I AM LEAVING PARMA TOMORROW.

I wish I could write a good post about Paris and how great it was to see Sarah (and Mark!) and see all the neato sights of Paris but I really should be getting to bed. And alas, I do not think I will have a chance to write on here another time before I get back to the States, but I did want to write at least once more while I was still in Italy.

It's weird to be leaving! But right now, especially with my parents here, I am so excited to go home. I really just want to see the fam, unpack, and not worry about moving moving moving across countries for a little bit (until January when I have to deal with transporting myself and my stuff to Boston). BUT ALAS. I have 5 more days of travel with them, which should be great and lovely.

I will be sad to leave Nice, after all she has done for me and put up with this semester. She really made it a worthwhile experience for me but I am confident I will keep in touch with her and maybe even someday return to Parma. I'd like to do that actually. Fo reals.

Anyway, cheese is heavy! I am not looking forward to lugging home all my LUGgage and being laden down with My Things. Thank goodness my parents can be my sherpas! Hooray!

Love to all and see you on the 20th!!!

:D

AMORE AMORE MI AMO PARMA

Hewwo there.

We are back from our trip to the Alps in Aosta! They were quite lovely. It was a 3.5 hour ride from Parma to Aosta, but it was completely worth it once we got near enough to see the snow-capped mountains. Our hotel was SWEET (we could open the door by pressing a button next to our beds) and what was sweeter still was our view from every window! The Alps are gorgeoussss.

Aosta itself is a bebe little town, and on Sunday we went either skiing (not I said the fly) or SNOWSHOEING (yes that was me). Snowshoeing was ridiculous, as I expected it to be, and we got so very snowy and cold. It was large amounts of fun. We had a lot of hot chocolate and went to a Christmas market where I got a Second Very Excellent Winter Hat, and got to go to mass today. My voice is still gone and I am worrying about my oral presentation of my soc paper on Thursday. Let's hope it comes back!

This week is going to fly -- I have two finals on Wednesday, two on Thursday, a movie to watch with my Italian class on Thursday, our goodbye dinner on Wednesday, and my last babysitting on Wedesday. Tonight we are having a family dinner with Nice. Friday I leave for Paris, and then when I get back I spend like one more day in Parma with my parents and then OFF TO ROME and around WE GO! My program is done in 4 days and I will be in the United States in 12!

UNREAL

I had developed the unsettling habit of talking to myself while riding my bike, so I guess that fact that I LOST MY VOICE is good news. I don't remember the last time I lost my voice. Good times. Hopefully it comes back before my presentation of my soc paper on Thursday.

EXAMS ARE HURR and it is dumb. There is a lot to be studied but I am not too worried about them for the most part.

My parents leave today for Italy! They will be spending a week traveling and then a week con MOI and then we fly home! YIKES.

This weekend our BC program is going to the ALPS in Aosta for a lovely little trip. I will let you know how that goes. OH MAN. I just realized I won't be able to yodel without a voice. ALAS.

Have a lovely weekend, don't be stressed about finals if you have finals, and get excited! 20 days until Christmas!

LOVE LOVE ME

Happy late Thanksgiving!

Although I wasn't at home to celebrate with my family, I wasn't alone for the holiday -- Daniel came to visit, arriving on Wednesday and leaving early early this morning. Once he got to Parma, after a couple extra train rides, we had a very lovely weekend.

Wednesday we had a chill day because poor Dan had jetlag, but we got to eat dinner wtih Nice and Fil and Sarah (as soon as Nice met Daniel she asked how McCain was). Nice had us go to the grocery store to get some vino to celebrate eating together. Very cute!

Thursday was his tour around Parma -- we got tickets to the Correggio exhibit, and went through the museum sans audioguides because I had a bad experience with a tour when my group went to the exhibit. The cool part, again, was going up scaffolding into the dome of the cathedral to see the frescoes up close. It was nice going with Dan, too, because we didn't have an agenda like I did for class so we were able to look at the inside of the Duomo as well. We had lunch at Frank Foccacia (where I successfully ordered a meat sandwich instead of a pepper sandwich this time) and ate some gelato at Milano Chocolat (yum). We rode our bikes over to Anna's, where we had tea with her and Aldo. They were so cute! Aldo kept trying to speak English to Daniel and Anna gave us cookies with her homemade jam (we liked it so much she gave us a jar to take home. SWEET). Anna told me she thought Dan was a very nice boy and that what we have continues for some time. She is too cute.
We had dinner at a lovely little place and admired the city with its Christmas decorations. I got to Skype with the fam after they ate dinner, which was great! Sad that they couldn't see me, but it was nice to see them in all their Thanksgiving glory.

Friday we had planned on going to Cinque Terre, but the weather was so terrible that we changed our plans and decided to go to Bologna instead. It was very rainy all day (although it was snowy as we walked to the Parma train station) but Bologna is a good city to spend a day in in the rain because it is filled with PORTICOES -- basically every sidewalk was covered by a loggia, so it made walking around very easy. We had MTV Italy as our guide, and got to see a couple cool sites - we had lunch in a cute little place where I had some pizza (after unsuccessfully trying to find another lunch place that our guide suggested but probably didn't exist), we went up one of the two towers (it was very narrow and very tall, but had a good view), went inside the main church (very beautiful inside, and very very interesting. Each side chapel had something different in it - we felt like we were in a museum. There was one with a Foucault's pendulum, one had a ton of different relics, one had wood carved statues that were eerily similar to the ones at the Correggio museum, etc. Pretty awesome), saw a scandalous statue of Neptune (when it was originally carved, apparently the sculptor made Neptune's "triton" a little too big...so the church fathers asked him to make him smaller. However, after he recarved it, he made it so if you stand behind Neptune at a certain angle, his outstretched thumb restores him to godly status. HILARIOUS), and went by the University, which is the oldest in the world! We got to see this Anatomical Theater, where students would watch the dissection of human corpses. The room was gorgeous, and there were two skinless statues holding up this special chair. Really cool.
When we got back, Nice asked us if we wanted to go to dinner with Fil. Despite the cold, we walked to the restaurant, which was approximately 19 miles away through a lot of slush and snow. We were freezing and our feet were soaking when we finally got there. Nice was friends with the owner of this Naples-themed restaurant, and we had delicious food (a lot of fried things) under her suggestions.

Saturday Dan and I walked around Parma a bit (we got gelato at Mickey Mouse, and then wandered around a mini-market. An old man was manning this free wine tasting booth and when we got close with our bowls of gelato he told me this specific kind was good with ice cream and poured it in our bowls. Only in Italy. It wasn't bad, though), missed the train we wanted to Milan and ate lunch at a creperie (delicious bruschetta!). We finally got to Milan, dropped off Dan's bag at the train station, and manuevered our way through the Milan Metro to get to the Duomo piazza. There were 9 million cops around with riot gear and we never found out why. We went inside the Duomo with hopes of going up the dome, but as there was a mass going on, we were not able to do so. The Duomo is GIGANTIC (one of the biggest 4 I think?) and very beautiful. We also looked at the Galleria, a huge area of swanky shops covered by a glass ceiling. MTV Italy told us that one of the mosaics on the ground which had a bull on it brought good luck to whomever dug their heel in and spun around, so we did that. We looked at the outside of the Opera House and tried to find somewhere to eat but did not want to get ripped off, so we headed back to the train station to catch a bus to Malpensa. It was rainy and crowded in Milan (very similar to NYC) and Dan had an early flight the next morning.

When we got to Malpensa airport, we couldn't figure out how to get to our hotel, so we decided to take a cab. I asked a cabbie if he was free and after he asked where we were going, he called the hotel himself to get their free shuttle to come pick us up. That would never happen in the US. We finally got picked up and had dinner at the hotel (I felt bad that Dan's last dinner in Italy was in a hotel restaurant, but it was actually decent) and went to sleep. This morning we got picked up at 5:15 am to get him to the airport for his 6:55 am flight. It was hard saying goodbye -- after not seeing him for 3 months it was such a short visit of 4 days -- but we'll see each other in a little more than a month. I slept on the shuttle and train ride back, and listened to a CD on the Discman Dan gave me (since my mp3 player can't charge on any computer except for my broken one). When I got back I slept for 5 more hours, and then went over to the villa to bake Christmas cookies with Steph and Nate. We made our own frosting and cut out cute shapes but they did not turn out at ALL. I will post a picture later because they are quite hilarious.

I only have 3 weeks left in Italy! RIDICULOUS. 2 more weeks with the BC kids here! There will be a lot of work to do this week (preparing for final papers and presentations and exams) but this next weekend our whole program is going to the Alps in Aosta for a ski trip! I am very excited. We also have a group-wide Christmas Party at Anna's which I am stoked about.

I hope everyone's Thanksgivings were marvelous!
Home stretch, man!
<3

Alitalia is going under and keeps cancelling flights, so while Dan is able to get from Boston to Rome today/tomorrow, he has no way of flying from Rome to Parma. Emergency actions are being taken so I can transport my boyfriend here for Thanksgiving.

