Chapter 19: A Town So Perfect, It Has Its Own Crayola

The week after my lovely visitors went back to America, Lorenzo de Medici Scuola orchestrated the perfect storm of final papers, oral presentations, and exams to help me relax from my two-week-long hostessing duties. How kind of my professors. This was two weeks before finals week, and over the course of three days, I had to give an oral presentation in Italian of a brief biography of someone we know (let me know if you want to read mia mamma's life story in Italian), take the written exam for my cooking class (memorizing detailed recipes, writing an essay comparing Italian vs. American cuisines and attitudes about food, and a little history of the unification of Italy), give an oral presentation to my history class about the life of Marie Antoinette and the history of the French Revolution, write an 8-page paper about Helen of Troy, AND write an 8-page paper about the representation of women in ancient Greek and Roman epic poetry, exploring the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aneid.... needless to say, I didn't get a lot of sleep that week.
The following weekend, to finally relax, Dana and took a little day trip to Siena! Only about an hour's train ride away, Siena was Florence's rival during Medieval times, but after the plague wiped out a huge part of their population, it never really recovered. But it's still absolutely beautiful, and I could have stayed there for days. It was so pretty and quiet and perfectly, perfectly Italian in every way. One of my favorite parts was this enormous Christmas tree we found as soon as we got off the train (and took a bus up the steep, steep hills all the way to the city center). I'm standing underneath it for scale. WHO decorated it? I can't imagine a crane or cherry-picker fitting through the teeny tiny, cobblestone, winding, steeply hilled streets of Siena. My money's on elves.



Then we sat around the main square, taking in the sights. The colors of the brick buildings and roads in this town are where the Crayola crayon color "burnt sienna" comes from!

Since our train was only 6 euro, and we didn't do anything the entire day that cost any money, we decided to treat ourselves to a little fancier meal than our typical one-plate-of-pasta-and-a-glass-of-water dinners. Everything was ridiculously delicious, it was the tiniest, coziest restaurant I've ever been in. I think this meal is when I realized that I could probably be happy in Italy for the rest of my life.

Chapter 18: Thanksgiving in Italia

Aside from massive amounts of food, an overrated parade in New York, and football, Thanksgiving is generally a holiday associated with two things: Family, and being thankful for all the things in your life that you take for granted the rest of the year. As someone who has endless affection for her loved ones and a ridiculous amount to be thankful for this year, it was easily one of the best holidays of my life. A week before, one of my very best and oldest friends (since first grade), Stephanie, flew to Italy for her Thanksgiving break. I can't think of any of my friends with more appreciation for art, history, and Italian culture (did I mention her last name is Frattini?).

Getting to show my best friend around Florence for two weeks, as well as take her to both Venice for the beautiful canals and Rome for the Colosseum and Vatican, was more than anything I could have hoped for. We did every museum and every pub justice, and I stuffed her with more pasta than most people can handle.
We even got to go to my first Italian futbol (soccer) game, which was unbelievable! Definitely one of the coolest things I've done this semester, even if we did almost get trampled several times by some genuinely terrifying soccer hooligans.
As if I wasn't already the luckiest girl in the world, the day before Thanksgiving, my big sister Alix landed in Florence too! We had a couple unfortunate and complicated hiccups in her journey here, but she made it eventually, and that's what's important. She and Stephanie got to explore all the best places in Florence with me as their guide! My apartment here is barely big enough for its usual two guests, so it was certainly close quarters, but more than worth it. I didn't realize how much I'd missed her until we were reunited; she's honestly the funniest person that I know, and I couldn't be happier that she got to visit me!

