buon giorno

I hope you all enjoyed my last post consisting only of pictures. Don't worry, I have not slacked off! I just decided to give it a rest for a bit. I'm trying to only post those things that were incredibly interesting, not writing about boring little things.
So in the past few days, I learned about the origins of coffee and ceramics. We get these neat little workshop things... we still have food and opera left! So if you didn't know, cappuccino is named after the cappucci monks who pretty much created the drink and named it after themselves because they wear all brown and have a bare head so the drinks look like little cappucci monks- cute! We also learned about ceramics and watched someone paint and design a bowl. There is a ceramics market on tuesdays so I am definetely going next week to pick out some things :)
We also had a housing meeting where we did silly ice breakers, except the workshop was run by an Irish professor, who happens to be the psychology professor here! She's really neat and very nice :) I love her accent!
In the past few days my friends and I have been trying to find all the good restaurants and shopping places. The Umbra gave us a guide book which we pretty much read cover to cover and am now checking off the places one by one as we go to them. The secret restaurant was amazing, probably one of my favorites so far: it was a nice environment-- everything here is so slow! (it was like a 3 hour meal). I had fettuccine shrimp with mushrooms and everyones' dishes looked amazing. We also finally ate at Parma, for panini (sandwiches) and they were delicious. Last night we ate at the Mediterenerrea (probably spelled wrong) which was fantastic! The service was so fast, in less like 5 minutes these giant pizzas came out. We also had really good tiramisu (which means "pick me up" in italian because of the caffe in it) and nutella pizza which was basically like melted nutella ALL over a GIANT pizza... amazing!
After spending a bit too much money out... (however, I have yet to take money out of the ATM yet!) it's going to be a day of cooking in! I'm planning on making a frittatta with all the ingredients I bought, the book they gave us even has a recipe in it so I can check to make sure I don't mess it up!
So far intensive Italian is going wonderfully, my professor's name is Francesco B (because there are two) and he is very nice and funny (and cute of course). He's really easy to understand so I'm really enjoying the class. I feel like I'm getting a lot more out of Italian just by being here in Italy. This weekend Jackie (basically my best friend here- she's amazing) and I are planning on going to the museum, figuring out the bus system, and going to Assisi for the day (it's only a 20 minute train ride!) We wanted to go to the chocolate factory but it is closed on the weekends :(
Well it's time to be getting ready for my class!
Ciao!

P.S. For all those who wanted to see the hot police officer:
Not exactly the best picture of him- he was great. He was not accessorizing at this point... borrowing girls' purses and demonstrating how we should walk along sketchy streets. He also scared the crap out of every single girl at that meeting and now we are all incredibly paranoid and refer to his stories about "drugga," "italy's favorite sport: women bothering" (or did he say battering) and "they will bash your face in!"