Welcome to my home

I have spent all of two days living in Rome and while my Italian is still a little rusty, I’d like to think I’m trying the best I can to stay out and about, immersed in the culture. In the meantime, I wanted to introduce you to my apartment by way of a few poorly lit images —

I thought about color-correcting the orange out of these photos, but this is really the feel of our apartment. We have bad light and, yes, there are huge cracks on our smudged-up wall. But, we do have a lot of floor space and the students before us left us tons of useful presents — like Rome guides, spices and cookbooks.

This is my desk and our room fan, which surprisingly we haven't had to use. We don't have air conditioning and our apartment hasn't been humid or hot despite the 90+ degree weather we've been having the past two days. You can't see my full window in this photo very well, but it's probably my favorite part of our room (two beds to a room in a four-person apartment). There is a restaurant smack next to our apartment complex and every night, I hear loud Italian voices, motorbikes, unfamiliar cracks and whistles, and if I'm lucky the accordion player (he's my favorite) will show off his skills for some fortunate diners — and surrounding listeners.

This is our sitting area/dining room and the room deep in the photo is our kitchen.

There are unnecessary doors everywhere.

In our kitchen, we have a washing machine, microwave, gas oven, refrigerator, sink, and tons of storage.

Meet our gas pipe. This is probably the scariest part of our kitchen. We have to turn this knob to flow gas to our stove. Then, we push a button to ignite the flame... sometimes the flame doesn't ignite in our oven which requires long matches, but that's a whole other scary story. We have to remember to turn this knob off or our entire apartment could become extremely flammable.

It might not be five-star accommodations, but it's got Italian charm.