Toilette Etiquette

This was my bedroom in Firenze. I slept about an inch away from my roomate, so luxury may be a bit of an understatement. I must say, the orange and pink comforters did us justice. Despite Italy's poor attempt to keep heat running in every household, these blankets kept us warm.

Every evening, I would return home to find my host mom, Gina, already dressed in her fuzzy blue pajamas and pink slippers, cooking up some four course dinner-you know the usual: soup or pasta, then meat, and more pasta, and paired with Italian bread drenched in balsamico (I would always get made fun of for drowning my bread in the vinegar), but I'll save the food for another post.

It's funny because back in Syracuse, returning home for the day means doing loads of homework, trying to throw some sort of Mac N' Cheese plus veggie concoction together with about 4 other roomates cooking dinner simultaneously, and deciding whether you want to make the hike down to the Marshall Street bars in the cold or stay in for a wine night.

I must say, getting ready to go out(showering, putting up makeup in the bathroom, etc.) is a lot easier here in Syracuse.

Inside 16 Via Fiesolana, I shared what I would joke was a 2x2 box of a bathroom. The reality doesn't get much better.

My shower was about a centimeter away from the toilet and the sink. I really don't even know if you could call it a shower. The drain was on the floor of our bathroom with a curtain rod above to give us some sort of shower domain. When I drew the curtain, I faced two cabinets with a mirror the size of a 4x6 picture frame hanging above the sink. I guess you could say I got pretty close with all aspects of the stanzo da bagno that semester. My favorite part of it all was the post shower activity: mopping. That's right, I mopped up all the water since the drain was the size of my palm. I somehow did not mind this, and either did my roomate. It became a normalcy: going to the bathroom, walking not even a step "into the shower," wrapping a curtain around us, and making sure we did not exceed the ten minute maximum time allotted before the water started to flood.

There was of course the one time where we had a guest from the states stay over who didn't understand the ten minute shower rule. I assumed she thought 25 minutes was an allotted grace period we decided not to tell her about. The result: the entire room flooded, causing two tiles on my side of the bedroom to lift up. I covered for our friend, but luckily was not charged.

We also discovered how fast two people could go through a roll of toilet paper. Trying to translate this was a bit difficult at first. This is where language barrier issues definitely became evident. But we finally mustered up the courage to ask our step sister when we were down to our last two sheets. "Carta igienica," she laughed. So did our host parents when they found out how nervous we were to ask. Soon enough, the request for toilet paper,"Io ho bisogno di carta ignienica, per favore" became our new favorite phrase.

At Syracuse, my bathroom is a bit different. Ironically, I share it with the same roomate I did in Italy. Now, we have two sinks, two mirrors, actual walking space, and a shower with a glass door rather than a curtain. I liked my 2x2 Italian box bathroom better.