Pasta ed Amore

I know it's been a long time. There's a lot to catch up on. Not all of it will be written tonight, because I have work in the morning, but soon.

I've become good friends with Salvo, one of my housemates. He's Sicilian, so I can practice my few words of Italian on him and talk about Italy, we bond over bottles of Italian wine (thanks to the European union it's almost cheaper here that in Italy). He works at Philips, in research, so we meet for lunch or run into each other around the campus, and through him I've fallen in with the young Italian expatriates, a whole group working on PhDs or at their first real jobs, all under thirty (unusual around here), and all Italian, except for Andrew (Maltese, but adopted into the group because his Italian is good). We've been following the world cup together, cheering for Italy. It's so nice tohear the language spoken again, to hang out with Salvo when he's talking to his friends here and back home and understand what's going on.

Tonight, Salvo and I took over the kitchen to make spaghetti carbonara, which was fabulous. We ate together and talked about work and engineering in general--it's so nice to be living with someone else who gets the same gleam in his eye when talking about integrated circuits and programming languages as I must. Two very likeminded people.

Basically, life here is good. The weather has not been great (dreary for over a week = me begging to see the sun again), but today the sun came out for a bit in the evening and broke the monotony. I'm going to Italy for my birthday this weekend, so I'll be getting away from the clouds for a few days at least.

Ah, Italy this weekend. I'm so psyched.

For now, to bed. Work in the morning, work and getting paid the day after, and Italy on Friday.