Casa mia
19:43
Despite having arrived in Pavia on September 4th, Thursday the 19th was the day I was allowed to move into my hall of residence. I would provide an explanation as to why I wasn't allowed to move in earlier, but I wasn't given one, so you'll have to remain as confused as I am. After staying in two different houses for the first two weeks of my time here I was pleased to have finally gained a permanent address for the next semester.
I consider myself a cheerful soul and my year abroad a wonderful opportunity, so I'm going to start with the positives. My bedroom is not as small as I expected it to be. For the price I'm paying and the rumours I'd heard about my hall, I was expecting to be living in a large cupboard for the next five months. However, there is a fair amount of floor space (some of which is definitely still visible between piles of my clothes) and a very large window, so the light is actually significantly better than in the room I had last year in Bristol (and paid nearly £400 per month for). I also have an en suite bathroom, something that I've never had before in my life aside from in the occasional hotel room.
Due to either insurance restrictions or Catholicism, I am not allowed
guests to stay overnight in my bedroom. Rather than putting a system in
place whereby somebody actually checks up on this, they seem to have combated this issue by giving me a bed the size of a roomy matchbox. I am not particularly thrilled about this as I spent the last academic year with a double bed and have, therefore, become accustomed to being able to move about in my sleep without hitting my head against a wall or bedside table. I'm currently trying to perfect a sleeping position that I have dubbed The Coffin – it involves lying on your back with your arms and legs completely stiff and not moving at all, as if stricken by rigor mortis. If I manage to crack it I will publish a guide.
I had been warned that the internet was slow in Italy before I arrived but I didn't give it a great deal of thought, mostly because I was preoccupied with trying to find somewhere affordable to stay for two weeks. After finding somewhere that wouldn't bankrupt me and avoiding spending the first fourteen days of my year abroad as a down-and-out, I have now evaluated the situation and I can tell you this: the internet here is terrible.
My God, is it terrible. I'd say it was crappy but, frankly, I think I'd be doing faecal matter a disservice in that comparison. The photo at the top of this post took ten minutes to upload and it was taken using a phone with a camera so poor that I haven't even bothered to look up how many megapixels it is. The only good thing that has come of the broadband here is that I will never complain about the internet I have at home ever again. One UK broadband company has started using Usain Bolt to market their services and if UK internet is Usain Bolt then Italian internet is the fat kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who went swimming in the chocolate lake and got stuck in the pipes. It’s like UK internet is a cheetah and Italian internet is an elderly snail covered in toffee, or if UK internet were a Ferrari and Italian internet is a shopping trolley with a stuck wheel. This is if I can get a connection at all; a lot of my time online is spent holding my laptop at various angles, trying to get enough signal for a webpage to load and then, once I do, contorting myself into various strange and uncomfortable positions in an attempt to use it without moving it.
As a result, I have become one of those young people who is addicted
to their smartphone (as opposed to before when I was one of those young people
who is addicted to their computer). Don’t think that has solved my problem,
mind you. I can access Facebook but that’s pretty much it. Any webpage that
contains anything more complex than some text and a JPEG image can be forgotten
about and Skype is absolutely out of the question. I made the terrible mistake of using my phone’s
internet to send an e-mail to my grandmother that contained three photographs I
took at Lake Como, at which point my SIM card had a nervous breakdown and
refused to function at all until I deleted the offending e-mail before it could
be sent. Italy: please sort your internet out.
Now, here is where the real self-loathing starts. I am about to complain about my en suite bathroom. This is counter-intuitive as I've never had one before and I was very excited to get one, and I have very much enjoyed being able to get up in the night without having to put clothes on, and not having to wait hours in the morning just to wash. However, there is a very large design flaw in my bathroom and that is the shower.
Most shower manufacturers seem to have embraced the idea of either putting a shower in a bath or building it inside a kind of glass cubicle in order to prevent the water from the shower from going all over the bathroom. I am fully in favour of this development in the world of hygiene technology; unfortunately, it appears that my hall of residence is not. I merely have a shower curtain which, when coupled with a shallow raised platform about two inches high with no discernible ledge round the sides to keep the curtain in, is less an effective anti-flooding device and more a billowy, plastic irritant. As a result, every time I take a shower the room floods. I'm not just talking about a few spots of water here and there; the entire floor is half an inch deep in water. The first time it happened I didn't realise and it seeped out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, nearly reaching the corridor. I've found the best way to minimise this problem is to have the pressure on so low that it's barely a dribble – it takes about half an hour to wash my hair but at least I'm not living in fear of the warden ringing me up to tell me that the ceiling of the room below me is leaking.
So, my moany description of my new abode is complete. Now I've got that off of my chest, I think I'll stick to concentrating on the positive aspects, such as the ample wardrobe space, well thought-out plug socket placements and the fact that having a fixed address means that it doesn't take me half an hour to explain my living situation to people anymore.
Now, here is where the real self-loathing starts. I am about to complain about my en suite bathroom. This is counter-intuitive as I've never had one before and I was very excited to get one, and I have very much enjoyed being able to get up in the night without having to put clothes on, and not having to wait hours in the morning just to wash. However, there is a very large design flaw in my bathroom and that is the shower.
Most shower manufacturers seem to have embraced the idea of either putting a shower in a bath or building it inside a kind of glass cubicle in order to prevent the water from the shower from going all over the bathroom. I am fully in favour of this development in the world of hygiene technology; unfortunately, it appears that my hall of residence is not. I merely have a shower curtain which, when coupled with a shallow raised platform about two inches high with no discernible ledge round the sides to keep the curtain in, is less an effective anti-flooding device and more a billowy, plastic irritant. As a result, every time I take a shower the room floods. I'm not just talking about a few spots of water here and there; the entire floor is half an inch deep in water. The first time it happened I didn't realise and it seeped out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, nearly reaching the corridor. I've found the best way to minimise this problem is to have the pressure on so low that it's barely a dribble – it takes about half an hour to wash my hair but at least I'm not living in fear of the warden ringing me up to tell me that the ceiling of the room below me is leaking.
So, my moany description of my new abode is complete. Now I've got that off of my chest, I think I'll stick to concentrating on the positive aspects, such as the ample wardrobe space, well thought-out plug socket placements and the fact that having a fixed address means that it doesn't take me half an hour to explain my living situation to people anymore.
* Before you start throwing gravy-covered chips at me, this remark was intended in jest. The north of England is actually home to some of my favourite cities and people.
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