Recreational Horror

Friendships were blossoming already in the first week of the language course. Gaby and I were enjoying each other's company in the flat and even cooking for Catherine and Anna was proving to be less stressful that it was to get the money off them in the first place. In between our outings and classes we had quite a bit of free time on our hands. We weren't at the stage where we knew enough people and the town itself well enough to go and descend on a local pub - sorry, bar, so we found alternative forms of entertainment.

I was surprised as to how many people brought laptops with them. Had I not returned home from Italy the first time, I wouldn't have had one. Gaby didn't have one, but Bree did and the other thing that Bree had in plentiful supply was horror movies on said laptop.

During the morning that saw Francesco Totti-Gate, Bree invited me and Gaby over to her flat for a movie night. We ate (probably pasta) and left (probably late) and arrived at Bree's flat. Ours was quite old - we had an old front door and the flat itself was hollowed into the old walls. Bree's flat was quite modern by comparison. The building itself was old and a bit run down - wide marble stairs all the way up to the fourth floor: this is where Bree was. Lynette was on the floor below, but I was yet to see her flat.

It was a small flat with modern furnishings and it was generally quite cozy; our flat was typically Italian with very high ceilings and whitewashed walls which made the whole place look a bit impersonal. Bree's flat was in the roof of the building and so everything seemed that little bit more intimate. She was sharing a room (I only met one person who wasn't and they, interestingly, were in Bree's flat: if you wanted such a privilege then you had to pay for it). Her roommate was a nice girl, from Ecuador if memory serves, but she left us be.

We got ourselves settled and crowded round Bree's tiny netbook.
'What do you want to watch?' she said.
'What have you got?' says I.
'You know.'
I didn't.

It turns out much of the video library was horror-based: my least favourite genre: gratuitous violence, unnecessary torment, nightmares and poor plots cover pretty much everything. When I was in high school I watched the Johnny Depp film Secret Window. My friend was a little affected by the film and so decided to turn the sound off. Without the soundtrack it was literally watching a man with unruly hair wandering round a house and opening cupboards.

But Bree only had horror films. We settled on a thriller with Jodie Foster about a team of people who are have to complete a training exercise where they locate and catch a dangerous criminal. Predictably there is an actual dangerous criminal on the island and one by one the team members are killed off. It was a good film. I'd managed to steer Bree away from pure horror and the result was a nice evening where we could just relax and take some time away from studying Italian.

We were now in the middle of the first week and I was really getting into the whole experience. Camerino was the perfect location - it was like we had our own authentic campus town built where we could try out our Italian in a controlled environment.

The end of our week was looking busy - we had all (as in the four of us) decided to go to the opera, the following day would see a special culture class all about Puccini and at the end of the week we were having a trip to Assisi and Perugia. Lovely.