in archeaology and she translates books from English to Italian - and an American student called Ben who is doing an internship at the World Food Programme.

Anyway, to finance my new, elegant Italian lifestyle, I have been frantically looking for work. I spent 2 and a half hours queuing up in the tax office to obtain a codice fiscale, a tax code - my first brush with the infamous Italian bureaucracy - and I have in theory been offered a job teaching for a school to start next week. Fingers crossed, I'm not sure I entirely believe in it until it materialises. I HAVE signed a contract, but, well, it's a freelance co-operative agreement, of the type that most teaching jobs in Rome are offered on, and basically offers absolutely no security or guarantees. Looks like I'm going to have to get used to that.

In the meantime, I have been tutoring a couple of students for an english language exam, the IELTS, which you have to take to go to university in the UK. It's interesting - teaching one to one is less pressure than a class, especially as they're both lovely people. Trying to get Jacopo to do any work whatsoever is difficult, as he has the concentration span of a goldfish and tends to start doodling "dodgy" (his favourite english word - apparently there's no italian equivalent) over everything. Yesterday I was getting him to practice listening exercises using a CD which came with the practice materials, but it obviously had a grease mark on it as it kept skipping. He went out of the room to clean it and then came back saying "I think I do a bad thing. I think I do something bad to the CD..." he'd tried to clean it using nailvarnish remover. Turns out, if you put nailvarnish remover on a CD it then starts trying to play backwards...so that was the end of that listening practice lesson.

Anyway, since I last posted lots of other stuff has happened...we finished our CELTA, which was a HUGE relief - that ocurse is seriously ridiculously intensive. After finishing we had a night of partying at the Turkish Embassy, courtesy of Nur, a girl on the course whose father works there. It was incredibly posh and exciting, though I was slightly saddened by the absence of that embassy staple...ferrero rocher.


Following that, my parents came to stay for a flying 4 day visit, so we did lots of sightseeing including a boat trip on the Tiber that my dad declared to be "crap".

It was really nice to see them and I think they enjoyed Rome despite all its drawbacks of crazy traffice and expensive-ness.

Anyway, now that I've got an apartment and am hopefully settled for the next 2 months, I am ready to receive visitors, so if you're thinking of coming to Rome, let me know.