All Roads Lead...

Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys

2010-02-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

This is what our nation's greatest President, Josiah Bartlett, said about the French. Yeah, he was in a bad mood when he said it, so I think we can ignore the animosity behind the sentiment and focus on the positive: the cheese.

Cheese is delicious.

Okay, well that's the end of this blog... hope you enjoyed it!

Just kidding.

But really, cheese is awesome. And for those of you who have never been to France; I'm sorry, but you can only have a theoretical idea of what I'm talking about. Yeah, there are some places in the States where you can get good cheese, but it's always prohibitively expensive, and those pesky government regulations can stand in the way of some really excellent bacterial processes. I rediscovered my love of cheese last week when I met one of my best friends, Elsa (see earlier post... much earlier) to take the south of France by storm. It was a much needed sojurn after two months of moving on every couple of days. Even though I've begun to really love my transitory existence, I can totally see the value of a place to call home. Even if it is only for four days.

We met up in Marseille, which Elsa tells me is a city with which the French have one of those relationships where you either love it or you hate it. She also told me that it's sort of the Naples of France. This didn't give me a wholly positive preconception of the place, since Naples is (I've heard... from everyone who has ever mentioned the place to me) is patently the sketchiest place in existence, and you should only go there if you're heading for Pompeii or somewhere in the vicinity but not the actual place. I didn't find this to be true with Marseille, at all. Granted, we were only there for one night, but it seemed to me that it's a beautiful town on the sea, not a sketch-as-hell litter city in the middle of the south-ish.

We wandered around and talked; I was pretty much just happy to talk to someone again. Elsa has been one of my best friends since I began college, and so she knows me well enough that I don't have to censor the sometimes really dumb observations that come out of my mouth. And the fact that I've had basically two months by myself means that I've thought about a lot of really random things, and that Elsa was subjected to hearing me talk about them, even though they really had no context. That's friendship, baby.

Marseille didn't strike me as the kind of city one should have a violent reaction to; it's very nice, but nothing exceptionally good or bad. Apparently, a French soap opera which Elsa's host-mom is obsessed with, called Plus Belle La Vie, takes place there, as did the almost as renowned story by a little known writer called Alexandre Dumas... perhaps you've heard of The Count of Monte Christo? Yeah. That took place there. And around there. You don't know the book? Well, then, you certainly remember the movie, don't you? The one with Mel Gibson's Jesus and Dumbledore? Look it up. Worth a watch. When I went to see it in eighth grade, I got my head stuck in the movie theater seat from hunkering down during a particularly intense sword fight. I can give no higher recommendation than that. But I digress.

We ate dinner at an Indian restaurant, which had literally the best samosas I've ever tasted in my life, and where we experienced a little bit of French immigrant culture; living proof that France is absolutely not the homogenous country of smelly men in striped shirts and berets that some people named Glenn Beck would like you to think it is. Usually, you would expect dinner at a restaurant in France to last for a long time, with plenty of time spent not eating, but just shooting the shit. Not so in this place. Elsa actually had to put her coat on outside, that's how fast they seated some other people at our table when we'd paid. This wasn't entirely impressive to me, because I personally enjoy the European way of dining better than the 'eat it and beat it' style favored by many Amuhricans, but the tikka masala was so good, I'll let it go.

We had originally planned to spend four days in Marseille, but circumstances lead to us being able to spend three days with some friends of my mom's from her time in France. They're pretty wonderful people named Christy and Pierre Marre, and they really reinforced my conviction that the best tour guides are real locals or pseudo-locals (read: college kids) who really love the place where they live.

Christy is an American from Chattanooga, TN. who went to France for study abroad when she was 20, met Pierre, and pretty much the rest is history, from what I understand. Christy is, in spite of 20+ years of living in France, pretty much still very American. Or maybe our presence brought that out in her, but it was fun to see how she and Pierre, who is very, very French, interact. Of course, they've been married a long time, so their interactions are those of people in that situation, but it was interesting to witness a mixed-nationality marriage in practice.

