A Student’s Life here at the University for Foreigners, Siena

Many friends have asked me to ‘’enjoy myself’. There are those who say how much they envy my ‘’vacations’’.

Sure, I spend my Saturdays visiting other towns or cities, but my weekdays are far from vacation-like.

This is not a complaint, but some of the horrors we tolerate here sure deserve mention and consideration. In fact, a friend back in Singapore commented, ‘’I don’t think I could ever do this again!'' when I told him I had to share a room with 2 other people I have not met.

The heat is scorching; the weather is 34 degree Celsius. The rooms and other parts of the residence have no fan, nor air condition. Imagine staying in your room trying to study or even sleep in this condition. We are literally trapped in this breezeless heat.

This residence that they put me in is the furthest from civilization. If I take the bus from town, it’s literally from the start of the bus journey to the end of the whole journey.

After 9.25 pm, there is no more bus home. Either you walk home, which I often do (45 minutes!) or you wait till 1 am for the last bus. In fact, buses are infrequent, and it sure teaches you to be patient and punctual.

At my residence, there are 2 floors of ‘’work room’’ where there are proper desks to do our homework or to log on to the computer. But the wifi connection is uber slow, unreliable, and breaks often. There are only 2 power points, especially on the lower floor where the connection is slightly better. So if your computer battery runs low, tough! The 2 lucky chaps who have been here earlier than you and who have been hogging the power points will not let you have them. And this place is full of mosquitoes. So, while suffering the slow connection, you get eaten mercilessly everyday. I have lost count of the number of bites or scars on my entire body.

Once I decided to cover myself with jeans. This helped a bit, but it also meant I was dripping with sweat as I worked.

And this lower floor with reasonable wifi connection also happens to house the one and only TV in this entire residence. So, if you want to do your homework but someone else wants to watch TV, tough!

And now the room. The cover of the shower’s tap keeps falling off. The main light to the room keeps flickering.

This morning I discovered ants on the floor. Other days I discovered parts of the bathroom door falling apart. On day one we realized to our horror there is no drainage; so after each shower, the whole bathroom will be flooded, even though we try to shower within the tiny ‘’shower area’’. We decided to mop up after every shower. After each mop in this temperature, we would be so soaked in perspiration we need another shower!

Worse of all, the bathroom emits a stinking odour. We are sure it’s not the product of us 3 girls, who are pretty paranoid about cleanliness. My roommates actually bought disinfectant and all kinds of room freshener to mask the smell. And just imagine 3 of us having to share the bathroom every morning and then sharing the kitchen with 35 others and still trying to make it to school on time every morning. Or imagine what happened the other day when one of my roommates decided to sleep at 9 pm (!) and requested that I turned off all lights!

The kitchen. This is the only place I would be so proud to own. Very well designed and equipped with a full suite of cupboards, microwave, oven, stove and two fridges, cutlery, pots and pans, plates and cups, and a dining area. The only problem is the way students chuck their stuff haphazardly and misplace what you have in the fridge, or sharing the work (cooking area) during dinner. Not everyone has manners. There was a girl who, without even a gesture or sound, moved the tap away towards her so she could wash her apple, while I was in the midst of washing a plate! And the beloved mosquitoes. Just standing there spreading some jam on my bread, or making a coffee, will get me bitten real bad.

Another piece of Italian logic: each room has only one key, even though there are 3 of us. So either you get locked out sometimes (especially when she is having a shower and you have just returned), or you have to wake the other person up if she sleeps early.

We don’t all have the same schedules and obviously do not stick together. We are in different classes and some have classes near the train station, which is nearer the residence, while I have lessons at the historical centre.

It is well noted in all sorts of surveys that the poor spend a large proportion of their money on food. It’s not because we eat a lot, but what money we have, it all goes to feeding ourselves, with little left for anything else. So it is so common to see us lugging heavy supermarket bags of food after school, to bring home for dinner. Some even hurry home to cook a late lunch at 3 pm, to minimize spending on café or canteen food.

For me, I stint on shopping, food, drinks and ‘’going out’’, preferring to use the money to pay for bus or train tickets to go to other cities on weekends. Today I packed a fruit, some bread and biscuits as I spent my afternoon in Pisa. Other European tourists do the same too. It’s usually the Americans (again!) who mindlessly go to the touristy eateries near the sites to indulge and get fleeced.

Many of us are from developing countries – especially Eastern Europe and the newly ‘’democratised’’ countries that were part of the Soviet block. Many of them are very young, barely out of university. Hanging out with them reminds me once again to be thrifty. The occasional times we decided to go out for dinner, we actually walked from one café to another scrutinizing the menu placed outside, and comparing prices, before deciding on the café.

So, to answer the questions of many of you: I have yet to eat at an osteria, let alone a simple trattoria. Once, after a meal, we simply sat at a nearby park to chat (it’s free!), instead of going to a pub. We do like to hang out a Meetlife Café near our school though, because it’s cheap and good, and cosy. It’s full of materials to read and even has a display of dictionaries of various languages, including Chinese. It’s truly a Uni’s café.

During the break, we do not have anywhere within the Uni to go to for a drink, except for this café and a few other eateries nearby. The school canteen is far away and is open only for lunch, not drinks.

Communque (as they say in Italian – a word used to close a conversation), we are all here for one purpose – to learn and enjoy the language. Putting up with some of these horrors is part and parcel of a student’s life here, and perhaps a way to make me realize how spoilt we all are in Singapore, I guess.