ITALIAN TRANSPORTATION IS SO DUMB.

FIRST SNOW IN PARMA!

I was actually not excited about it because the prospect of walking to Soc at 8:15 in the morning in SNOW was no good.
We did see a snowman, though, so that was baller. I want the snow to go away for the weekend, though, so we can ride bikes around Parma.
I'll keep you all posted.

LOVE
the abominable snowman

Another excellent weekend!
On Friday, the entire BC program went to Verona for the day, which I was looking forward to but turned out to not be that fun, mostly because I was very frustrated with the people who were leading us around. Caterina, our coordinator, was in the US at BC and couldn't come with, so she had a couple of our Italian teachers accompany us, and they were just very disorganized and not fun to follow around a city. Despite that, highlights include: Juliet's balcony (which has a statue of Juliet that you are supposed to rub her boob for good luck, which I did not do...and then got POOPED on by a PIGEON!), delicious pastries for lunch, and...yeah it was a fine day. Oh well.

From Verona, a couple of us ventured on to Venice, which was MUCH MORE satisfactory. We got in around dinner time on Friday night but decided to find our hostel first. The hostel was unmarked, as many hostels are, but the weirder thing was that even though all 7 of us booked together we wanted different rooms...and these different rooms were in different buildings. Okay. As the manager guy was giving us our key he told us that for breakfast we had to come to the main hostel place and ask for a ticket and then bring that to the Chinese restaurant down the block and we'd eat there. Obviously.

We found a place to eat that was pretty cheap -- I had spicy pasta, one boy in our group had CUTTLEFISH, and the waiter kept making eyes at us. HOORAY! That was really fun (not the creepy waiter) and it was good to sit after our travels.

Jeff's cousin is studying with Wake Forest in Venice, so we went to the house that all the Wake kids stay, eat, and have class in (which seems really weird now that I think about it). The house was soooooo nice it was ridiculous. They were all very nice and welcoming, and DAVE PREDICTED THE SCORE of the BC/Wake game that happened yesterday! HE GOT IT ON THE NOSE. It was awesome.

We got lost going back because Venice is essentially a maze in Disneyland (it is impossible to comprehend that people live there and that it is a real place to live) but finally found our hostel and went to sleep. The next morning we were saddened to find out that our breakfast was NOT at the Chinese restaurant (it was actually closed), but at a bar next door. Alas.

WE WALKED AROUND ALL OF VENICE ON SATURDAY. Here are some things we saw: Rialto Bridge, San Marco Square (where Dave, Steph and I went up the elevator on the belltower, and I had an adventure with pigeons. San Marco is infamous for the ridic amount of pigeons that hang out there, and all these sketchballs come up to you and shove food in your hand so the pigeons land on you and take a picture. We didn't have any interaction with any of those people but I was hungry and wanted to eat the bread I brought, but every time I took the bread out pigeons were like "WHOA HEY THERE KRISTIN" and I got scared. I threw a bebe piece far away from me to get them away and they SWOOPED like swooping things and ate that thing up in miliseconds. So I decided to throw the entire loaf of bread at them to see what would happen, if it would be like piranhas in the movies. So after some dodging of pigeons to get the windup, I CHUCKED that loaf of bread and pigeons got mad excited, but then a seagull was like "AHA I am so huge and terrifying this bread is MINE" and scared off all the pigeons. And then a man picked up my bread and broke it up and threw some more. The end), we went on a waterbus, and basically saw adorable streets and canals, saw all the Murano glass we could bear to see, and Steph and I had these AMAZING pastries that were more than delicious. SO GOOD.

We caught a train back at 7. The train was supposed to last for 3.5 hours, but we spent the first hour just being happy and talking. We only had one ticket, and the thing said we would get to Parma via 4 other cities. We stopped in Bologna and everybody and their moms got off. We started looking around, wondering if this was the last stop, but that wouldn't make sense because every other time we've taken trains and had to switch we have gotten 2 tickets. So obvi we wouldn't switch for this either. Jeff and Dave got off the train and checked a schedule, seeing that there was another train that would get us to Parma, and they suggested we get off. We were going to gather stuff and get off when the train started moving again, so we figured we would figure everything out in the next station. However, the train never gained momentum and it soon became evident that the train was not going anywhere but instead going to park for the night. Once it stopped, we got all our stuff together and tried to start walking towards the front of the train where the conductor was, because all the doors to get off the train were now locked. It was a very long train and before we got up to where we needed to be all the lights went out. We yelled at someone to hit the Emergency Open lever, and we tumbled off the train. There was a creepy man standing near the front of the train and we walked quickly away from him, towards the real station. Steph stopped because she thought she left her wallet on the train. Erin and I booked it so fast to the platforms, and managed to not get hit by any trains passing by. We finally got on a train to Parma, and the rest of the night was uneventful. It was one of the more scary things I've experienced in Italy...being stuck on a train with no way out and no one going up and down the cars to check. GOOD TIMES.

This morning we met up and went to a little Christmas festival in the streets of Parma -- it was so cute! We had free samples of cheeses and salamis, and saw all these Christmassy gadgets. Very very cute! Also, everyone in Parma is so nice. We had a bad experience with a mean bus ticket issuer in Venice, so it was good to be back in a place where people actually smile.

AND THEN!
After that we headed to the Villa around 12 and started cooking for our THANKSGIVING EXTRAVAGANZA! A bunch of kids decided we wanted a Tgives feast because we're all travelling (or having people visit <3) on Thursday, so we each made something. Jeff made pieces of turkey and a whole chicken, stuffing from scratch, a pumpkin pie and an apple pie; Nate made mashed potatoes; Steph and I made cookies and I brought the biggest loaf of bread I have ever seen (that I bought at the Christmas market earlier); Erin made broccoli and green beans; Dave made a Canadian chili that was delish; and we had vino. Steph and I made placecards for everyone (I drew turkeys on them!) and we had a HUUUGE table in Nate's kitchen. It was SO CUTE and SO FUN to spend hours cooking together and then having a FEAST. We have SOOOOOOO MANY leftovers...the entire chicken and a ginormous pot of mashed potatoes. Round two is tomorrow. But it was great, we listened to Christmas music and felt very holidayesque.

So! Short week this week -- we have hot chocolate with Caterina tomorrow night and I think we're watching Christmas movies on Tuesday, and then Wednesday DANIEL COMES TO PARMA and life will be magical. Also, I used Steph's computer to upload a lot of pictures, so check out the webshots!

Love to all, hope life is wonderful!

BACK FROM POLAND!

Poland is awesome! Everyone needs to go there. I need to go back. Let me tell you about how great it is!

Jeff and I met up with Sarah MILLER on Friday night, after a little confusion on where we all were -- she had gotten in earlier that day and had been exploring, so she knew all the cool places to walk to. After we got situated in our hostel we went to walk in the center of Krakow. There is this huge wall that you walk under to get to the REAL KRAKOW.

We explored a little and marvelled at how cheap everything was and then went to a restaurant that had 25 DIFFERENT KINDS OF PIEROGI! I kid you not! Also, the ceiling was decorated with swirls akin to Starry Night, because the place was called Restaurant di VINCENT or something Polish to that nature. I had delish pierogi filled with SHEEP'S CHEESE and potatoes, and for dessert we all shared a plate of fruit-filled pierogi. SO GOOD.

Yesterday we did a lot of sight-seeing. We started off at Wawel Castle, which had a beautiful courtyard and also housed a gorgeous cathedral. The state rooms in Wawel were pretty interesting; the throne room had these stucco faces hanging from the ceiling which were entertaining and creepy.
The cathedral was amazing, it was named for St. Stanislaus and had his remains there (I think), as well as a lot a lot of important dead people, like the first Queen of Poland, whom JPII made a saint, and a ton of royalty. We also climbed up to see a very large bell. Haha.

We checked out another cathedral and had some Polish pastries (yum yum, from the pretzel lady) and then found where we needed to meet for our tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

The tour was very informative and worthwhile, and, as you would expect, incredibly sad. I was really glad we went though.

After the tour we went to dinner back in the center of Krakow. Sarah and I both had a CHICKEN ROLL which was yummo. She had to ask the waitress what exactly a chicken roll was, but it was a very adequate description, actually.

All of Krakow was so Eastern-Europeany, it was so great, and so different than Italy. I really want to go back and spend like a week there. ALSO I used my mad Polish skills -- I said "thank you" a lot in Polish and "excuse me" a couple times. When I listened to announcements I could pick out numbers and I read COLD BEER on a sign. Life was good!

Amazing trip all in all, despite the 12 hours of traveling we did on Friday and 10 hours today. Definitely worth it.

OH AND TWO PIECES OF GREAT NEWS: my baby jar containers worked PERFECTLY, and I bought a Very Excellent Winter Hat! HUZZAH!

I am a chilly little monkey. Tell this rain to go away!

Also, I am a tad frustrated. It is my goal to get an internship to count for class credit for next semester, and so all week I have been calling places. It is very hard, though, being 6 hours ahead of Boston, and using information that is out of date is bad too. Also having no number at that the people can return your call is no good. I don't think this will end well for me.

