Pretty
It finally happened: I love Bologna. They* put Christmas lights up all over the city two weeks ago--and I mean
all over. There's hardly a street without decorations here, and walking around at night in the cold with the soft glow of the lights bouncing off the architecture (many narrow streets and portici,** and pretty much
everything in Bologna is some variation of red or orange) and pine boughs arching over the streets and festively-strung trees in the major piazze. It's a lot quieter outside now than it was before...probably because of the cold, which is honestly the strongest I've ever lived in. (And I still don't have a good winter coat, because I'm lazy and hate clothes-shopping.) A lot of people say that Bologna is different from the other major Italian cities in that, instead of having well-known landmarks, it's sort of a general mood that permeates the city. But the main thing is, I've found I'm happier just walking around here now.
*Who? I don't know. The local Bureau of Making Things Festively Italian, I guess.
**(After Venice, it's the second-best-preserved city-center in Italy.)
peachy as always, Mike at 12:38 PM
Not Enough Time
I have a midterm tomorrow in International Monetary Theory. (It's worse than it sounds.) In one sense, this is probably the hardest class I've ever taken, but it doesn't keep me from wasting time when I should be studying. Maybe I've gotten a little cocky since I managed to overcome my frustration* and I have a strong sense of how the basic ideas work. I just want to get a B--I just want to pass. I don't think it'll be horribly hard to pass, and that must be why I'm not studying right now.
* This is actually an amusing anecdote in itself: I wasn't the only student struggling with the material--a group of my classmates went to the academic affairs dean to complain about the professor and petition that he not be asked back due to the miserable time** we're having. The leader of this group then sent a message about this meeting to the class email list--which included the professor. Oops.
** It was really weird at first. He assigns readings from one textbook, then takes his lectures (which he teaches at a Ph.D level, using economic methods we haven't studied, and making frequent mistakes) from another textbook and gave us homework based on outside readings. Things have kind of fallen into place, but only now that I've been studying and I see that some of what he lectured on was covered in readings he assigned three or four weeks later.
peachy as always, Mike at 11:48 AM
