Betta
Betta Joined: July 17th 2006
Logged in: August 15th 2010
Logged in: August 15th 2010
Travel Blog Posts
I wrote this awhile ago and never finished it, so I'll just put it up now.... Last night I went with some of the students from this semester, who are all finishing up and heading out of Siena this weekend, to the Luna Park, the little amusement park/county fair they have in Siena during the summer. It’s in the middle of the Fortezza, the fortress built during the Medici reign over Siena, so it’s quite an experience to go on amusement park rides and eat too much cotton candy in an area that has been in use since the 1300s. Italian amusement parks are a much different cup of tea than most of the amusement parks I have frequented in America. We all had a really intense experience on the bumper cars (autoscontro), and as I ... read more
Big American
I haven’t written in quite a long time. I’ll just jump right in. The semester is going very well. There is a group of 22 students and so far it has been busy, but going very smoothly. We’ve had the normal problems and ups and downs of the beginning of the semester, getting everyone settled into their houses, dealing with initial worries and problems with the home-stays, but nothing out of the ordinary. For example, many of them are initially very uncomfortable with the fact that their host mother will be doing their laundry for them (“But, I mean, I’m the only one who ever washes my clothes. It just creeps me out to have someone else wash my underwear”). In the end, most of them are amused but pleased when their obsessive compulsive host families ... read more
From requests from my mom and Sarah, I am going to try to do my best to keep updating my blog more frequently (with no promises of quality or length of the entries...). I arrived safely in Italy on Monday morning with no problems, although it was probably one of my more absurd airport experiences. My roommates and some other friends in Siena had requested that I bring back some different kinds of candy from America, so my mom and I had gone to Target and Costco to load up on a variety of sweets. I guess my eyes were a little bigger than my luggage allowance, and when I went to check my baggage it was very overweight. My parents and I began unpacking my baggage in the front of the check-in line at the ... read more
Palermo
Here’s a very belated and sort of abbreviated account of my Easter trip to Sicily last month. Easter in Sicily was certainly an experience I will not forget. I was very lucky to get to experience Sicily within the context of a large and exuberantly welcoming Sicilian family who immediately opened themselves and their home up to me. It was a warm but easy sense of welcome, without any huge gestures or clear statements of ‘make yourself at home’, displayed simply by the way they picked me up at the airport, hustled me into the family car, and immediately starting talking about what we should have for dinner. Emanuela’s mother treated me as she treated her own kids, pushing me off to the bathroom to wash up when it was time for dinner, making sure I ... read more
I love Friday!
I got back on Tuesday from a very exciting trip to the south of Italy. I went with Samantha, one of the students this semester. It worked out really well because we have very similar ideas about how to travel—which basically means that we don’t plan things well because we think it's more fun to explore (this also involves getting lost a lot and walking around aimlessly). We also think that food and drink are the most important part of any trip. Following these rules, we had an entirely random and delicious trip. Friday evening we took an overnight bus to Salerno, a beautiful city on the coast about an hour from Naples. We left Siena at around midnight and found ourselves at the Salerno bus station at 6:30 in the morning after a pretty uncomfortable ... read more
Butterfly
I’m still recovering a little from my impromptu but wonderful trip to America a few weeks ago. It was wonderful to visit home and see family and friends, and although I’m happy to be back in Italy, I’m really missing everyone very much. Here’s a brief rundown of my trip: basically, the program director was in the States visiting colleges but unfortunately got pretty severely ill and couldn’t finish, so the program flew me over to finish the last week of her visits. I flew into Washington D.C. and had a very tearful reunion with Mom and Dad (I heard a woman standing near us watching say to her friend ‘I want to hug them too!’). We must have looked pretty happy. I had an excellent first dinner consisting of an enormous bison cheeseburger, French fries, ... read more
The other day two of my roommates decided to put internet in our apartment. They’re really excited to blast into 2009 with new-fangled downloading-at-home capabilities. I came home the other day and Olinda was all in a huff. She told me: ‘I tried to download Happy Feet but instead I accidentally downloaded a porno about a guy with a foot fetish. I sat down expecting to watch a nice little movie about happy, dancing penguins but instead I had to watch some guy sucking on his girlfriend’s toes.’ She was certainly not amused. The new students have arrived and everything has been going really well. They are a group of eleven girls and I’ve been having a good time hanging out and showing them around Siena. We had orientation in the same place near Pisa where ... read more
Innsbruck
Christmas in Austria I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday! I just made it back to Siena safely after a great week in Austria. I left last Monday night on an overnight train. It was not such a good trip-there was this terrible family in the car with me. The mother kept yelling at the children and she kept telling me that I was on the wrong train. She asked where I was going and when I said ‘Innsbruck,’ she shook her head and told me I was in the wrong place. When I told her to leave me alone because I thought I was correct, she just clicked her tongue and kept shaking her head. Gotta love Italian mothers, right? So, it turns out I was right and I made it to Austria around ... read more
Siena
Well, I am officially terrible about keeping this updated. My goal for next semester is definitely to write more. I decided rather than trying to write everything that has been going on these past few months, which is impossible, I would include some random photos from various trips and things throughout the semester, from the first days to the last. The semester ended last week and all of the students sort of trickled out. Everyone is gone now, even most of the professors and other people who work here. I leave tomorrow evening for Austria on an overnight train and I'll be there for a week, until New Years. Then I'll be back in Siena to celebrate with a friend and her family in Siena. It's definitely hard to be away from home right now and ... read more
I have gotten way behind in writing. I am going to give a few random pieces of what has been going on here in the past few weeks… I am also going to post some pictures soon. To begin with, here’s a random funny language blunder of the week: I woke up early and was in the kitchen having breakfast and packing my lunch for school. Typically I either bring some kind of sandwich or leftover pasta, a banana, and a little package of biscotti. So, I made a salami and mozzarella sandwich and I was looking for the plastic wrap, which wasn’t where it normally is. My roommate Letizia walked into the kitchen and I asked her where to find the plastic wrap to wrap my sandwich. But I got the word for plastic wrap, ... read more