HOWEVER, I do believe I will win the INGENUITY AWARD after this weekend! Steph and I both realized that neither one of us has travel-sized toiletries (I always share with Erin, she always goes to hotels) and that this weekend we would need to bring our own! OH NO. Where does one buy such a rarity in Italy? NO ONE KNOWS. We looked in some pharmacies but then decided our best bet was to go to Esselunga, a giant grocery store that we'd never been to. Well, we went.

ESSELUNGA IS AMAZINGGGG
They had exciting items which we had never seen in Italy! Hot sauce! Peanut butter! Individual jellies (just what I needed!)! Lots of kinds of cookies! CHAI TEA!
We were so stoked and feeling good until we got to the cosmetics-and-the-like aisle.
No. travel-sized. to. be. found.

ESSELUNGA IS THE WORSTTTT
So! I bought two bebe jars of baby food (mixed fruit) and washed them, and have since put my shampoo and conditioner in them! I am assuming they will be confiscated by airport security, but WHO KNOWS! MAYBE I AM A GENIUS!
You may be wondering about my shower gel. How will I transport that?
No fears, friends, Steph and I also bought KINDER EGGS in which resided a TOY encased in a PLASTIC EGG-like thing!
Shower gel situated!

So, while I may have no future, this weekend at least is bright and shiny and CLEAN.

Also, I did taste the baby food. Not too shabby, but I would never eat a whole jar. Sorry, Johnny, I now feel your pain.
Ew also, side note: babies here eat things like HORSE and RABBIT. Sick.

La la la here is the obligatory after-weekend update.

THIS WEEKEND I STAYED IN PARMA!
Whoa. First time since arriving.
But it was lovely!

Saturday I took my bike and went around town for an hour and a half. I have been down some of the streets 19 million times so I went down a bunch of streets I had never been to. I knew I couldn't get lost because Parma is the size of my big toe. And basically after that hour and a half, I had seen all there is to see in Parma. GOOD TIMES.
No, it was actually really adorable and peaceful to do this. Venturing off the main road I was able to see how Italians really live, and the streets were so QUIET. It was a lovely way to spend a sunny day, just me thinking and cruising.

I also worked on my presentation for my Cultural Diversity class -- which I have to present in an hour. I am a little nervous because I don't know how well I related my chapter to the material, but this class is pretty laid-back and my professor is always nervous in front of us (he is a very sweet man but very quiet) so I think it should go okay.

What else of note. Nate and I made cookies yesterday, which turned out pretty good despite the fact that we had no real sugar so we took all the sugar packets from everyone in the Villa and just used those. We ALMOST had enough sugar for each batch (but not quite). Also I watched The Shining this weekend. Why, I do not know. After watching it I had to bike home alone. No good.

TODAY I rode to Soc and discovered that my front tire is flat! ALAS! Even more ALAS because there is a BUS STRIKE today, which means that I have no idea how I will get to cooking lessons tonight! OH CRAP. Actually, life is more OH CRAP for Steph because she is stuck in Milan. She was coming back from Paris and was planning on taking a 5am train home but guess what? There is a TRAIN STRIKE too, which may last until tonight! Poverina.

In other news, I really need to start working on my paper that is due in a month. WHY, KRISTIN? That sounds crazy and over-achievery! No, guys, it is a TEN PAGE PAPER IN ITALIAN ABOUT SOCIOLOGY. Oh. In that case, WHY HAVEN'T YOU STARTED IT SOONER? Good question.

Apparently Italy has taught me to talk to myself! Well done.

I hope life is great! Fam, I hope you had an amazing time in Quincy.
Hooray for BC for beating ND!

CIAO BELLI!

Okay, out of respect for those who view politics differently than I, this is the last time I will talk about Obama winning.
BUT
When I went upstairs to have dinner with Nice tonight, she showed me a cake she had made -- it says OBAMA and has a dove of peace (and the symbol for VIVA) on it. TOO ADORABLE.
Also, she told me I couldn't help with the dishes because it was Obama Day, and then proceeded to sing Obama Day songs, which meant she would sing OBAMA DAY in a certain way and then go "that was the classical version. The last one was the pop version." I heard opera, drinking song, Catholic school girls, Brownies, Christmas song ("I'm dreaming of a white Obama"...which we immediately decided was not the best choice hahaha), college fight song, jazz, and I can't even remember. Nice is too hilarious, and I think it is so interesting to see how the rest of the world viewed the election.
She told me to send the picture to my grandma who loves Obama, so here are the pics!




(I did the dishes anyway. No worries, Ma)

I was a slacker and only stayed up until 3:30 am last night (right after my boy won Ohio) but I was a happy little monkey when I woke up this morning!

HOORAY FOR OBAMA!
This morning my History of Parma class got interviewed by the Parma Gazette about the election. Amusing.

IT STOPPED RAINING! I hope hope hope that this holds out until I am back from babysitting, because I do not know how to take the bus to get there and I hate riding my bike in the rain. Oh well.

SO LIFE IS GOOD!
Love to all!

Hahahaha I just read my entry before I went to Switzerland and the entry after I got back and I AM SO PREDICTABLE! I used the same joke for the weekend and then the same word to describe the people going. I guess that means I also have a short term memory, because both times I thought I was being very clever. ALAS.

I got a package from Daniel yesterday! Now I can clean my apartment with Lysol wipes, chew gum that I did not pay 9 dollars for, and listen to excellent music! DAN IS THE BEST! <3

ALSO I got a Halloween card from the gparents today! The mailman must think I am super popular. THANKS GMA AND PAPA B! :)

It is raining here. I think Italy is pretending it is England for the week, which is not cool. There is a river that runs in the middle of Parma that is always always dry. It is simply a ditch with bridges over it. HOWEVER, lately there is a HUGE AMOUNT OF WATER IN IT, which confuses everyone. No one told me to bring my rainboots. I have to ride the bus, not my bike. I hope these short sentences adequately convey my discomfort.

I didn't have too much to update on, since I did I think yesterday. Or the day before.
OH AT ANNA'S FOR COOKING LESSONS, we made tiramisu which I never liked but it was really really good. She also made pesto (homemade) pasta, and chicken with peppers. It was the bestttt.

That's all for real! Hope everyone is doing well!

PS ALSO OH MAN! GO OBAMA! I AM SO NERVOUS!

I was able to update some pictures on my webshots!!!!!

AHHH
They'll be completely out of order and not titled or anything but hopefully you get the gist. It took forever to get 42 pics up so APPRECIATE THEM!

TEE HEE!

Oh hai!

I just got back from Svizzera! Lucerne, Switzerland is a lovely little place to go to, let me tell you. I will now tell you.

We took a train there, which took about 6 hours, which was less of a hassle than flying and a jolly good idea, because the sights that we saw as we rode through Switzerland were GORGEOUS. We were completely surrounded by the Alps, and little mountain towns covered in SNOW. We were so excited to see snow, and felt very Christmassy all weekend, even though we got there on Halloween. The night we got in we found our hostel and went to eat. That took awhile to accomplish because APPARENTLY there are no restaraunts open in Lucerne. EVER.

BUT we had German sausages and they were delish. Lucerne is a German speaking part of Switzerland, if you didn't know. Juanes would have loooved it. Also he would have loved the train ride over because we spent the 4 hours in Switz talking to a German student. Pretty great!

Saturday we did a lot. We took a bus up to this Gutsch forest and walked around in the snow. It was COLD so we walked back down to the town and got some hot chocolate at a place named Heini. Tee hee. DEELISH as well! There are some really beautiful bridges that have these painted panels on the insides...one is the bridge to Hell and depicts all these death scenes, and the other is the bridge to Heaven and has prettier paintings. Also we took a picture in front of the largest Jesuit church in an attempt to get on webmail. Haha.
We also saw this giant lion carved into a mountain which was a gift from France, and we took a picture with a man playing a mountain horn.

We had cheese fondue which was AWESOME and got swiss chocolate. ALSO I bought a Swiss Army knife but it is in the shape of a credit card and has 13 functions! It is so cool!

Basically it was a very chill weekend (literally) of seeing a beautiful little Swiss town and being with a solid group of people. VERY AWESOME.

Time to watch the Office! YAY

We went to the opera yesterday! It was cute. Everyone dressed up and we sat in these fancy schmancy boxes. We saw "Rigoletto" by Verdi, which has a famous song I guarantee you've heard: "La Donna é Mobile." Youtube it. Good times!

I got my hair cut today! The place I went was tres chic, and had a little pooch laying around. It was the cutest little dog. Oh and my hair is okay too. It's MAD SHORT. Shorter than I intended, but hey, hair grows back.

I finally got to eat dinner with Nice tonight! I felt bad because I have not been able to eat with her for a couple days, due to cooking lessons (grilled eggplant and homemade pasta) and the opera, and she was STOKED to have me eating with her tonight. That was good.

