10 things to do in Padova before the end of your Erasmus

One week before going back to Portugal I realised there where some things that I really had to do in Padova before leaving... Here are the top 10! 

1- Organising/participating in a meeting in Prato della Valle (drinks, games, music and lots of fun in the second biggest square of Europe for one last time with all the international friends I made along the year)

         

2- Having lunch/dinner in 212 Hamburguer & Delicious in the Ghetto (the famous fast food restaurant in the ancient Jewish neighbourhood of Padova, with a very original decoration, where you can sit on a swing instead of a normal chair)

                       

3- Visit Basilica di Sant'Antonio for one last time (even if you have a different or no religion at all, this impressive church deserves a visit)

       

4- Ride your bike on Via Umberto/Roma (for me, these are the two most beautiful streets to take a nice relaxing bike ride or walk)

                 

5- Have a bottellon in Piazza dei Signori (the best way to start any night)

       

6- Have a beer/cafe at Piazza dell'Erbe (you can also enjoy the famous fruit market that takes place every morning there)

                      

7- Have a Spritz at Hemingway (actually this is not the real name of the bar, but everyone knows it by this name, since the owner resembles the famous writer. Here you can have the Spritz with the oldest recipe in Padova, which according to the legend the owner learned from a monk when he was young)

                       

8- Go for Apperitivo at Sfizio (if you did your Erasmus in Padova, you will have spent a lot of evenings/nights at this students bar and you have to say goodbye to Mauro, or else he will certainly be offended!)

                         

9- Go out to Factory Club (the famous night club were all the Erasmus students spend most of their Wednesdays/Fridays)

10- And finally, the most important one, take a dive in the fountain of Prato della Valle (a tradion that every Erasmus student must do before the end of the program)

                     

Here you go! If you ever do Erasmus in Padova make sure you don't forget this list and try to check all of it at before you leave. 

Hope you enjoyed it and fell free to add some more ideas! :)

Bank wins - Round 2

I decided to go to the bank on a Friday afternoon (as I have always done) to make one last deposit in my account.
It was open and so I went in to talk to the guy that was working there.

Me: "Hello! I would like to make a deposit in my account"
Sir: "I'm sorry but you can only do that in the morning..."
Me: "I don´t understand... I've always done it in afternoon"
Sir: "Well, we are now closed for cash purposes all afternoons until 15th September"
Me: "Oh ok... (I don´t even bother questioning this type of thing anymore) How about Saturday, is it open in the morning?"
Sir, looking very shocked: "No, no! You will have to come back on Monday!"
Me: "Ok, thank you very much for the help! I'll be back on Monday..."

Another pointless trip to the bank! <3 Part of the stuff I will miss about Italy! You get to walk around avoinding to study for perfectly good reasons! ;)

Funny Facts of Italy #1

#1 - Toilets

No matter how much I tried I would never be able to explain you this... So you should just see for yourself.
I just want to mention how hard it is to find a public toilet in Padova and after midnight it will be nearly impossible to find any toilet as most bars and caffes are closed (which is mostly a problem for the ladies unfortunately).
Anyway, here it goes! Enjoy! :D

I'm not sure how normal this type of toilet is in your country, but it's definitely not comun in Portugal and I don´t remember seing this kind of toilets in any other country. Feel free to tell us your opinion! :)

Internet 1 - Erasmus 0

I know I already talked about the Italian internet problems before but today (once again) something happened that deserves to be on this blog.

Let me just mention that it's not the first time this happens so you can understand our feeling of helpless...

When we did the internet contract we decided to choose the method of payment where we would receive a letter every 3months and had to go to the post office to pay for it. (Anyway we couldn't choose the option of direct payment because we didn't have an Italian account)

Of course we never received any letter but eventually we got an email saying we were late on our payment.

       

So we went to the store with the document they had sent us and some cash to pay the bill.

Of course when we got there they told us they could not use that document and needed the one that was supposed to have arrived to our mail box. We kept trying to explain that we never received anything and after about 30min (and showing them on my email account that I had only received THAT document) they told us they could find some reference so we could do the payment.

Turns out we couldn't use cash to pay for the internet! And our cards are not Italian so of course they were not working!

Bottom line: we had the money in our hands, the document that said we had to pay for it but they wouldn't accept the money and the credit cards didn't work because they're not Italian! Lol!