Since it was my first Thanksgiving in my own apartment, I decided to go all out. In addition to Dana, Alix, Stephanie, and myself, I invited our friend Mallorie, and also my favorite professor, Jacopo! We also made construction paper pilgrim and Indian hats to complete the American ambiance. I spent the entire day cooking the most American food I could think of. A whole turkey was just not going to happen, but I planned on homemade chicken and dumplings from scratch, hand-mashed potatoes, vegetables, fruit salad, stuffing by Mallorie, and a fruit custard for dessert. To make a long story short, a lot of it turned out to be delicious, and some of it... didn't. My oven caused several smoking nightmares, the dumplings all stuck together, and I spent a great deal of the day sweating and yelling at pots and pans. However, by the time my professor showed up, the table looked beautiful, the food was wonderful, and we all ate until we were stuffed and drank endless wine.
Looking around the table at some of my favorite people in the world wearing pilgrim and Indian hats and roaring with laughter, I forgot about all the messes, fires, and mistakes I'd made in my tiny hellish kitchen all day, and was happier and more thankful than I can ever remember being. Jacopo even complimented my 99-cent plates and wine glasses, and humored me by wearing a native American headdress for almost 30 whole seconds.

After he left, Dana and Alix collapsed into food comas, while Stephanie, Mallorie and I sat around the table reminiscing about our Catholic school days: we drank even more wine, and sang Catholic hymns and Christmas carols for hours, though I can't remember why or how this started. This year, I think I'm having more trouble coming up with things NOT to be thankful for.

Chapter 17: My first visitor: mia mamma!

The hardest part about studying abroad so far has been the incredible frustration of not being able to share it with my family, who I've always done all my traveling with. I can send them pictures, write blogs, video chat, but it's not quite the same. There's no way to communicate through the internet what a fresh Italian meal smells like, or how the Arno river looks right before dark, or what chaos the daily market feels like. I can't explain how ancient the bricks of my school buildings are, or give a good enough impression of the Italian street market salesmen whispering "Ciaooo belllaaa" when I walk past them on the way to class every morning. I can't describe how tall the David looks in real life, or how small you can feel standing underneath Brunelleschi's dome inside the Duomo. There are some parts of this semester that only I will ever really understand, and that's hard for me, because I usually like to share every detail of my life with my family and my friends.
Imagine my joy, then, when I found out that mia mamma was coming to visit me for four days! I counted down the days all semester, and the very first weekend after fall break, there she was! I was so overwhelmed when she first walked through the arrivals gate at the Florence airport that I burst into ridiculous tears. It was by far the longest I've ever gone without seeing her, and I hope it's never that long again!
The whole weekend was pretty much perfect. I gave her a walking tour of the whole beautiful city: took her inside all of my classrooms, including my cooking class kitchen, and then happened to run into a couple of my teachers as well as my advisor, and got to introduce her to all of them. We wandered through the central market and saw the tons of fresh vegetables, and huge carcasses of animals that had probably been slaughtered just a few hours before. We went out for great dinners, and I also cooked a lot for her here! We visited the best museums and churches here, and also just window shopped and hung out. Showing someone else all the best the city has to offer made me realize even more how much I love it, and how well I know it. Florence really does feel like my own now! And it put on quite a show for her: great weather, happened to run into everyone I know on the streets, and a certain restuaurant owner who's taken a liking to me even gave us free wine, free dessert, and several kisses on her first night.

It was so strange to be hosting my mom at my first-ever apartment, I've never been hostess to her before! I already felt like I had grown up a lot this semester, but that weekend really felt like the first time my mom and I were hanging out as two grown-up friends, instead of an adult and a child. It was so much fun!
One of the best parts (besides sharing several of our first beers and bottles of wine together) was teaching her how to make homemade pasta from scratch, like a real Italian! A few days after she got home, my dad called to tell me that he'd come home from work one night to find her making pasta in Carterville.
I barely had time to recover from this whirwind weekend before finding out I was about to play hostess to two MORE Americanas.....

Chapter 16: Fall Break Part 2, Paris!

