Somewhere Over the Rainbow

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The weeks are really just flying right by and I can’t believe I’ll be home in almost exactly a month! Although it will be hard to leave, it will be really exciting to come home and see everyone (and I’m also looking forward to chowing down on some foods I haven’t eaten in awhile...really high on my list are Chinese food, Mexican food, bread and butter instead of olive oil, eggs and bacon, and definitely cutting back on the pasta for awhile). A quick update on my plans for Christmas: my flight doesn’t leave Rome until December 26 at noon, so I had been planning on either spending Christmas here and taking a really early train that morning, but I wasn’t exactly sure how that would work....but....one of my best friends here, Sarah, is from Austria, and she invited me to come to her house and spend a snowy, Austrian Christmas with her and her family (according to her, this also includes some skiing in Austria, which, given my susceptibility to extremely clumsy accidents, might not be the best idea, but she said I could do the little kid slopes). She has four little sisters who are under 10, and she’s really excited to have me come home with her and meet everyone (and she’s already talking to her mother about the traditional Austrian foods they will have to have while I’m there). We’ll take a train together to
Austria either the 22 or 23, then, in order to get to Rome in time for my flight, I’ll take an overnight train which leaves Austria at 23:00 on the 25, so I will get to Rome at 8 in the morning, in perfect time for my flight home. Then I’ll be in Philadelphia by about 20:00 on the 26. I’m pretty excited about all of it.
The weekend my parents were leaving Italy, we took the train together to Rome, as I was flying out of Rome that day with a couple of friends to spend the weekend in Barcelona. My friend, Taryn, from the program has a really good friend studying in Barcelona, and we were going to visit her and have her show us around (she ended up being an excellent tour guide, and even though we really weren’t there for very long, we saw and learned a lot from her). It was really the craziest travel whirlwind weekend, but an excellent experience. The flight went really well, although I was actually pretty nervous, and we landed in Spain after about an hour and a half flight. What we really hadn’t realized was that the airport we landed in with Ryanair was actually an airport about and hour outside of Barcelona, so we had to hop on a bus to get to the city. Exhausted, we ended up getting confused and a little lost in the subway system (although I will never forget walking down into the subway in Barcelona and hearing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the radio). After all of the confusion, we finally found our hostel (really, a very shady place and someplace I was not too sorry to leave...it was in a bad area of the city, and if you opened the mirror medicine cabinet above the sink, it opened out into this dark, creepy courtyard...). But Barcelona is a really exciting, beautiful city and I wished I could have had time to see more of it. Life in that city really doesn’t stop. We ended up being out really late both nights we were there because we wanted to do as much as possible, and there were people out and about until all hours of the morning. We met up with Taryn’s friend, Eve, Friday night (interestingly enough, our meeting place near our hostel was a three story Kentucky Fried Chicken....amazing), and went to one of their favorite bar/clubs in the area (while I was carrying my very first drink of the night back to our table, I failed to notice the existence of a stair and ended up tripping and dumping an entire glass of sangria in this young woman’s lap...it was quite the sticky mess, and I didn’t really know what to do, so I just excused myself in Italian and walked to our table..this proves the fact that I should not go skiing). But the sangria was really delicious. Saturday, we woke up pretty early and started our day of sightseeing. We visited Gaudi's Casa Mila and had an outdoor lunch near his church, Sagrada Familia. We also visited his park, Park Guell, where there were some neat views of the city and interesting structures. In the early evening we visited the ancient Roman section of Barcelona, including the immense Gothic Cathedral. After stopping for a little snack of hot chocolate and churros, we headed back to our creepy hostel for an early evening nap (because our flight was early in the morning on Sunday, we were planning on just staying up all night so we could maximize our awake hours in Barcelona). We then had a great Spanish dinner of tappas, then headed out for the night. We ended up at the club that David Beckham owns in Barcelona (one of Eve’s friends was on a list so we could all get in), and we had a lot of fun dancing and hanging out outside on the back patio. After having waffles down by the water, we caught our bus to get to the airport and flew back to Rome. We spent a rainy afternoon walking around Rome, had lunch in a little pizzeria, and finally completed the last leg of our journey from Rome to Siena. We returned safely, completely exhausted but happy that we had gone.
The next weekend, a group of us from school went to Pisa to stay at Stefano’s house. Stefano is a student at the University of Siena who is from Pisa, and whom we met because for awhile he was living with the same host family as Sarah, one of my friends from the program. We took a train to Pisa Friday afternoon, and Stefano picked us up from the train station. His house was incredibly beautiful and his parents were so welcoming to all of us. Friday night his parents made us a delicious dinner, then a group of Stefano’s friends came over to hang out. The mix of languages was interesting, and we all had a really great time. Really late Friday night we went to see the Leaning Tower. It was about 1:30 in the morning, there was absolutely no one around, and I will never forget walking through the archway and seeing the Duomo, Baptistry, and tower in the clear, quiet night. After walking around for awhile, we went and had drinks along the river. On Saturday, a few of us had to go to Florence with our art history class, so we took a train from Pisa to Florence and spent the day seeing churches in Florence with our