Pierre and Christy were wonderful hosts, and their house in Carnon is nothing short of incredible. You know how in the States you entertain that wistful fantasy of moving to the south of France and living right on the beach, walking barefoot along the sand and collecting sea shells? Yeah, they actually have that. It's a pretty sweet setup. And they were so generous in letting us stay there... do you know that it was actually the first time since leaving the United States of America that I slept in a room that didn't also have another person in it? It was weird, but it was refreshing, too.

The best part about visiting with Pierre and Christy (besides the amazing, delicious food in copious amounts, the proximity to the beach, the late-night viewing of French Kiss and hearing about the crazy shit my mom did when she wasn't yet my mom...) was getting to see the area around Montpellier with people who live there and who love it. Here are some of the highlights of what we did:

Nimes and Pont du Gard: I've lived in Rome. Sure, it wasn't for as long as I would like it to be, but still. I was there long enough for the Colloseum to get a little standard, and ruins of an empire long-fallen but not forgotten to become kinda situation normal. Pont du Gard blew me the frick away. You hear about aqueducts. You might even see the remnants of some if you're in the right place, but you ain't seen nothing like this thing. It's huge. And in the middle of this beautiful, windswept, rocky river valley, with the sun hitting it and olive trees all around. It's a miracle. I honestly think the most exciting part for me was how very impressed I was by it. I thought I had become one of those jackasses who can be all blase (no accent mark... sorry) about the miracles of human ingenuity and say "Eh. I've seen better." No. Apparently I retain my childlike wonder. It made me think of something Professor Gadeynne said in class one day: "If the Romans were tourists going to American today, the things they would go to see would be our superhighways." So right on. The people were engineers of the highest echelon. Higher. Go to Pont du Gard.

Saint Marie de la Mer: I think that it's pretty evident that I'm the type of person who, when she has access to it, watches way more History Channel than is good for her. As such, I have a vague list in my head of all the historically and, let's be real, mostly historically conspiracy-theory-related significant places that I someday want to go. These include DallasTexas, Jerusalem and wherever the heck the Mayans lived. But one of the big ones was definitely Saint Marie de la Mer. You've heard of it, or you will recognize it's significance, because of three little words that pretty much ruined the world: The DaVinci Code. Yeah. This is that place from that godawful book (that's completely, incidentally, ripped off from another godawful book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail) in which Dan Brown postulates that OMG Jesus had a kid, and her name was Sarah (you know it was Jesus's kid because her name means princess in Hebrew... compelling.) and she and her mom, Mary Magdalene, lived in the south of France and she mothered the line of Merovingian kings who eventually produced that chick from Amelie. Are you with me? So you understand why going to this town and seeing this church and this cool statue which have featured in so many hours of the History Channel was fun for me! I can check that one off the list of places I pretend to be disdainful of but am secretly absolutely ecstatic I got to visit! YAY!

La Camargue: Is beautiful, and looks an awful lot more like Ireland than I had any right to expect from France. Including the houses, and the extra-hairy horses, one of whom I named Elmer, because his bitchy attitude is going to end him up where all bad horses go. Or maybe I smell. I don't know. But it's beautiful, and there are indiginous flamingoes there. Go figure.

Saint Guilhem de la Desert: Looks exactly like you really want a French village to look. Well, what I want a French village to look like. It was literally built into a canyon in these beautiful, rocky mountains, and literally the light was all golden... we went in the late afternoon and wandered around for awhile, and then went to Vespers and listened to the nuns sing. Let me tell you something: you ain't no real Catholic until you've been to one of those things. And this one was in French. Oh my goodness. That was some very intense Catholicism. It was beautiful and moving, but mostly I was laughing at Elsa, who got thrown into the deep end of religion on her very first lesson. Giggles. It really was a beautiful service, and a great experience of the town. Loved it.

Montpellier: A very cool college town. There's a lot to see, and there's a lot to talk about, but mostly it's one of those towns that you just have to experience. So go do it. I'll wait. Say hi to that foxy waiter at the crepe restaurant for me.

But mostly it was just fun to hang out with them and hear all the cool things they've done and their experiences (especially Christy's) of making your life in a foreign country. It's something that I think about, so it was cool to hear the good and the bad from someone who has made that decision. They're delightful people and I was so happy to be able to meet them.