Computer still not 100% fixed. I think Nate was doing the reinstallation tonight, which means I should get my computer back tomorrow, sans everything on my hard drive. Alas. I will be pestering people for music shortly.

The bebes I am bebesitting for are awesome. The bebeist of the bebes is really shy still but today he played cars with me so I think we're on the road to becoming best friends soon. The older boy is mad smart (speaks three languages) and really good with his brother, despite the 8 year age difference. Also, feeling like I am earning SOME money is nice as well. Downside? I biked 40 minutes in the rain today getting there and back. That was not so pleasant.

That's all I really have for you! This weekend we are training it to Lucerne, Switzerland, for a chill (literally, it was snowing today there) weekend of pretty sights. Also we have a really solid group going. Should be a good time!

I hope life continues to be awesome for everyone at home. Miss you all! LOVE!

BACK FROM BARCELONA!

By far my most favorite city that I have seen yet. It was so well-rounded! I mean, you could be completely surrounded by people in the most urban of settings and then you could walk to the beach in 10 minutes! Plus, there were palm trees everywhere, so that helped with the exotic-ness.

Erin and I stayed with our friend from BC, Chiara, who was the best hostess we could have asked for. She has only been in Barcelona for 2 months but already knows so much about the city -- when we would go to places she was like our own personal tour guide. My favorite things that we saw were, undoubtedly, the buildings and structures created by Gaudi. We saw La Pedrerea, Casa Batllo, Parc Guell, and Sagrada Familia. They were ridiculous! Look up pictures online if you don't know about them (soon, as well, I will post my own pictures). I really knew nothing about the modernist movement (he was building Dr. Suess houses in the early 1900's) but I am basically obsessed. We also saw some work of another modernist who built the Hospital San Pau (where we all agreed we would gladly be sick for an extended period of time...it was basically a gorgeous college campus) and the Palau di Musica. The coolest thing about Barcelona was that you could just walk down the street and be amazed. Every building was so cool, even if they weren't Gaudi's or anything. I loved it.

We also went down Les Rambles, a huge square that was packed and had the most intricate street statue performers I have ever seen. There were also a ton of kiosks, some of which sold ANIMALS. So weird.
We got tapas, of course, and sangria (it's a cultural thing!), and for lunch, Chiara made me try a waffle topped with chocolate and condensed milk and ice cream and it was simultaneously disgusting and delicious. ALSO CHURROS!

No crazy nightlife for us though -- because we wanted to see as much of the city as possible, we bypassed the club scene where people get back at 7 am (no joke, Erin and I saw some people coming back home this morning when we left for the train station). I don't think I could handle being abroad there -- sleepy Parma is much more my style. But I would love to go back to Barcelona, there is still a lot to see.

Oh, and we were able to go to the BEACH because it was nice weather. We didn't go in, but instead sight-saw (conjugation?) the Olympic Village in Port Olympic, and threw rocks in the water. ALSO ALSO we went up a funicular (I sang Decemberists all the way up because it reminded me of Myla Goldberg) and a ski.lift type thing to the top of this hill that had beautiful views of the city.

So basically Barcelona was a weekend of a GORGEOUS town, a TON of walking, and TOO MUCH fried food. Oh man. LOVED IT.

This week we have a Verdi opera on Tuesday (excited to dress up!) and my 8:15 am classes were CANCELLED this week because we are transitioning to the next part of the school year. SCORE.

I don't want to think about the fact that it's almost November already.

I was going to add some pictures on this post because obviously I cannot update my webshots, but Jeff's computer is being dumb. I think it is good that my computer is broken because today was the biggest waste of a day that I've had since I've been here! Jeff is in Southern France and I learned how to break into their room so I stole his computer for the weekend. Because of that, I am now fully caught up on the Office and very important Saturday Night Live sketches. Oh Sarah Palin, you are just not funny. I really really enjoyed Amy Poehler's rap though, that was worthwhile.

We went to Lake Como yesterday and saw George Clooney! He took all the pictures for us, so that was nice. It was really really pretty there but also really really touristy. It was like a huge resort basically. We took a bus from Como to Bellaggio, which is supposed to be this gorgeous little Italian town, not realizing that the bus took an hour. Despite the length, it was a fabulous way to tour the lake and the little towns along the lake. I didn't realize how HUGE that frickin' lake is. You wouldn't think it! But it was a very chill weekend in that respect so it's been good.

I've been wasting a lot of time on Facebook and looking through people's pictures -- I miss hearing about what's happening at BC! NO ONE EMAILS ME TO TELL ME ABOUT THEIR LIVES. I beg you to take pity on the poor lonely child lost in the wilderness of Italy -- tell me about your lives at home! No matter how trivial or lame you may think it is compared to my glamorous and cultural life here, DO IT. I miss you guys.

CRY CRY CRY!
hope all is well! but not too well that you're having so much fun without me that you can't EMAIL ME.

:[

Our flight to Brussels was cancelled today because of a strike at the Pisa airport...which meant that we spent essentially 12 hours traveling around Italy for nothing, trying to figure out what to do. Basically though we just got a ton of money down the drain with our deposit and first night for the hostel (because we did not cancel before 24 hours) and our dumb flight (which we can try to get back if we send a fax? Right.) and all the trains we took (7) during the course of the day. Yuck.

The only good thing that came out of it was that Erin and I had a wonderful wonderful train ride home from Florence (yep, back there again) to Parma because we talked to this 64 year old Italian man who spent 2 years in Chicago (living in Downers Grove!) working with ENRICO FERMI and who made the first nuclear plant in Italy. Um. Also he was hilarious. We basically talked to him about everything and anything -- he said he would toast us if Obama won. Yesss. When we got off the train we looked back and he was looking out the window for us so we did a big big wave and blew him a kiss. He was so happy -- he was telling us about his family but how he's alone now because his wife died 5 years ago so I think he was really excited to strike up a conversation for an hour. It made us so so so happy, despite our terrible day of traveling.

There really is not much to do in Parma. Upsetting. I don't know what we're going to do tomorrow. Bleh. We were so looking forward to Belgian waffles and Belgian chocolate. Maybe we will go to Lake Como -- we are looking up train times right now. MORE TRAINS HOORAY. :[

BUT FRANCO IS THE BEST!
Also it is Nice's birthday today! We celebrated with cake and gelato and Happy 21st! plates. Because that's how old she is.

HOORAY!

1. Yesterday I decided my bicicletta was the one the woman who turns into the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz ride, and I started humming her little theme song to myself.

2. I am getting so good at nodding -- I think Italians have like a special magnetic power that when they speak really fast they nod at you and you nod with them, making it seem like you know what they're talking about but really you just can't tear yourself away from their magical nodding powers.

3. I got a babysitting job! Twice a week for a couple hours for two boys, ages 9 and 21 months. I'm so stoked (and thanks to Dianne for talking to a random Italian woman...sorry I didn't tell you I put you down as a reference...) and getting paid in euro is a bonus as well.

4. My soc class was cancelled for tomorrow! Meaning I don't have an 8:15am class but instead a 12:45 class to start my day! HOORAY!

5. I got two! COUNT THEM TWO! prizes in my cereal box yesterday! KUNG FU PANDA!

6. My Dell disc still hasn't come and I think I will live the rest of my life on other people's computers. Forever!

7. I forgot to say that there was an old man in the Portugal airport wearing a BC hat. When Erin told him we went to BC too, he said "fair enough!" Hahahha.

8. Nice's birthday is in two days! Also I showed her how to use Facebook yesterday. She is so cutting-edge.

9. Gelato keeps getting better and better. I feel bad for when I go home because my old love, ice cream, is going to feel all jealous and stuff, because in my head I'll keep comparing it to gelato. Sigh.

10. I'm going to mass in like 45 minutes for the first time in a long time. It's been really hard to find mass times and when I don't have that darn Salt and Light meddling in my faith life, I don't remember to go. I'm very excited, though, I've been looking forward to it all day.

Still no computer. I'm about to call Dell again to see if they can connect me to their international number so THEY can send me a recovery CD. I think my friend might be able to fix it if I get that, so cross your fingers. I don't like not having my computer to watch my movies or listen to my music or check mah email. Or talk to people, I GUESS. Alas.

WE WENT TO PORTUGAL THIS WEEKEND.
Highlights:
-awesome hostel! attractive and friendly staff, very very clean, and free breakfast! yummy.
-we saw a lot a lot of the town -- we climbed up a castle, scoped out some markets and took a tram to Belem, where we sampled the local pastry (of which a certain pastry shop makes 1200 a day!!) and climbed a tower on the water. It was very windy but very awesome
-EVERYONE WAS SO NICE. our cab driver definitely had no idea where we were going when we tried to get to our hostel so he dropped us off on a random street so we went into a shop where a heavily tattooed and pierced man took like 15 minutes mapquesting where we were going and explaining the best he could where our hostel was. sooo nice. we went back the next day and i bought a couple things from them.
-i won shanghai! what what?!