The same thing happened today and now the guy told us we have to fill some kind of form (papers papers...) at the post office and deliver it there to pay for the god dam internet!... TII ♥️🇮🇹

The Bank

The first days I was in Italy I was withdrawing money from my home account and that was enough to cover all the expenses.

But a few days ago, it was time to pay the apartment rent. So I grabbed my landlord's account number and went to the nearest bank. 

When I got there I asked the good looking young man if he could speak English and he started to act all nervous and didn't really know what to say. I calmed him down by saying I just wanted to make a deposit.

                                         

He asked me if I was a student and when I confirmed it he told me maybe it would be better to open a new account in that bank. I told him I didn't think it was necessary because as Portugal is part of the EU I didn't even have to pay fees to withdraw money from my account.

But then he told me I would have to pay a fee of 5€ just to deposit the money if I didn't have an account in that bank, but if I did I would only have to pay 1€... Apart from the fact that I was shocked for having to pay for a deposit (this never happens in Portugal) he told me I wouldn't have to pay any fees to open the account so I agreed to do it.

And that's when the Italian bureaucracy arrived to "make it all very simple". He asked me for my ID and I gave it to him. Then he started typing on his computer and making those sounds of someone who is working very hard to solve my problem... After a while he told me he need another official document of mine. I asked him why telling him that was an official EU document so I couldn't see the problem. And that's when he told me he actually needed 2 official documents! By mear coincidence I had brought my passport to Italy and so I quickly picked up my bike and raced home and back with the passport (the bank was about to close so I had to hurry up). After waiting a bit for the other people that meanwhile arrived to be answered I gave him the document and he went back to typing on his computer.

(Did I mention it took me about 10min to find the correct way of opening the electronic doors to the bank? I guess no burglar will even be able to go IN that place, might as well leave it!)

He finally says there was a problem... That I had already been registered in some other office of the same bank. I explained him I had to pay for the university's insurance in that bank and that was the reason for it. 

And so after about 1 and a half our he said everything was ok and presented me the receipt that I had to pay. Guess what was written on it? That I had to pay for the god dam 5€!! So I asked him "what about all the talk of opening a new account??" And he answered: "oh we can make an appointment for that! Maybe tomorrow?". 

                                         

Oh my god! How ridiculous was it to make me run home and get all the stupid documents if he was only going to open the new account the next day and I still had to pay for the fee anyway??

Of course I had to go back there the next day and loose another hour of my precious time to solve the problem! But that was not enough! He still managed to find another problem to make me go there even another day and sign the same paper 4times to correct an error on the spelling of my last name! (Luckily he was good looking and I didn't really mind visiting him more often...)

TII (This Is Italy!)

The Internet

I know it sounds quite boring a post about internet, but not if you live in Italy!

As a Portuguese citizen I take internet for granted... I mean we have it everywhere! And most of the places it's for free! It's also quite fast for which you learn to be mad if it takes more than 3secs to upload any page...

However that is not the case in Italy.

From the moment we were out of the hostel it took us quite a while to find a place with wifi access... We eventually found a caffe with free wifi and it soon became the place we would spend the most time. Nowadays I can't really organise my life without internet and I had never thought how important it was for me because I took it for granted! I mean from finding apartment adds to getting information about classes and of course communicating with my family, I really need my dear internet!

         

When we finally rented the apartment the first thing we decided to do was to get some internet for it!

So we searched for internet companies and took all day just to visit them and decide which one had the best condition. But of course nothing is that simple in italy and we discovered it would take about ONE MONTH to install it! "But why?" I kept asking... And they just looked at me very shocked and answered "because that's the way it is". They didn't know why and they didn't really care about it!

So there I was for one month waiting for the precious internet to knock on my door when one day I got a phone call of an Italian guy saying something that I understood as: "I will be in your house in 15min". I couldn't even believe it! I told my friend and we grabbed our bikes and rushed home!

Once I got there I realized the guy didn't speak English of course... But then I didn't care that much because he just need to do whatever he needed to install the internet and go on with his life! 

Obviously the guy was not normal and it was not that easy! Again he really liked chating and would go on speaking in Italian or one of its many dialects, which I could only understand every now and then.

However, my Italian was now good enough to understand the topics of which he was talking about and that's when I realised he was completely crazy!