London went just a little too smoothly for me to believe that we'd make it to Paris with no hiccups, and I was right. Between the three forms of public transportation that it took us to get from London's city center to our airport, we were running a little late. When we arrived at our boarding gate at 2:46pm, we were informed that the gates closed at 2:45, and that we would not be allowed to board. That's right, one minute late. 60 seconds. Wow. Thanks, Lufthansa airlines! Four hours and a missed-flight fee later, we boarded a plane to Paris. After staying in the nicest hostel we've been in yet, we woke up the next morning ready to take on the city. The language barrier here was much harder than in Italy, and we weren't really prepared for it. It was really frustrating at times, but again, impossible to complain in such a beautiful city.

We hung out under the Eiffel Tower, visited Notre Dame, the Musee d'Orsay, the Arc di Triomph, the Louvre, and Versailles!

And we still found time to wander around some parks, neighborhoods, and a beautiful cemetary with Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde's graves, and take a nighttime riverboat cruise!

Our last day was Saturday, and we had an early evening flight. So we decided to spend our last day relaxing and being as French as possible. So we bought a couple bottles of wine, a big baguette, and some beautiful delicate little pastries to sit under a tree looking up at the Eiffel Tower all morning and afternoon. Our friend Mallorie was in Paris that day as well, so she joined us with more wine and food!


It....started out so well. Seems like a perfectly innocent plan. Well, to avoid any further embarrassment on the subject, I'll put this gently. Things went downhill very quickly. When three young girls are in Paris on a gorgeous day, living in a fairytale that doesn't seem like it will ever end, it's easy to get a little carried away. And by carried away, I mean accidentally consuming much more French wine than any person ever should. Long story short, we managed to miss our flight back to Italy. Karma caught up to us, and hard, that evening. There were no more flights out of Paris to Italy that night, so Dana and I had to sleep in the airport.... on benches... next to homeless people. I would not call this my finest hour.
But, like the rest of the ridiculous situations I've found myself in this semester, there's nothing I can do to change it, so I might as well learn from it, laugh at it, and get over it.
C'est la vie.

Chapter 15: Fall Break Part 1, London!

Obviously, my Italian school doesn't really care too much about pilgrims, Indians, or turkeys, so Thanksgiving Break isn't given here. However, we did get a Fall Break- an entire week off school in late October. Since my schedule is only Monday through Wednesday anyway, that meant that I had ten full days of freedom to travel! Dana and I decided to spend five days in London and four days in Paris, and it was honestly the best week of my life.

We flew to London on a Thursday morning, to discover that we were several expensive bus rides and Underground (subway/Tube) transfers away from our hostel, which was called The No. 8. The Number 8 turned out to be a hostel, a bar, and a club combined. It was black on the outside, pale pink walls on the inside, and covered in posters of mostly naked women and some comic book heroes. Not exactly the palace we would've designed for ourselves, but we made it work. Five nights of sharing bathrooms with rough looking middle-aged men, living above a loud club, and sharing a bedroom with a large mouse.....built character? Not ideal, perhaps, but it's pretty hard to complain about your life when you're spending five days in London.


Those five days were a blur of some of the most amazing things I've ever seen. London has SO much to do, it is SO huge and beautiful, and of course, we could understand what everyone was saying! We watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, went to the National Portrait Gallery for two amazing exhibits: From Beatles to Bowie: the 60s Exposed, and a collection of rare Bob Dylan photos, and I toured Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

We went to the Tower of London and saw the Crown Jewels of England, saw an amazing show, STOMP, in London's West End, which is like their Broadway, and walked the famous crosswalk at Abbey Road Studios! We went shopping in a fabulous outdoor market called Camden, took tours on the bright red double decker tours, and wandered around Westminster Abbey and heard the bells ring from inside Big Ben.

One of the craziest things we did was ride the London Eye, which is basically a massive ferris wheel, but it's the largest observational wheel in the world!

We walked through a fantastic open air flower market, and got gloriously lost enough times to accidentally discover beautiful little British neighborhoods. We also got to eat non-Itlalian food like Mexican and Chinese!
London's underground subway system, the Tube, is seriously one of the most impressive modes of public transportation I've ever seen. It's so big and so efficient, but so clean and easy to understand! We literally flew across the city underground in a matter of minutes, and felt like we conquered one of the biggest cities in the world, all by ourselves!