Lowlights:
-Portugal is smelly! we got up really early on Saturday so we could make the most of our day -- way before anyone was up and about, and the amount of trash and broken glass from the previous night was astounding. Certain streets REEKED as we passed them. Very odd.
-confusing streets -- thank god for Erin and Jeff, I would have had no clue where I was if I was on my own.
-traveling -- we got to the airport to portugal way too early because we had the wrong times for our flight. it was simply a long day of waiting around and not being able to sleep because my ipod was out of battery. alas.
-no passport stamp! ALAS! How will people know I am such a world traveler?
-we don't speak Portugese. We did learn one word when we were there: "obrigado," which means thank you (or "obrigada" if you're a girl)

It was really good to experience a different culture though. It was weird, the flight took the same amount of time it takes me to get from Chicago to Boston, but this time when I got off the plane it was a completely different language (although some would argue the East Coast accent is a different language altogether) and a different way of life. It wasn't at all what I had expected, but then again, I didn't really know what to expect. I was so glad I was able to go -- it's such a unique place to say you've been to -- but I'm not sure if I'll be going back ever. We had a lot of fun though, and took a ton of pictures -- hopefully sometime soon I will be able to upload them (cross those fingers hard plz).

Time to call Dell and eat leftovers! Cooking class tonight! We're making risotto con zucco. DEELISH!

Thanks Jeff for letting me use your computer!
Sooooo my computer is DEAD. I don't know how or why but all I know is that I came back from my weekend and I could not turn my computer on. I tried for 6 hours! ALAS. So right now Nate is looking at my computer to see if he can do anything because if he can't my coordinator said they'd have to send it to Milan and then to FRANCE because no one uses Dells here! SO GOOD!

This weekend was good though! Me and Jeff went with Nice on a trip -- her friend has a HUGE property where they make olive oil, and so we spent the weekend walking through tiny Italian towns and basically living an authentic Tuscan life. The best part, maybe, was the meat market because they had chickens with heads and feet (if the feet are yellow you know it's good) and we saw a pigs hoof get cleaved in half. YUCK. Dan would not have liked it because NO ONE used gloves. And NO ONE cared.

I got my bike today! And was terrified to ride it on the streets -- you'd think since I know how to bike and do it well(ish) it would be no big deal. But you don't get it. There are cars and buses and motorini and bikes and pedestrians all vying for the same spot on the road. And I had no idea where I was supposed to stop and go so I would follow old people. Hahaha.

ALSO I mailed my absentee ballot in today! I am very excited but very sad I don't get a I VOTED TODAY sticker.

I don't know what else is new. Not having my computer throws me for a LOOP.

I LOVE CAPS!

there is no peanut butter here.
:[

Here are some pictures of my apartment! Try to count how much is from IKEA :]

This is my bed and the pictures I put up 10 minutes ago. My bed isn't made, and you can see the change of sheets and note that Nice left for me this morning. Also you can see one of the 9 million stuffed animals at the foot of the bed that was in my room. I like the crocodile so I keep him there.


Here's my bebe kitchen! I make tea on the stove and have cereal for breakfast. If you zoom in, you can see the Batman toy I got in the cereal box above the stove by the dishes.


Here's my BATHROOM! You can see the shower in the mirror kind of -- I had a picture of how tiny it was but I thought it was boring. Pictures of toilets obviously make for better posts.


Here's the other side of my bedroom area. The stuffed mouse that Nice gave me is on the shelf above the drying rack, which is holding the majority of my laundry that I did last night. It's not all dry yet. Usually I put my laptop on the desk where I can look out past the stuffed animals onto a really cute lane that leads to a park. It's a little messy, but I'm still getting situated. There is a polka-dot rug on the floor that I wish you could see.

Dinner last night was good! The girl that is living here for the year is in a single as well, so Nice had her eat with us. She kept bringing food to the other BC students in the next room, who had just attempted to make gnocchi (and didn't do too well on their first attempt).
Nice also invited me to travel with her to Torino this weekend! I'm pretty excited; she is such a character.
Also, last night we booked a flight to Lisbon! Hooray for Portugal!

We had a language proficiency test today and tonight we have our first Italian class. Blehh. I love walking around Parma though. I am the only one in Nice's apartment who is in the advanced track, and I had to be in the main piazza this morning earlier than they did. Walking there this morning it actually hit me that I'm in Italy and I'll be walking along these streets everyday. That soon I'll have a bike and get to wherever I'll need to go. That I'll be able to read in the giardino and navigate around the city to get to the different areas where my classes are and where my friends are living. That already I'm a part of la dolce vita that exists here.
It was a good feeling.

Mmmm -- I'm writing this ONTO MY BLOG and not onto a Word document because I HAVE INTERNET!
Maybe the capital letters should instead read I'M IN PARMA! Because that's true too.
Guys, its so cool here!
I think I'm a little slap happy still of getting out of Florence and the hotel, because some people already are complaining but I'm super excited to be here.
We took the bus from Firenze to Parma and there wasn't enough room for everyone's luggage. Very nice, bus. We spent a cramped 2.5 hours and then got dropped off at our respective homes.
I am staying in this woman Nice (pronounced knee-chay)'s apartment, and although I have a single (the other people living in her apartment have doubles, except for one girl who is staying the whole year who also has a single), I am technically doing a "homestay," which means she makes me dinner and breakfast. But mostly dinner because she told me she gets up early to run, so I buy what I want and she'll pay me for it. Which is good news for me! I bought tea and Honey Nut Cheerios today so I'm totally set.

BUT YEAH!
Nice is adorable. She got us (the 6 of us living here) huge things of gelato which we ate with another homestay family who lives nearby, and the two BC students living with them. First of all, the gelato was amazing, and it's right around the corner. Also, it is called Gelateria Mickey Mouse. HA.
Everything in our rooms is from IKEA, which they LOVE here -- we all had like 9 stuffed animals in our rooms. Nice gave me a mouse stuffed animal to keep to welcome me. Too cute.
I have my own bathroom and tiny tiny (smaller than yours, Suze) kitchen area, and windows that look out over this arched passageway and a lane lined with trees. So pretty. We're very nearby the center of the city and close to a beautiful park.
Nice told us that in two weeks she will stop speaking English and only speak Italian, and that we will get bikes to ride around. I'm sad about the latter because everyone already has bikes :[ I feel a little left out.
EVERYONE RIDES BIKES! It's so cute and European. I can't wait to join and possibly die because of the wacky traffic.
Today Nice went to Milan, but I'm super excited about dinner with her later. We had a boring day, lots of standing in lines and shelling out money to get bus passes and a permit of stay. Parma is adorable, and completely different than what I expected. It has a definite city vibe to it, but its small and soooo much less touristy than Florence.
Our welcome dinner was fabulous last night -- tortelli, prosciutto and parmesean cheese (obvi), vealish type meat, sparkling vino (?) and a YUMMY cheese crepe thingy.

Right now I need to go figure out if I can do laundry (the washers are TINY TINY and there are no dryers) and upload some pics! HOORAY!
Love you all, hope life is molto bene!

I realize that with another sparkling tale of my adventures this weekend, I am getting to the point where all my raving about Italy will become a little trite.
THEREFORE I have constructed a list about THE BAD THINGS IN ITALY.

Why Italy Is Dumb (a list by Kristin):
1. Everyone wears metallic gym shoes. Old people, young people, people riding bikes, people expecting to be taken seriously, EVERYONE.
2. No toilet paper in the bathroom! Anywhere! When I become President of Italy, my first act will be to ensure that all WCs are properly installed with a sufficient amount of toilet paper for the clientele that uses the facilities daily. Squat toilets I can deal with, having nothing with which to wipe my tush is another issue.
3. Clothes are expensive! Erin and I went into a couple department stores, thinking that prices might be a little more reasonable but NO. I absolutely refuse to buy a sequined Hello Kitty tank top for 25 euro.
4. Too much Hello Kitty. It’s everywhere. People actually think it’s stylish.
5. Texts and phone calls don’t go through, even when I’m texting or calling people on the same plan as me. Also the little voicemail symbol on my phone WILL NOT GO AWAY, even though I have no voicemails. Come on now.
6. Boys wearing pants that are colors other than black, brown, or denim (or variations of those). Where I come from, orange pantaloons will not get you very far in the business world.
7. Italians think that 65 degrees Fahrenheit is freezing. When we put on light cardigans to go out they wear down jackets with mittens and hats. Legitimately. Plus, North Face and Uggs prices are mad high here (at least double what they are in the States), so this reason correlates with number 3.
8. Sometimes I can’t tell what kind of fruit I am eating. Prune or plum? Lemon or orange? Nectarine or peach? It is slightly distressing.
9. The dryers hold approximately 2.4 articles of clothing. It is culturally sound to dry your clothes outside on a line or over a porch or whatnot, but what happens in the winter? I do not like icy jeans, no ma’am.
10. METALLIC GYM SHOES. YOU REALLY DON’T GET IT.

