January 21

Boar statue in the city center. Today, we began our 2 week survival Italian course! Since UNC gets here earlier than all of the other university students, we take a course all together before "real" classes start.  In the mornings, we have some kind of field trip planned and in the afternoons we have 2 hours of Italian. This morning, an LdM professor gave us a walking tour of the city. He was great and very animated and loved telling us about legends of the city. He showed us this boar statue. If you rub his nose and call him "darling" in Italian, you can put a coin in his mouth. If the coin lands in the grate below, you have good luck. Not to worry people, my coin fell in the grate! After lunch at the apartment, I went to my Italian course where we started with the very basics. Dinner was a pepper, tomato, mozzarella, spinach and eggplantpanini from Pino's for 3.50.