Off to Toulouse! La Ville en Rose!

Long story short: Elsa and I vegged out in Toulouse. We made an effort at being touristy one day by going to Carcassone, which is unbe-freaking-lieveable... it made me want to drink mead and joust something. I spent way too much money there. But I digress. Other than our amazing trip to beautiful Carcassone, we cooked dinner in our swanky little hotel/apartment, watched a lot of TV online, went to two movies, went shopping, ate at a delicious vegetarian restaurant and took a lot of showers because the water pressure at this place was amazing. And this was exactly what I needed. I can't speak for Elsa, who might think that I totally killed her vacation, but it was so much fun to just hang out and do all the stuff that we do at home that I am honestly not bothered that I can't tell you what the biggest tourist attraction in Toulouse is. This is maybe how I know it's time for me to come home.

Speaking of that: the day is fast approaching. It's this Thursday, in fact. I'll try to get in one more post about Florence: Revisited and Rome, who is going to break my heart, before I leave this continent indefinitely. But really, if you're at all interested, stay tuned, because I'm going to try and wrap this mother up with some re-entry observations that could either be entertaining or really offensive. Stay tuned.

Stuck in Neutral

2010-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

...so, in conclusion: watches, chocolate, cheese. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Swiss.

But not really the efficiency that you hear so much about. The journey from Greece to Switzerland was necessarily an epic one... you can't cover that much ground without it being exhausting and, well... epic. But as far as crossing continents goes, this time wasn't really too uncomfortable.

The ferry I took from Patra to Venice was called the Ikarus Palace, which is a name that would have made me a lot more nervous if it had been a plane and not a boat. I was just glad it wasn't called the Kracken or something similar. I've had enough with ironic names to last me for awhile, thanks. This boat was serious business. Like, it had cabins in varying levels of fanciness, two restaurants and a pool (which was empty) on the back deck. It really didn't have to feel like you were on a boat at all, if you had enough money. Just a really swank hotel.

I am poor. My Eurail pass gets me literally the bare minimum of comfort in any mode of transportation, and I'm young and spry so this is never a problem. But in this case the bare minimum would be sleeping on the deck. Outside. Yeah, not such a good idea in February, anywhere in the Northern hemisphere. Luckily, the nice usher guy ushed me into the area full of airplane seats, stating that under no circumstances was he going to let me sleep outside. Then he laughed and told me how lucky I was, because I would have had to pay 40 euros more to sleep in here if it had been April. Lucky me.

The setup was just like in an airplane, with one key exception: you could sleep on the ground. I haven't tried this in an airplane, but I have a feeling people might get a little miffed if you whipped out a blow up mattress (like a few of my fellow campers) and blew it up in the middle of the aisle. That was totally okay here, and everyone kinda set up camp in their little corner of our large communal cabin. Since the ship set sail at midnight, I immediately went to sleep, with only my sheet and a makeshift coat pillow. This was roughin' it. But not really, since it was decently warm in there and everyone was fairly respectful of the hours when normal people are sleeping, so though I was sleeping on a floor with nothing but a sheet, they weren't the worst two nights of my life.

I had never been out on the open sea before, and let me tell you: America was right. The ocean is a desert with its life underground. It was possibly the most desolate, isolated feeling I've ever had, though not necessarily in an unenjoyable way. It was actually kinda fun, except for the 20 euros I paid for the one and only not-so-awesome meal I had on the trip. Captive audience, I guess.

When I got back to Venice, I had a reaction that worried me. When I got off the boat and heard people speaking Italian and saw the relatively familiar watery city, I had to repress the urge to fall down and kiss the ground. For a girl who is going home in less than a month, this very strong reaction to a place that she's only been once before, a reaction that smacked of a long-awaited homecoming, was very worrying. Returning to Italy was like a weight being lifted off my shoulders; a weight of unfamiliarity and uncertainty that I guess must have been with me since I left Rome the first time to go to Dublin. Being back in Venice, after living for two months in places I've never been before, and where I didn't know what to expect, was much more comforting than I would have ever imagined. It really was like coming home, sort of. I can only imagine what it will be like to go back to Rome. It's going to tear me up.