So anyway, this weekend was phenomenal!
Yesterday we took an earlyish train to Monterosso, one of the Cinque Terre towns. Things to do in Cinque Terre: go to the beach or hike through all five towns. We chose the latter! Overall, it took about five and a half hours to make it to all the towns, and the hike was actually more strenuous than I had originally anticipated, but it was worth it. I mean, despite my shirt and tank top being absolutely soaked through because of my backpack (lovely mental image! But seriously, I was basically a caricature of someone not in shape on a very hot day. Yucky.) and the never-ending inclines through the mountainous terrain, we felt very accomplished at the end. The first two legs of the trail, Monterosso to Vernazza and Vernazza to Corniglia, were the worst with the biggest inclines, but we did those first and the rest was peachy keen. On the way down to Vernazza we heard music from the beach below drifting up through the trees. That was pretty magical. Vernazza was my favorite, I think. We ate by the water and I dipped my feet in the water, which felt excellent after such a hike.

The path from Monterola to Riomaggiore was adorable. It wasn’t so much a hike as it was a stroll along this Via Dell’Amore, which was a covered walkway where people wrote confessions of love grafitti style, or had marble plaques put on the wall with the name of their love. I saw a marriage proposal on a cement bench. TOO CUTE.

At Riomaggiore we caught a ferry back to Monterosso, and the views of the towns from the water was spectacular. It was really neat to see the land we had just hiked, and to realize that we could have covered the same amount of land in a fraction of the time if we had just shelled out 8 euro at the beginning and did a ferry to begin with. Jokes, that would have been far too easy. It was definitely worth the journey.

At Monterosso we were all ready to get some dinner when we discovered that Monterosso is the most fabulous place on earth because they had set up a FREE WINE TASTING for whatever reason! Probably not the most healthy thing to have right after a long day of hiking and not a lot of eating, but it was incredibly fun and we felt like we had deserved it after such a hike. We got some dinner (gnocchi with pesto for me!) and then sat on the beach with gelato (stracchiatella and chocolate/coconut for me!) until it was time for our train. Really great.

This morning we went to Assisi, which was not as outwardly fantastic but was in its own right ridiculously cute. We started off seeing the tomb of St. Francis, and got holy cards. There was a wedding going on in one of the nearby chapels, and the bride rode through the piazza in a horse-drawn carriage. We went to a couple different churches and walked up to a castle on the top of a large hill, where there was a wonderful view of the countryside. There were so many priests and friars and nuns around, it was adorable. All in all, it was a great weekend for pictures, which I will upload as soon as I can in Parma.

Tomorrow is our art history final and Tuesday we leave! I cannot wait, you have no idea. I really need to start packing things up here and organizing my notes some more. But life is pretty beautiful on this end, especially since I got more gelato tonight – Mars bar flavored and Kinder flavored ahaha. YUM.

Today we had class in the convent of San Marco, which has frescoes all over the place by a painter named Fra Angelico. They were pretty sweet, although a lot of them were undergoing restoration. It has been indescribable to be seeing these works of art in sitú, on location. So much more fulfilling than just looking in a book.

After class Erin, Sarah and I took a long walk up to the church of San Miniato (10 points for anyone who finds out for me what he is the saint for…I’m too lazy to actually look it up) which has an amazing view of the city of Florence – much like everything we go to. I’m really overwhelmed by the amount of places that have such a beautiful view of the city – I feel like my pictures are getting tedious with these constant gorgeous views. MAN! WHAT A PAIN!

We stopped at the Piazzale Michelangelo, which has yet another copy of the David looking out on the city. It was a lovely place to sit after a long hard walk up at least 3 million stairs and just sit and eat apples and look out on Firenze.

San Miniato itself was really cool. We walked around the outside of the church before going in, and there was a ginormous camposanto (cemetery) that extended for awhile. It was beautiful, in a strange way. Everything was made of marble: statues, huge intricate mosaiced mausoleums, and the grave markers themselves. I tried to read a couple of the markers and was able to understand a lot of the epitaphs.

The inside of the church was neat too, but it was weird not to have Rocci standing over us explaining every little detail of the church (hence me not even knowing who San M was). There were a couple frescoes that were only sketches, which I haven’t seen yet. This church was really cool because you could actually walk ALL AROUND inside it – like up to the choir loft and peek inside side chapels. So many churches right in the city only allow you to walk in and check it out from the ground floor, unless you want to pay something to check out the rest.

Since we’ve been back at the hotel waiting for dinner I’ve been looking through 9 trillion pictures and listening to music, and I’m a little – not homesick – nostalgic. Only a couple more classes left in Florence, then it’s off to Parma, which I am so excited about. It will be so good to feel settled in somewhere, and I’m psyched to check out my homestay. Plus, reliable internet is always a bonus. I should stop whining (and start WINING?). TEE HEE. Okay, ciao, it’s nearly chow time. I am just too clever for my own good.

ALSO we did some reading on the bridge next to the Ponte Vecchio. How cool is this?

It's been a couple days! Everyone's probably really excited that I haven't posted for awhile.

The day after we had the splendid wine tasting, we had a bit of a disappointment. We wanted to go to these gardens which we thought would be like Fiesole, but the bus dropped us off pretty much on the side of the highway and we had to walk a long, sketch route to these pretty pathetic gardens. We didn't stay long, because we had had such high hopes DASHED, so we left after we did our class reading and went instead to a flea market. Much more entertaining. I love how old junk is pretty much the same everywhere you go -- you wonder why certain things even EXIST, they're so ugly.

Yesterday class was at the Palazzo Medici and San Lorenzo, which my mom would have loved. The old residential palace of the Medici family is now the city police center, I guess, and there was this HUGE protest going on outside of the building while we were having class. Rocci told us if they breached the gates to tell them that we didn't work there and that we were Canadian. But alas, nothing so exciting even transpired. The church of San Lorenzo has the bodies of a lot of the Medici fam, which was cool. THEY WERE SO RICH.

It was one of the girl's birthday last night so we went to the kareoke place we went to last week. After awhile, a group went to this club to see MIMS (this is why I'm hot)...there are so many random artists that come here. Last week Chingy was here and next week is Flo Rida. Hahahahaha what. I didn't go (obviously) but apparently he was disappointing anyway.

TODAY we did the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, which is where a lot of the original stuff that was in or on the Duomo is housed. We saw some famous door panels, St. John the Baptist's jawbone and index finger, and the second of the three Pietas that Michelangelo carved (number one is in Rome, obviously, this one he smashed because he found an imperfection in the marble. YIKES MAN). Oh, and Brunelleschi's death mask.

Also today was Jeff's birthday so we went out to lunch at this restaurant Perseus, which apparently has the best steak in Florence. Jeff and Nate split this 48.00 steak which was delishhh and huge. Sarah Erin and I split some pasta and also some meat, which we now believe to be liver. Really gross, our tummies hurt afterwards. OH WELL WHAT AN EXPERIENCE.

ALSO we got train tickets to Cinque Terre for this weekend (we're doing a day trip on Saturday) and to Assissi for Sunday! These are the the plans we made in place of Munich, and I'm really stoked. CT looks GORGEOUS and Assissi is supposed to be pretty sweet as well.

Right now I'm looking up hostels in Poland and trying to figure out what to do with the 5 weekends I have not planned anything for. Oh traveling; never realized what a hassle you are.

ANYWAY I hope all is well with everyone -- shoot me an email to say how you're doing please! I miss you all!
LOVEEE

Today was perhaps one of the most pleasant days we’ve had since we’ve been here! The majority of my BC group is in either Rome or Lucca, and there are five of us currently in the hotel. WHICH IS SWEET. Last night we went to a very silly Americanized bar that had Italian and English karaoke, which was really amusing to watch. My favorite person who went up was this giant man with long blond hair and ridiculous sideburns who sang Madonna with his twiggy little friend. Also some man sang the theme song to an Italian cartoon, which confused everyone who was not Italian. GTs all around.

TODAY we had plans to go to Greve, the capital of the Chianti region, and rent bikes, taste some wine, wander around, fly by the seat of our pants. The bus that we were on, however, was really confusing and we could not tell for the life of us what stop we were at ever. We thought we missed the Greve stop at least 4 times, and these three American girls in the seats ahead of us heard us talking and told us to just get off at Panzano like they were doing, because there was a wine tasting festival going on. We quickly agreed, because that was what we were looking for and it sounded much more organized than anything we were going to do.

We got off at Panzano and immediately knew it was perfect. You paid for a glass (which you got to take home) and got a list of the wineries and types of wine that were around, and then went up to the stands and tried whatever you wanted! It was really fun, especially since we had no idea what we were doing, so we would listen to the sommeliers describe what kind of grapes were in it and how old it was and then we would just pick at random. We had absolutely no notes to write down but we knew what we liked. There was also a cheese man with the BEST CHEESE IN THE WORLD. It was so fresca and milky and delicious. I think it was a pecorino cheese.

There were tons of Americans there; a lot of older couples who had come to Italy for this specific festival. Surprisingly, we met a lot of people from Chicago, which was nice. Everyone was so friendly and made fun of us for not knowing what we were doing. We talked to this one couple from Chicago who seemed insistent that we actually get to Munich for Octoberfest – the older man offered to drive us there haha. We did a lot of walking around and looking at the beautiful vineyards on the countryside and it was so pretty. The weather was gorgeous and it was a very fun, relaxed day.