          

The first time he saw me he told me he had called 4 times and I didn't answer... And then he asked me if I was deaf?! At first I thought my Italian was really not as good as I thought and I was just mixing up everything he was telling me... But the next day I realised it was definetly not my mistake!

Of course the internet didn't work that day and he had to come back the next day really early and fix it. 

And that's when the conversation started!

He started by asking me if my friend was still sleeping. I said of course because it was still very early. For which he replied she was very lazy and immature! Lol! Then he kept going on as I looked more responsible. I told him I was a bit older than her and that was probably it... And his amazing answer was: "oh of course! I can see that from the dark marks below your eyes!" And he just said that like it was the most non offensive natural thing a strange man could say to a client! Finally he said it smelled like someone was cooking and I told him that was because someone WAS cooking! I was cooking something for lunch because I wouldn't have any time to do it later... Obviously he couldn't keep his mouth shut and he just warned me about how I was going to become very fat eating like that! -.- 

I have nothing more to add to this post... Just that Italian people are completely crazy! Gotta love Italy! <3

The Apartment Adeventures

If you are thinking about moving somewhere and live there for one year of course you will need to find a place to live.

And as young reckless and optimist students we are, we decided to do it only once we got to Padova. We figured if it was a students city like everyone told us, it wouldn't be so hard to find two rooms in an apartment for 2 Portuguese girls. And of course we were wrong! 

                              

In fact, we where so wrong that we ended up "homeless" for a week because we thought 4days in a hostel would be enough to find a place to live... I know, how naive! But that's another story that earned the right to its own post, so I'll write about it later!

As I was saying, as soon as we got settled in the hostel we bought an Italian phone card and off we went to find the little papers with adds that are spreaded across the city.

First stop: the medicine faculty! A lot of people told us that would be a good place to start because there was a specific place for those adds there.

So we stopped our car, trusting Catarina, and couldn't find the building anywhere... We asked a girl about our age that was passing by... Of course her English was terrible but she managed to tell us the hospital was about 10min walk (which in Italian means about 20min walk!) on the opposite direction! This time we really trusted Catarina and didn't really feel like walking 20min again so we just walked the complete opposite way of what she told us... And imagine what happened? A big hospital appeared in front of us!

                                   

So lesson nr 1 for living in north Italy: never trust the direction people give you! They're really just trying to be helpful but most of the times they just say the first thing they can think of that they think resembles some word you said in English and send you that way (we'll talk about the language again some other day)!

And there we were... Facing thousands of tiny papers written in computer and nicely printed or just by hand in some napkin! 

We had to select the ones we though were worth trying, so my friend took care of one wall and I took care of another one. We were there about 2hours just calling those numbers and picking up others to call them later! 

Most people didn't speak English and some of them wouldn't even bother trying to understand us so they would just hang up the phone. Others told us they didn't want foreign students or the place was already taken. In summary: we had long pointless hours of calling people who would talk to us in a language that we could not understand and didn't really care if we could or not understand them... 

But among thousands of phone calls we were able to make some appointements to see some rooms!

As we had called so many people we had to organise the visits every day and were just running from one house to the other, writing pros and cons about all the houses we saw.

However some of them we didn't even had to think about it because they were so terrible the minute we walked out of it we would cross it from our lists!

Here's an example: a creepy Russian guy who couldn't speak English and had a terrible Italian! The house consisted of a long scary corridor with doors on the left side and one on each end of the corridor. The rooms he showed us were tiny, dark and had ugly old furniture on them... But the best part was when I got the courage to ask what was the door that was closed for and he told me: "sometimes I sleep here". Ok that was it! I'm glad I asked him what was behind that door which led me to the decision of never even going near that place again!

Another one was a funny adventure: an old typically Italian couple. They were the most adorable people you can imagine, they just didn't speak any English... And still they wouldn't shut up! Our visit to that house took about one hour which was more than enough for the old lovely lady to tell us all her family history... In Italian! There was a point when I just felt like laughing because I couldn't understand a word of what she was saying and I looked at my friend and the expression on her face told me I was not the only one feeling that way! It was hilarious! The house was nice but we ended up finding a nicer one and gave up on that one.

       

Finally, after dozens of visits to different apartments all around the city we were left with 3 places. So we just made our famous lists of pros and cons and decided on a 2 bedroom apartment in a residential area not far from the city centre! 

Home sweet home! <3