But onto more entertaining subjects. I boarded a train from Venice to Milan, where I was then to get the TGV to Geneva. I was counting on the Swiss and their renowned efficiency to get me to Geneva early enough to find a hostel, as I hadn't booked one. I put my trust here, and that was where I got it wrong.

But to get away from the foreshadowing for a moment for a word about Milan. It's crazy. Like, women with chihuahuas wearing pink faux-fir parkas that match their dogs' pink faux-fir parkas. I was only around the freaky Fascist train station, so maybe it's different elsewhere, but the hour or so I was there gave me the impression that Milan is not a city that I would enjoy living in. I know it's not fair of me to pass that judgement based on less than an hour, but it honestly felt like one of your not so interesting Midwest cities, rather than the fashion capital of the world. Like... Cincinatti. Innocuous building with very little charm and some jackass people wearing way too expensive clothes. I wasn't sorry to leave.

The TGV to Geneva was an adventure. And not the good, validating, I Am A Strong, Capable Woman kind of adventure. No, this was more the kind of Train Breaks Down At The Border, Board Another Train To Some Random Destination, Then Another To Another Random Destination And Finally One To Geneva, Where You Walk Around At 11 At Night In The Freaking Freezing Wind To One Hostel Which Has No Beds And Then To Another Hostel Which Is Once Again Full Of Very Loud People Who Don't Seem To Understand That I Haven't Slept In A Bed Since Leaving Greece And I Will Totally Cut A Bitch If You Don't Shut The Hell Up adventure. Not actually my favorite kind.

But the bed in this hostel was nothing short of heavenly, even if the Brazillian women who came in after me felt the need to open the window. Isn't it like 100 degrees in Brazil right now? Shouldn't you be freezing your asses off? It's a mad world. But I woke up in the morning and helped myself to the complimentary breakfast, marvelling at being in a place where the winter tourist industry is just as if not more thriving than the summer one. There were so many French school children that I thought I was in a Madeline video... except with more eyebrow piercings and public displays of affection. Though most of the other people in the hostel seemed to be using it as a jumping-off point for all the cool winter sports Switzerland has to offer, I was using it mostly for laundry and a nice walk around Geneva before I headed off to the south of France.

Let me tell you, with the prospect of the south of France, which inevitably puts one in mind of beaches and mild, blue-skied sunniness before me, Geneva's bitterly cold and biting wind was all the more difficult to stomach. I braved it to walk around some, but that breeze coming off the lake ended up being more than intrepid ol' me could take. I sought refuge for awhile in two of my most frequent haunts: the art museum and H&M. I adore both of these places, and have become a connoisseur of each in its own right. H&M is giving me an unhealthy obsession with dresses. It's a problem.

But my usual haunts could really only last me so long before I had to give up the ghost and find something else to do that wouldn't involve subsequent defrosting. I found a theatre, a little art place that showed films in their original version. The one they were showing the day I came seeking shelter was Bright Star, a film about John Keats. It was absolutely wonderful; one of the sexiest movies I've seen in a long time, and one of the most beautifully shot. I'm pissed that Abbie Cornish didn't get at least a nomination for Best Actress... she made my heart hurt. And the storyline was actually something that's close to my heart, since one of my favorite refuges to read and write and think in Rome is John Keats' grave. These connections are everywhere, if you're looking for them.

A word about the Swiss: I don't know if it's having to do with living in a bi-lingual country, or their proud and long history of neutrality, but the Swiss don't really strike me as having much of a collective personality. They're very mild and non-confrontational, from my limited point of view (not one car honked it's horn the entire time I was there)... they actually reminded me a little bit of Canadians. They were all very friendly and nice, but just kinda... neutral. Maybe it's just that I am hyper-aware of their political position and ideals... I don't know.

I spent just the one full day in Geneva before meeting Elsa in Marseille to begin our adventures in France. More on that soon; it'll probably be one of the last posts that I actually write from Europe, so you'll want to get your copy signed or something. I don't know how that makes sense at all. It doesn't. Leave me alone.

Greece is the Word

2010-02-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

Ah, Greece. It is a country, as I am sure you're aware, that is famous for a few things: being home to the civilization that laid the foundation for Western society as we know it, big fat weddings, and spinach pie, this last being perhaps better known and better loved than the first two.