Tonight (for real this time) we’re getting gelato at this famous gelateria, Vivoli. It’s supposedly the best gelateria in Firenze, so we’ll see how it measures up.

Ciao belle!

Ciao ciao!

So although I did not get gelato last night, we did play a card game very similar to Phase 10 (get excited Heinzes) and I lost terribly but it did bolster my spirits.

This morning we left mad early to go to Pisa, which would have been splendid if it had not been raining like a monkey. The bus ride there was nice because we all got to sleep, and once we went into buildings it was okay because we could take notes without fear of our previous work being washed away. Outside was pretty miserable though, and kind of chilly.

Something funny though, when we were in the cathedral at Pisa, there was an orchestra of sorts getting ready for and playing a few songs -- much like the Benet band did when we went to Rome. The thing is, being on the other side of it, I didn't realize how ANNOYING we must have been to tour groups and classes and people who wanted to learn about the churches that we played in. It was so hard to hear Rocci, and with the exception of the people who knew the people who were playing, I'm sure we weren't the only ones put out. Interesting perspective.

Here is my mandatory picture of me pushing down the tower with my incredible strength (and umbrella):

What a clever beast.

Anyway, the majority of our group went to either Lucca or Rome this weekend -- there are five of us in the hotel right now. Tomorrow we're taking a bus to Greve, for WINE TASTING and walking around vineyards, and Sunday we're taking a day trip to more closeby towns to check things out there. Should be good. Hopefully the weather gets a little nicer.

That's all I got, peace love and vino!

BAD NEWS AGAIN
All train tickets to Munich were sold out for the weekend we wanted. Now we have to find alternate plans for next weekend.

Also, weird/unsettling incident happened while we were at the train station. Or rather, outside of the train station waiting for a bus. Two carabineri came up to our group and demanded to see our passports. We tried explaining to them that we were from a school group and our leader told us not to carry our passports around with us, but to instead carry a photocopy of it with us, but they said that was not acceptable. They seemed to be pointing their remarks at a certain member of our group and made comments that indicated they did not think he was American. He did not have even a copy of his passport and they kept telling us we had to have them. We were getting kind of scared because we didn’t know what the consequence would be for not having it – whether it would be a fine or JAILTIME we had no idea, and these guys were putting up a tough front. One of the guys told me to like translate to our friend what the policeman was saying. Finally, they went away, telling us from now on we had to carry our original passports with us, and we jumped on the next bus we saw. From the bus window we saw them go up to a couple of African American guys and write up a report for them. We’ve had a couple of instances with this – off the cuff remarks and insinuations that were actually insulting in a way, and we weren’t really prepared for it. I don’t know.

I was going to write an enchanting account of the Boboli Gardens, which Sarah and Erin and I visited today, but I’m not in quite a prolific mood right now. I’d been looking forward to Octoberfest and was really disappointed when it didn’t work out and then that stupid incident left us all feeling unsettled.

I’ll try soon to put up pictures of the vast area that is the Boboli Gardens, and maybe to write about class, which was in Santa Maria Carmine and Santa Maria Novella (the latter of which houses the first painting to EVER use linear perspective) but don’t count on it.

TOMORROW WE GO TO PISA THOUGH and I’m sure I’ll have an incredibly clever and original picture of me holding up the tower, so that’s something to look forward to! Except we have to be ready to go at 7:45 am. Yuckola, as my dad would say.

Hope life is peachy! I think I’ll get some gelato tonight to make me feel better.
LOVE

PS. ALSO I got Nutella on my skirt today! Way to go, champ.

hi friends,

TWO UPDATES IN ONE DAY CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?
I just wanted to let you know that I made a site to post my pictures online for your viewing pleasure. Of course I am using webshots, because the other providers did not give me enough space, so I will be posting my pictures at

http://community.webshots.com/user/parmaparmaparma

Thought I'd do a little continuity for you all to make it easier to remember.
Anyway, I am uploading some as we type, but soon I must go to bed so we'll see how many I get up there. Also, please ignore the weird labeling system -- to amuse myself without internet I renamed the pictures on my computer, but then my computer sorted them alphabetically, so I had to add the numbers in the beginning to keep them in chronological order when I upload. Sorry that's annoying.

Anyway, enjoy!

PS. Also, if you want to save my lovely face or lovely snapshots on your computer, you have to magnify the picture (there's an icon that says 'view full size' or something) before you can right click and save. That's just the way webshots works. Mi dispiace.

OK BAD NEWS, EVERYONE.
They were sold out of soccer tickets! We went a couple days ago and could not for the life of us find the stupid ticket office because the guys at the hotel front desk didn’t give us a street to look on, so we kept asking at bars who just told us to buy them there at a higher price, which we were not favorable towards. SO TODAY we looked up where to go and when it was open and we just went over there and they were SOLD OUT. SO SAD! I bought a Firenze shirt for NOTHING. Except wearing it outside of the stadio, I guess.

So let’s see. Yesterday we went into Santa Croce, a church where many famous people are buried, such as Michelangelo and Galileo. Dante is NOT buried there. In case you wanted to know. There is a cenotaph for him, and a lot of people think they’ve seen his tomb but they HAVEN’T. There were these sweet private chapels on the sides of the high altar owned by mad wealthy families, and this famous artist named Giotto decorated them. They were so cool; one of them was the Life and Times of St. Francis (not his real name! did you know that? I didn’t) and the other was some St. John the Baptist action. Giotto was a beast and was doing all these revolutionary ideas with his paintings, like animation and facial expression. There was another section painted by one of Giotto’s students depicting the Life and Times of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was equally cool (forse only when you have Rocci telling you anecdotes and what every little symbol means) because they told like the apocryphal stories of her growing up. Very very fun class, although it was long, because we had sat in the sun in the piazza outside of the church for two hours (legitimately) because we had nothing better to do than people watch. That itself was sweet because there was this group of musicians who came and played for at least an hour and they were mad good. I kept seeing couples dancing in the piazza and it was terribly cute.

TODAY we went to the Bargello Museum, the national sculpture museum. That is where Donatello’s bronze David is located, but it was being restored. Good news was it was being restored in the museum; bad news (or good news I guess?) was that he was face down on a table so we had an excellent view of his bum and not a lot else. Still, the symbolism with that statue alone made it a good class, not to mention we saw the Competition Panels for the Baptistery doors (to figure out who would decorate the doors to the building opposite the Duomo, they had a competition, and the finalists were Brunelleschi and Ghiberti – Bru lost but went on to be the mastermind behind the actual dome).

IT’S SUCH A GREAT CLASS.

Afterwards we went shopping (didn’t buy anything) and came back to the hotel. I got a phone! Or more specifically, my mommy called ATT a bazillion times and got my phone unlocked so I bought a SIM card and whatnot. Incoming phone calls and texts are free for me so if you really love me…Jay kay but seriously do it.

I can’t believe stupid soccer is sold out! No one even likes soccer here. I think we decided instead we’re going to take a bus to somewhere in the Chianti region and try to find a vineyard or do wine tasting or something. We are in Tuscany – it’s like a problem if you DON’T do that.

I’M REALLY HUNGRY. I want dinner; still have 45 minutes. Alas and alack. Hope life is great!

PS. September 17 is a good day <3

This morning we ventured away from the Duomo/downtown area and found this park in which to read our assignments for the rest of the week. There was no one there, and it was so quiet. It was a completely different atmosphere than we’ve been seeing in Florence thus far. It was all drizzly and there was an occasional clap of thunder so we sat under a loggia in the middle of the park by some fountains. It was extremely pleasant – after we read we just sat and chilled and listened to our music for a bit before we got cold and went back. It was a good thing we went out at all – as there were no planned activities for the day a lot of people just stayed in their rooms all day.

Today was Sunday, which is the Lord’s Day, and although we are in a city chock-full of churches, we didn’t know how many would be in English. Sarah found this service that was in English so we decided to check it out. It started at 6, and thinking on American time, we rushed through the city to get there. It obviously did not start until 10 after. The service itself wasn’t really a specific format – we sang four worship songs and then this Italian couple spoke. They gave up their jobs 5 years ago because they wanted to give back to the Firenze community, and so they started this center to connect Italians and Americans who are in the country for a brief period of time. They have Italian lessons and the opportunity to meet other Italian youth. It was very interesting, but we didn’t stay long enough to find out where it was.

Dinner at the hotel is served at 7:15, and we peaced out when the clock hit 7. We were about 30 minutes from our hotel if we walked which was a problem. We were looking for the bus that we could take but Sundays are dumb with that sort of thing so we couldn’t find one. Luckily, someone remembered that the bus we took to Fiesole goes right by our hotel so we hopped on that and jumped off at our hotel. We ate like nobody’s business.

