Saddly there is no real Halloween in Italy....How dare them it is my favorite holiday! So instead I had a class field trip to the private home of an Italian family who taught me to cook a traditional Umbrian meal, with fresh seasonal ingredients. The mother Daniela was extremely nice and smart. She speaks Italian, English, German, Spanish, and a little French, and works with a program to keep the traditional Umbran traditions alive. Our main course was a risotto with pumpkin, Perugian sausage (my favorite), and onions. There were baked seasonal vegetables, amazing cake, cookies, and fruit dous [View Full Entry]

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Today Kirsten went to speakers corner where supposedly a bunch of British people bicker at each other about politics. I went off on my own and went to 4 different museums. They were all free! I went to the Natural History museum and felt like a little kid going on a field trip. It was really fun to go back. There were dinosaur bones, and a lot of Taxidermy animals. I was amazed by the size of the museum. It was gorgeous, I don't think I have ever been to such a magnificent museum. Then I walked around the corner to [View Full Entry]

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So Kirsten loves tea and knows a lot about it...so it was our mission to find the tea museum and have tea time. Today we ended up going to the Tower of London, which was nothing like I expected. I learned a lot about the medieval history of London and saw all the crown jewels. I got to walk over the Tower of London bridge which I always assumed was London bridges. We hunted for the tea museum which ended up being across town. We found Vinatopia and I had tea and carrot cake at the Brahman tea museum. There is [View Full Entry]

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After we left Eindhoven we took a flight to London. The airport was HUGE with more than 90 gates. Kirsten and I bough bus tickets to Victoria Station, where we stumbled around to find how to get to our hostel in Earls square. We ended up getting tube tickets. On a side note I have to say I LOVE THE TUBE! I was so impressed by the public transportation in London, even better then that in Amsterdam. Anyway, London is very beautiful and I was only seeing it at night. I loved the accents and the people were very friendly and [View Full Entry]

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To broaden our view of the Neatherlands we went to Den Hagg, the capital. There was a vacation so most of the important buildings were closed. We had a nice restful day strolling around and had a cute lunch. There was a sign for "chilli" and I was really excited to have some, although it ended up being a hot sandwhich. Weird? Oh well I was introduced to Stroopwafels! They are these caramel waffle cookie delays that were way good. We ended our day by going to the Van Gogh museum! It was amazing. I really love his artwork, and I [View Full Entry]

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So I really wanted to go biking like everyone in Amsterdam. So today we walked all around to try to find a bike rental place, and pancakes. I was craving dutch pancakes since I got there. For some reason we were always passing these two places but this morning we couldn't find them. We ended up renting from a place called Damstraat...they were very reasonable. The couldn't tell us where to get pancakes, although we went just around the corner and found them. They were huge...I call them the Dutch pizzas...I got cheese, eggs and ham. Delicious, except for the stomach [View Full Entry]

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Alright, so after giving a dirty first impression of Amsterdam I would like to so you the reason why it is called the "northern Venice". Amsterdam is beautiful, the people are very kind (I love their accents - even when I was in the middle of the road and a woman on a bike yelled "you're in the middle of the road" it was very polite, i guess you had to have been there), the history is rich, the city is lively with bikes, plus the Netherlands have windmills, I never found them but they have them! lol Anyhoo I found [View Full Entry]

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My break begins as follows…I had to wake up at 5, catch a 5:30 bus to the train station and get on a train to Pisa at 6:15. In Florence Kirsten, Matt and I almost got on a train to Siena, but thankfully switched literally last min. Oh yeah Kirsten and I ran into Matt at the Perugia train station. From Pisa we got to the airport for out 12:30 flight. We took Ryan air…which was actually pretty decent, except for their landing. Every time we landed I felt like the tip of the airplane crashed into the ground. It was [View Full Entry]

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The big event of the year in Perugia happend this week...EUROCHOCOLATE...actually midterms and Kirstens birthday consumed my life that I didn't go to any of the chocolate events until the end of the week. I just taste tested samples as I went to class and my apartment. I love chocolate though. I have to recommend any dark chocolate from Africa, especially Madagascar. What is tricky in America is that the FDA regulates that Dark chocolate has to have 30% or more coco to be considered dark chocolate. Milk chocolate has to have 10% or more to be considered milk chocolate. What [View Full Entry]

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Kirstens birthday became Kirstens birthday weekend. It was a lot of fun. A bunch of us went to a really good traditional Perugian restaurant. There were medieval weapons, armor and gnomes. Weird huh. I tried to get a truffle dish although I think they gave me the wrong meal. Oh well. I thought it was too confusing to explain in Italian and change it. Kirsten started her afternoon a shot every half an hour for her 21st. We went to La Tanna Del Orso pub which was extremely crowded. We almost went to some club that you had to be bused [View Full Entry]

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