Spinach Pie: An Ode

Oh! Thou flakey crust of phyllo which dost flake into my shirt! Why art thou so annoying and yet so undeniably delicious? Couldst thou not but hold it together, for love of me who bought thee? Thou costed but one euro and eighty, and arrived in my hand yet warm from the heat lamp, given me by a dark-browed Greek god, a Prometheus of iron-rich leafy greens! Oh snack so misleadingly healthy-sounding! Could I not but partake in thousands and more of thy golden-brown brethren with fain a thought for the butter teeming through their rich crusts? Nay, I shall cast mine eye upon the spinach, not the cheese which overtakes it in both calorie and taste... for spinach dost make thee far healthier a sustenance than I, who hast lived but on cocktail peanuts for lo these two months, have partaken in for long and longer. But must we be parted so soon, not four days e'er we first met? I shudder then to think of leaving Greece for want of thee, my cheesy flakey darling, though the country lack in charms compelling me to stay for their sake. May one then eat the Acropolis? Pick lovingly the crusts of the Parthenon that fall into the clothes? Nay, say I! They have yet their attractions to them, but I shall not ache and pine for them when this ferry boat doth take me hence as I shall for you, O Spinach Pie. My love rests then with thee for longer than these ruins may yet stand.

Do you get it? Spinach pie is delicious. But there are other good things about Greece, too. It's just that very few of them are in Athens. There is that big, gorgeous hill surrounded by the amazing green gardens and the incredible view of the ocean and the city around, and then the mountains, but once you get back down into that city, it's kinda a different story. It's actually pretty sketchy. Like, as in the guy at my hostel made it a point to warn me about going out by myself at night. So, I did not.

There wasn't actually that much GREECE, as in blue skies, blue waters, white sand, white houses (blue and white being the national colors for a reason) in Athens. It's a city without much of the cliche personality that you want to immediately be inundated with upon entering the country of Greece. Oh well. There was an excellent museum, and while it rained a little while I was there, it was sunny and warm for more of the time, and so I hiked around in the olive tree-covered hills around the Acropolis and shopped in the area surrounding the hill on both days I was there.

Do you ever have those moments where you stop, take a look at where you are (disregarding completely the sketchiness seething below you) and just think "holy crap. How did I get lucky enough to end up here?"? That's kinda the impression I got while walking around for about a cumulative seven hours on the Acropolis. The sun was glinting off the marble, which was wet from the recent rain, the sea was blindingly bright with that same sun, and everything smelled like plants and rain, and not the vaguely fishy body odor smell that I came to associate with at least the quarter of Athens in which my hostel was located.

I tried very hard to resist the urge to sing, but the place reminded me so much of Gethsemane from Norman Jewison's celebrated (particularly by my mom and me) 1973 musical Jesus Christ Superstar (music by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber) that I just couldn't help myself, and I sang "Heaven on Their Minds" in full voice. It was okay though, since I was pretty much alone up there, it being February and all.

And so, even though I probably wouldn't recommend Athens as your one stop on any future Grecian excursions, it was worth it just to see the place where, for fifty years ages and ages ago, a bunch of guys wearing sheets laid the foundations for the way we see the world today. The Acropolis and its environs are worth the hype.

I will not, however, recommend a certain bit of cuisine which I tried in a taverna where I decided to treat myself on a bright Sunday afternoon to a bit o' Greek food. Which is, by the way, pretty delicious, if you don't count the goat. Yup, goat.

Not so good. Kinda tasted a little like licking a pine log. Which isn't as tasty as it might originally sound. But the frites were good, as was the tapenade, and the guys kept plying me with free, very cold water, which I appreciated at the time and took full advantage of, but later regretted as I scurried from street to street looking for a McDonald's. But eventually the emergency was averted and I returned to my hostel, and the next day made my way to Patra to take the ferry to Venice.

It was then on to Geneva, and then Marseille, Carnon and Toulouse with Elsa and some old friends of my mom's, Christy and Pierre. More about all these adventures, plus my soon-to-come trip to Spain and triumphant return to Rome (all returns to Rome are traditionally triumphant, you know) soon!