I really missed 10:15 mass when I was at that service. I wasn’t really getting anything out of it and I kind of ached for some organization and tradition. Also we didn’t receive the Eucharist. I think I’d feel more comfortable next week going to a Catholic service in Italian – I’ll still have the basic understanding of what’s going on. Who knows. I think we’re going to a soccer game next Sunday, and that’s practically a religion here anyway.

OH AND I saw a poster for the Notwist, who are playing here on the 29th (I think my final is on that day so I won’t be going). I was surprised to see that until I realized they aren’t an American band. We have seen a bunch of posters for Burt Bacharach though, soooo I’m definitely putting that on my list of things to do.

Things I miss:
-desserts with dinner
-good bread
-cookies!
-maybe people, but right now food is topping my list – my tummy is still grumbly
-TEA!
-internetttttttt
-my green gym shoes that certain people think look like they’re falling apart. I’m so dumb, they’d be almost fashionable here, and more comfortable than some of my flats. Alas alas.
-more internet. It’s so dumb not being able to even check email daily, which sounds stupid but hey. I’m waiting on some emails from Caterina and the head of the Soc department and my parents and I can’t go on to see if they’re there because everyone and their mom is trying to access the wireless right now. Things will be better in Parma.

OKAY I WILL LEAVE YOU WITH THIS QUOTE from a sketch Italian man on the bus from Fiesole the other day.

“You are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cute. You are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo nice.” It totally worked. Sarah melted like butter.
Hahahahah. Creepy.

A group of us took a little trip to Fiesole, a little hilltop village about half an hour away from Florence. We were able to take a bus so transportation was free (!) and despite the rainy weather and waking up late, we still had a fun afternoon.

Apparently, Fiesole is a walking town, and had three routes to follow on our map. We wanted to find these Etruscan and Roman ruins, and walked in a circle for about 30 minutes before we realized it was right where we had come in. It was pretty neat to see, and we timed it extremely well – when it had stopped raining we walked among the ruins, and when it started to rain again we went in the museum. The museum was actually pretty interesting – there were these little figurines they had found, probably 50 of them; it was like little action figures. Then there was an almost complete skeleton of some guy.

After the museum it looked like the rain was gone for good so we decided to do one of the trails that had “breathtaking views” and catch the bus a little bit further down. We saw absolutely amazing views of Firenze from above. All the little red rooftops were so pretty, and the Duomo was such a stud. Love that building.

Nothing really else interesting! I hope soon I’ll have good enough Internet connection that I’ll be able to post some pictures online – right now I’ve been signing on really quickly, checking email, and signing back off.

YESTERDAY we had our welcome dinner at a very delizioso restaurant – we had four courses and some Italian vino (part of my education of Italian culture of course) and I ate like 2 pieces of chocolate cake (very small pieces) because people didn’t want theirs. DUMB. But awesome? For me!

TODAY we had to navigate our way through the Italian post office to pay our permits of stay for the time we’re here. IT WAS SO FUN. First, you take a ticket to get in line (blue for paying things, green for mailing packages) and then you wait and look at this screen which tells you what number is being served and at which ticket counter. It was basically a game of running around and it was very silly.

ALSO we had our second class – in the Uffizzi, which is the National Painting Gallery in Florence. We saw up close and learned molto about the transition from Byzantine to Gothic to Renaissance style, da Vincis, Bottecellis, Michelangelos, all while viewing them in hallways lined with nude men! Oh how they loved those Greco-Roman sculptures. We got to see The Birth of Venus, and the painting that changed how da Vinci’s teacher regarded his own career. Basically he saw the figure that da V had painted and said he was done for life because Leo had surpassed him in talent. It was really interesting because you could definitely tell the differences between the different figures, and da V’s was definitely the best. Pretty sweet.

ALSO ALSO we had a freak thunderstorm/hailstorm which was odd. We caught a bus before we got too drenched but it came out of nowhere. I went to Italy, not England. Come on now.

We’re planning on a nice quiet night by the Arno and Ponte Vecchio, and tomorrow are thinking of going to Fiesole, which is a little hilltop village about half an hour away. Already it will be good to get away from the city – it sometimes feels like there’s nothing to do but shop – so it will be nice to get a change of scenery.

PS I finally had some gelato 2 days in. MENTE! Mint! In a cone because it was cheaper. LIKE YOU CARE!

OKAY SO
I am here!
I will try to spare you every last detail of my trip

-I met up with a girl in the Rome airport before Florence because I was wearing my superfan shirt, so we were able to split a cab to our hotel
-I tried talking in Italian to the cab driver, but basically made a fool out of myself. Hahahah.
-toilet paper in the hotel is narrow, while the pillows are extra long
-our shower is the tiniest thing ever. I keep bumping my elbows
-when we got here my two roommates and I explored downtown Florence and saw the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, San Marco, ecc. It was sweet but we walked soooo much and my feet were hurting.
-our on-site director is pretty awesome. She’s from Parma and is really hilarious, and planning amazing trips for us to go on
-I avoided jet lag in the sense that I didn’t fall asleep until it was Italian time to go to bed, but I woke up at 3:30 am for some reason and couldn’t fall back asleep.
-we had our first art history class today and the professor is GREAT. He went to Holy Cross and did his masters in Florence, and has been here ever since. Basically our classes will be really detailed tours of certain spots in Florence. Today we checked out Piazza del Repubblica, which was the center of ancient Florence, and went to the Palazzo Vecchio, the old town hall, in front of which stands a copy of Michelangelo’s David. We also get little headsets to listen to him when we’re in big crowds, so we look really cool.
-I don’t get internet access in my room, but I paid for some wireless that is super spotty. I’m psyched to get to Parma if not for that reason only.
-my roommates, Sarah and Erin, and I are planning some great trips around Italy and elsewhere. We wrote down the excursions Caterina had planned and we realized we only really have 13 weekends in Italy the whole semester…it was a weird thing to realize, even on the second day
-tonight we had our “welcome dinner” at this restaurant near the Duomo, and it was stupendous. The group seems to be pretty friendly on the whole.
-Also, we picked out our classes today! Right now we are taking the art history course, and in Parma my track will take a history of Parma with Caterina, a language course in Italian, probably a soc class in Italian, and a class in English. HOORAY
-I miss people back home but the people I’ve met and spent time with are really nice, so that’s helping. I just wish I had internet all the time instead of having to write these entries/emails offline and then post them later, to save my internet usage.

Italy is great. It’s like walking around Disneyworld all the time with all the tourists and amazing buildings. There’s a Disney store here! Probably won’t be going in. But I’m really enjoying it so far.

Molto amore!

We are almost 2 days away! Hooray! Ryan left today for Venice, Sarah leaves on Monday for Paris, and come Tuesday I will (finally) leave for Florence! All the countries that could be used for slant rhyme.

Things I have done in preparation:
-got another suitcase
-bought a money belt, so I can be tres cool and impress the locals with my unbearable touristiness
-bought a gift for the woman whose apartment I will be living in -- it's a bread platter that says "HOME SWEET HOME." It's probably the lamest thing ever, but when my parents asked their friend from Italy what to get that's what she suggested because at least it's made in America. But alas, when we got home we saw that it was made in China. OH WELL.

I promise that when I get to Italy I will start having interesting posts, even if I have to make things up to make them interesting. I know these are dumb but I was already chided for not updating, so there you have it.

ciao chow

Despite having nothing to do during these last two weeks before I leave for abroad, I have been up late every night wasting time in front of the computer instead of going to sleep early to wake up refreshed for babysitting.
One such activity I've been amusing myself with is picking out a name for this stupid blog.

Obviously I'm not the first person to create a blog for going abroad, so naming it something like "Kristin's Abroad Blog" (dot blogspot dot com) would not do.

And I'm not the first person to go to Italy, so using some Italian phrase.blogspot.com would not do either (although I toyed with the idea of using a curse word or vulgar phrase, but then realized that I would probably be sending this site to former or present employers, and I wouldn't want them to think badly of me).

BUT APPARENTLY I am the first person in the history of the universe to use repetition, so I deemed that acceptable! Don't judge.

Other possible names included:
1. abroadabroad (not only for the repetition, but for having a double meaning hidden there. I really wanted to do abroadbroadabroad but I'm not really broad and I don't like being called a broad so that was like 2 strikes right there. Plus I think abroadabroad was taken and I didn't feel like looking up the second one) (click here for fun with words!)
2. Parma and Greg (but I never watched the show so ... dumb)
3. The Parma Initiative (but then people who actually watched LOST would think I was a tool and those who didn't would have no idea why it was named that)

It's gross writing in an online journal/bloggy thing again. I'll try to make it painless as possible for everyone involved.
ALSO I HEAR YOU CAN UPLOAD PICTURES ON THIS HERE THING.
What will these young'ns think up next? Hoo-ee!

Oh, also Susan was telling me about in this episode of "Arrested Development," there is a guy named Bob Loblaw who is in law and has a blog which is named "The Bob Loblaw Law Blog" which I really wanted to name this, but, wouldn't you know it, someone out there had already taken it. However, when I just typed in the URL, the person hasn't even posted anything. I hate him.

ENJOY MY BLOG! YAY