Each day, I ventured a bit further and got to know the city a bit better, and I am now comfortable walking most anywhere and taking the bus and the train to get around.
I also had to shift my brain into Italian mode. I have studied a lot of languages in my life – seven to be precise – and most of my Italian studies were nearly 20 years ago when I was a college student. I did some one-on-one Italian classes with a tutor online before coming to Italy to refresh my memory, but nonetheless, it took a few days to dust the cobwebs out of the Italian corner of my brain and recalibrate to have Italian come out as my default language. I have also been speaking several of the other languages that I know with some regularity – greeting Senegalese migrants on the street in Wolof and then chatting with them in French, speaking in Hindi with an Indian waiter at a restaurant where I had dinner and speaking Bengali with several Bangladeshi shopkeepers, often all in the same day. Speaking multiple languages is a blessing and a joy, but it can be hard to keep them separate in my head and the effort results in me feeling quite tired at the end of each day.
Finding a more permanent place to live was next on my list. When I move to a new city in the U.S., I can generally reach out to people in my network to get a sense of how much things cost and which neighborhoods are good to live in, and I know already which websites I can use to search for apartments and how to recognize scams. Without any of that background, I spent hours doing research online and walking around the city to get a feel for different neighborhoods and chatting with people about how to find a suitable place.