Macedonia

2010-02-08T01:53:00.000-08:00

I flatter myself that, at least in the last few months, I've seen quite a bit of the world. Of course, it's not even a tiny fraction of what there is to see, and not even a blip on the radar of all the experiences this world offers, but still. For a 21 year old kid, I feel like I'm doing okay. And really, I have the rest of my life to travel the world. I intend to.

When I went to visit Conor and Kacey, who are in the Peace Corps in Tetovo, Macedonia, it was without a doubt one of the biggest learning experiences of my life. In just about three days I saw more of the world than I have in the last 20 years put together, and I realized some things.

The world has problems. Deep-rooted, systematic problems that will not get fixed because we put band-aids on them. They have to be solved by single people working in single locations, making progress in inches, not miles. They will only get better with the sustained effort of people who are dedicated to a larger idea, yes, but more dedicated to the people they are helping to make the world better for themselves.

What struck me most about Macedonia was not the poverty, although it is painfully visible in the stray dogs running around, the litter, the half-finished buildings and the use of corrugated aluminum as a building material. It was not the corruption, although to hear Conor talk about the political situation in the country, and specifically in his municipality, seemed (to my privileged American mindset) the sort of thing that hasn't happened in the world (my immediate experience of the world got an awful lot larger after my visit to the Balkans) since Selma in the '60s. It wasn't the certifiable chaos of Kacey's school, where the kids run unsupervised through the hallways while the teachers congregate in the lounge. All of those things opened my eyes much wider than I ever thought they could go to life outside our bubble, and I'm so grateful for that. But none of these things struck me as much as one thing: the potential.

You have to remember that I was only there for literally three days, and so my perceptions are inevitably skewed. I haven't experienced the culture as Conor, Kacey and the rest of the PCVs have, and so I may be way off in making these observations. But, having been brought up to always see the good in things, I feel like I should say it anyway.

The teachers I met at Kacey's school really love her, and value the effort that she's making to improve the education they can give to their students. They were so welcoming to me when I went to school with her, but it was the kids who really floored me. People are pretty skeptical of miracles for some reason these days, which always confuses me, since I think you witness one every time you hear a little kid start to read. Or write. Or express what they're feeling with words.

And put all of this into a different language, a language which is the kids in question's second or third, and how can you deny that it's not a miracle to hear them read to you? The kids I met at this school have grown up in an educational system that, by American standards, might not even merit that name. And yet, with some good instruction, they're writing thank you notes to people who have donated books to their new library, in English, and teaching me how to say apple in the three languages they had to learn before this one. If the human mind isn't capable of miracles, then they really don't exist.

Seeing the brightly-painted room filled with bookshelves and CD players that was not too long ago a storeroom but is now a functioning library only reaffirmed for the first of many times during this visit that there is potential in human beings to overcome the most adverse circumstances, especially when I got to see it in use by the students. The little girls who excitedly showed us around the beautiful Painted Mosque in Tetovo, proudly displaying their own Qur'ans and inviting us to see the balconies for prayer made me think a little resentfully about the inequality that women the world over, and not only Muslim women, face. But these little girls made me think that devotion to one's faith may, slowly but surely, be becoming seperate from one's dictated place in the world. I really hope so.

It's slow going, for sure. From what Conor and Kacey told me, there's a lot of racism in Macedonia, which, by virtue of being a country cut out from a larger political entity in Yugoslavia, has a very mixed population, especially around the borders. Conor and Kacey (as you should be aware if you're reading their blog) have had to learn two different languages, Albanian and Macedonian, to work in Tetovo. This incredible feat they've accomplished only makes me believe more in the potential of the human mind, and the fact that they interact with everyone completely seperate from their ethnic identity makes me hope that someday the citizens of Macedonia might be able to start to do the same thing.

Conor and I spent a day with another PCV, Karen, at her home beside Lake Ohrid, which is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. It's crystal blue, surrounded by snow-covered mountains and breathtakingly lovely Byzantine churches... it's idyllic. I wish more people knew about it. Look at the New York Time's "Places to See in 2010", and then book your plane ticket. There's so much potential in this place to boost the economy of a country where a huge portion of the population is unemployed... if only the world knew about it.