London is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, and my best friend at home has decided to study abroad there next fall! I already know where I'll be spending my Thanksgiving break... :)

Chapter 14: "Really? You had room to pack your hair straightener, but not the Ireland guide book?"

The weekend before midterms, most people stay home and study. Others, recognizing that life is short (and that a semester abroad is even shorter) choose to fly to Ireland for three days instead. I belong to the latter group, and without regret. Three other girls and I left Italy for the first time since September, and jetted off to the Emerald Isle. I'd been to Ireland with my family years before, but never to Dublin- which is where we stayed for two nights and three days. My mom often jokes about how every new movie I see, book I read, or person I meet, is my new FAVORITE IN THE WHOLE WORLD, and she's kind of right, in that I don't have the most discriminating taste- I just love things really hard. So I guess it's hard to take me seriously when I say each new place is my NEW FAVORITE, but I'm really serious this time: Ireland is my favorite place in the whole world! I could easily move there and live there for years. Starting tomorrow. Maybe even later today. I desperately want to live there for an extended period of time, at some point in my life. Anyway, back to the actual trip. It was amazing! Here we are on the bright yellow and blue RyanAir plane.

I know that I should be better at speaking Italian than I am now, but the language barrier in Italy is still a daily challenge. Landing in an English-speaking country and going out for our first meal was like a brand-new world for us-- we were absolutely in awe that we could actually READ the menu, and our waiter actually understood what we were saying, and we could talk easily with other people and read street signs without confusion! We probably would have thought our meals were delicious even if we'd eaten them months ago, but digging into a NON-Italian meal was such a novelty- we couldn't stop gushing about all this amazing non-pasta food. Afterwards, we went to an Irish pub (go ahead and add it to my list of favorite things on this planet), drank Guinness and cider, and listened to amazing, hilarious, rowdy Irish musicians play all night. The pictures below are of my friend Kaisa and I enjoying our first Guinness beers, and another of the group with a charming gentleman named Mike Kelly (how perfectly Irish!), who bought us drinks and reassured us that we were making the right decision in regards to our upcoming midterm exams. That night, we slept at our hostel, Paddy's Palace, where we'd been delivered earlier by the bright green bus... the Paddywagon!


The next morning, we didn't let cold, rainy weather stop us from having an amazing day in Dublin! We toured the beautiful Dublin castle, where Ireland still hosts most of its government business, took a tour of the Guinness Storehouse, the museum and factory where the famous (and delicious) Guinness beer is made, and then toured an old prison called Kilmainham Gaol, where tons of Irish rebels were imprisoned and executed for their nationalist political stances during the Irish War of Independence. All the tours were excellent, the chilling stories at the prison were perfect for our hope for spooky stories for a pre-Halloween scare, and after the Guinnes tour, we got a free pint of "the black stuff" in a pub on the top story of the factory that had a 360-degree view of the city!

As if this day wasn't exciting enough, we ended it by going on a "Literary Pub Crawl", which is exactly what it sounds like. Two Irish male actors led an all-ages group around Dublin between four pubs, stopping at historic points to act out parts of famous works of Irish literature! For a Guinness-loving English major of Irish descent, I couldn't have picked a more perfect way to spend a night in Dublin. I always wish my parents be here with me in Europe, but this day was almost too much to bear- they would have loved every minute! After the pub crawl, we continued to (several) other pubs around the crazy 'Temple Bar' neighborhood. We met so many fun people and listened to the greatest music in the world, I wish I could keep reliving this night over and over!

After our big night, we relaxed the next day by taking a one-hour train ride out to a small fishing village called Howth, so we got to see some real Irish greenery and ocean! We ate amazing seafood, saw wild seals by the port, walked through beautiful green grass and early autumn leaves, and lounged around on rocks happily looking at nothing but the open sea. I could be happy on the Emerald Isle forever!