Being long term hostel resident, I've started to feel more and more like a tourist and traveler rather than someone settling into a routine here in Italy. Granted, I do have my routines. A normal day precedes like this:
1) Wake up to plastic bags shuffling around, as apparently plastic has replaced all forms of luggage for the modern day traveler.
2) Wait around for the bathroom (this takes anywhere from 15 mins to 1 hour.)
3) Walk to Piazza Bologna and do some reading, or writing, while fending off the roaming street vendors who just can't seem to get a handle on the fact that I already own enough socks.
4) Meet up with my friend Matt, head to the park and play a game of cribbage.
5) Wander around the city, looking for free things to do. Yesterday I visited the Pantheon and a Gothic church, they were beautiful, and once I start feeling like enough of a tourist to bust out my camera, I'll post some photos.
6) Try to appease the rumbly in my tumbly.
7) Steal internet: look for jobs, send off resumes, explain that I'm not in possession of a working permit, lather, rinse, repeat. E-mail family and friends, check out the weather in VT, hit up CNN to make sure the world is still in it's current state, write a blog.
8) Another game of cribbage, another chapter from my book, another five pages of writing in my journal.
9) Stare at the wall for a number of hours.
10) Fall asleep in the hostel with the light on, in a room that's 80 degrees, under a down comforter, on the top bunk.
11) Wake up numerous times during the night and actually wish I was back in Cesano where I had a room to myself and bed on the floor.
12) Have weird dreams.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. So while I've been hitting up these free tourist places, I've not only felt like a tourist, but acted like one (I never really stopped, seeing as how I still carry my backpack around, only because I'm too frugal to buy a different bag that will hold all of my stuff right now). So that is the basis as to why I broke down and went to dinner at Hard Rock Cafe last night. I know many of you are shaking your heads and saying, "Annie, Annie, Annie, YOU'RE IN ITALY!!! What are you doing going for American cuisine?!?!" Well, a number of factors go into this. Firstly, I don't have a kitchen in which I can cook, so even if I could get my hands on decent meat with which to make a hamburger, I'd be out of luck because of lack of utensils. Number two, I want cheddar cheese on my burger, and a stack of fries, and water with ice, and maybe even some bacon, and I'm willing to pay for it, especially since I'm living with ten million other tourists and feel out of place everywhere I go. I might as well splurge and go somewhere where the smell even reminds me of home (and oh how I miss that fresh Vermont air.) I'm tourist enough to a point that this morning a woman came straight up to me while I was coming off the escalator and started right off into English, she could just tell. I guess that's what you get for being 5'11" with blond hair and freckles in this country. Regardless, when that plate of American beef was placed in front of me, a beam of light came down upon me as the angels sang from above...or maybe it was the burned out lightbulb that the maintenance guy just fixed, but the effect was there, and it was so delicious, oh so gosh darn delicious, and I know that it will hold me over for the next two months, until I can get into the Shed in Stowe and order my own burger and beer for only $8.95. Word.