Rocca Fellowship!

Good news, I got the Rocca Fellowship for the next couple of months. So I will be going to Italy! Now comes the hard part... Finding a place to live! I have been trying to find a room in one of the grad dorms just to start, but it sounds like everything is full... Nati suggested calling one of the housing representatives that she knows, which I did. She said she will look around for me, but that the one place she thinks might have an opening is probably too far to commute to the section of campus I want to go to. I looked it up on google maps, it said an hour and ten minutes of commute, including a fair amount of walking. Not that I mind walking, it's just that a train, a bus, and a good chunk of walking is a lot of different stuff to go wrong. Reality is that the commute could be an hour and a half. So... that's kind of sub-par, even if the rent is not bad and the university apartments are not bad.

Next, I looked for studio apartments monolocale and rooms stanze on idealista.it, the major newspaper of Milan's website. My office neighbor Andrea suggested it, and so far, it has had the most listings of any rental site I have looked at. I am learning so many new Italian words! Arredato furnished, affita for rent, piano floor, ascensore elevator. I've sent out emails through the listing site for about a dozen places. Hopefully people will be getting home from work and looking at their emails soon...

So, how about it? Does anyone here know some folks in Milan who are looking for a flat-mate soon? VERY soon?

And, do you think I should buy the plane tickets before I have a room arranged? I am not sure, since the only person I know well enough to impose on in Milan is Marcello, and I am sure it would be a big burden for his family to have me at their place...