hilarious professor, Pierre Giacomo (although he is Italian, he just loves to use the word ‘redneck,’ and he often intersperses it throughout the lecture. I also keep a list of quotes in my notebook of ridiculous things he says during class). It was a disappointingly rainy day, but we visited Florence’s Cathedral, the church of Santa Maria Novella, and the Santa Croce church. Damp, chilly, and tired, we took a train back to Pisa, where we showered, relaxed, and had some delicious homemade pizza. Stefano had a bunch of friends over for dinner, and after hanging out at his house for awhile, we all drove to a discoteca near Pisa, where we danced all night long! It was a really nice club, and I’m really not joking when I say that we danced all night. We slept pretty late the next morning, and Stefano’s mom was surprised that we still wanted breakfast even though it was around 12:30 and she was in the midst of cooking lunch (Stefano had planned on having about 11 people over for lunch). We had cakes and biscotti, and she made us all cappuccino. Very soon after, we had a huge lunch, with two kinds of pasta, then pork, beans, and potatoes, and finished off with some fruit. We spent the day hanging out and went back to see the tower again, where we of course had to take the traditional touristy pictures. After a great weekend, we took the train back to Siena.
I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was strange not to be home, and I definitely missed everyone! I myself had a quite interesting turkey day... We had some extra seminars to go to for school, then our program had reserved a restaurant to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for all of us. Before dinner, a bunch of us went out for cocktails, then headed over to the restaurant (although I was excited for an Italian Thanksgiving, I was also pretty homesick. But, it was really fun having cocktails before dinner and explaining Thanksgiving to my friends from Germany and Austria, who were also coming to dinner with us to experience there first “Thanksgiving”). I really haven’t been too homesick since I have been in Italy, I think because I’ve just kept myself so busy that I didn’t allow myself time to be sad, but when we sat down for dinner, some pent up sadness definitely came out (I also think it had to do with the pre-dinner drink loosening up my emotions) and I started to cry. My friend Sarah, from Austria (she is really one of the sweetest people), gave me a huge hug and said “Come on, today, we are all your family! And, how often are you going to get to celebrate Thanksgiving in Italy with a German and an Austrian?” She was definitely right. Our program had talked to the restaurant about what we traditionally eat for Thanksgiving, saying that we of course eat turkey and stuffing, and that pumpkins are also important. We started out with bruscetta with black cabbage, then I thought it was absolutely hilarious when the waiters brought out the first course of pasta with a pumpkin sauce; it ended up being hilariously delicious. Then we each got a plate of turkey, stuffing, and fried potatoes, which, although not as good as home, was still tasty. For dessert, we had an apple and pear pie, and the restaurant made sure to cover all of its bases by including in the pie chunks of pumpkin. Top this all off with an abundance of wine, and you have a wonderfully Italian Thanksgiving.
I’ve been having a little problem with my eyes this week (I think my eyes are just dry and irritated from my contacts, but my vision has been really blurry), and it’s been giving me a lot of headaches and making me feel just a little under the weather. I hadn’t spent a weekend in Siena for almost a month now, so today it was nice to have a relaxing day. I slept in, read, had a huge lunch with my host family, and then just went in to do errands and hang around the city. I had hot tea, read, and wrote postcards in my favorite café, and I ended up going to this short film festival in a theater in the city center I had heard about in my education class because there was a section on films in sign language, which was really interesting. I decided that I would just have a quiet night at home, which I don’t do very much on the weekends, so I went to a video rental place to rent myself a movie (I hadn’t rented movies before here because I just borrowed them from school, so I didn’t really know how to do it. I just went up to the guy working and said “Excuse me, I would like to rent movies, please. ‘Mi scusa, volevo noleggiare i film per piacere.’ He was really nice and got me all set up. It’s also nice because I don’t feel as bad about watching stupid, mindless movies when I watch them in Italian because I tell myself that it’s just for the language practice...). Anyway, I had to make a quick stop at the grocery store; after selecting my purchases and paying (you have to pay extra if you want a plastic bag “busta di plastica” to bag your groceries), I was trying to put my movie and the things I bought into my plastic bag, but I just couldn’t get it to open. So, there I was, outside of the grocery store, pathetically clutching a chick flick, a box of ‘girl things,’ and a three pack of chocolate bars, struggling and almost having a breakdown because I couldn’t get them into my plastic bag. I seriously looked like a bad Midol advertisement.
Something I’ve found interesting here is that they often peel their fruit instead of eating the skin. My host family always peels the skin off of their apples and pears; I have never seen them eat any fruit skin. We were talking to Stefano last week as he was peeling an apple, and he said it’s because the skin of the fruit is dirty, so we said that’s why we wash it. He made a disgusted face and said “There are some things that don’t come off just by washing it.” I’m seriously terrible at skinning fruit, and I’ve provoked many an exasperated sigh of “Ellllllliiiiissabetta” with my perilous wielding of a knife in a sorry attempt at skinning some piece of fruit (Lucia usually ends up grabbing it from me and doing it herself), Tomorrow, I am going with my host family to Pisa because they have some friends that live there. But first, I have to get up early and go to Alessio’s, my younger host brother, soccer game.

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Photos

Sarah, Taryn and me on the train....
assuming my usual train pose.....