It was wonderful to see my cousins, too. Of course. First of all, the human contact probably saved me from going stark raving mad from solitude, but it also meant that I got to hear their impressions of their lives right now and talk about life in general. It's people like them, like Karen, like their friend Ronan, and Vjosa and Alex who make me sure that things can get better, even in somewhere that's incredibly fraught with problems. Their efforts make me sure that, with the same level of commitment, awareness and action, each of us can make a difference to the world around us. It may not make the morning papers, but if it helps the people around you to make a better world for themselves, and they in turn help others... that's how things get done, right?

I don't want to be all sunshine and rainbows about this, because I think it's incredibly naive to minimize the sufferings of people by saying that with hard work it can get better. I believe that, but I also believe that the process can be hugely frustrating, and that's why the world still has the inconcievable problems it does. The way I have to see it is this: you feel better when you help other people. That selfish reason alone should be enough to make us keep doing it.

A little story about what happened after I left Conor and Kace:

I boarded a train for Thessaloniki, in Greece, planning to spend the night there before going on to Athens in the morning. It was dark, getting late, and the train stops at the border station, Gevgalja (forgive my spelling). And that's all she wrote. I wait for a few minutes before an engineer comes along and gestures me off. I don't speak Macedonian, it will surprise you to learn, and I have already said that it was dark and late... I was terrified. I honestly had no clue what was going on or what I was going to do. I just kept going up to random people asking "Thessaloniki?" with this scared, pathetic look on my face, and getting incomprehensible replies in languages I don't know, or shrugs.

Finally, I found what appeared to be the station manager or something, and asked him. He thought for a moment before the word came to him: tomorrow. This station appeared to me to be out in the middle of not very much, and so I wasn't sure what was going to happen now. I didn't have a plan, an inkling of how to ask for help... I started hyperventilating. This guy took pity on me, brought me into his office, made me tea and patted my arm. He and I cobbled together a conversation in which he asked me if I needed a hotel by drawing pictures and a game of charades, and I said yes. He then called me a taxi.

As we were waiting, we talked in our little language, and I learned that he has a ten year old son and a wife, and they live about 30 km outside of town. When the taxi arrived, he helped me get my stuff in, shook my hand and reminded me that I needed to be at the station at 10.00 the following morning. I never even asked his name.The taxi driver spoke English. He took me to this lovely little hotel, acting as my translator to get me a room there. He helped me take my stuff upstairs, asking where I had been in Macedonia. I told him Tetovo and Ohrid, and we bonded over how beautiful Ohrid is, and how more people need to know about it. He told me good luck and goodnight. I don't know his name either.

These two guys who didn't know me from Adam helped me out of a potentially dangerous situation (young American girl by herself in country where she doesn't speak language is always a little dangerous) out of the goodness of their hearts. They had no obligation to me at all. They were just good guys.

It's this kind of thing that makes me sure that things in the world will get better. Again, it's going to take awhile, and it's going to take a lot of work, but some of that work will just be being kind to strangers and helping people out when they need it.

That can't be that hard, can it?

Slow Down, You Crazy Child...

2010-02-07T06:50:00.000-08:00

Good advice from Billy Joel. But Billy Joel is a rich bastard who can make it to Europe whenever the heck he feels like it, and do it in a helicopter made out of gold. I cannot. And so I do not slow down, even if Vienna waits for me.

Vienna. Vienna is more than disgusting little nuclear-bomb resistant sausages and Hapsburgs. But really, the Hapsburgs are a big part of it. I didn't see any sausages. Vienna is, as those of you who have not been living under a rock since the reign of Gilgamesh will know, about Music. With a capital M. Mozart, Haydn, Joel... they're all part of the music scene here. Empress Maria Theresa was once quoted as saying that the further one gets from Vienna, the deafer one becomes for want of beautiful sounds. Well, the traffic noises are as annoying here as anywhere else I've been, but in one sense, she was right.

I did a lot of walking in Vienna, of course, and saw some beautiful things. But I'm always writing about the beautiful things I come upon while walking, and it probably gets really old if you're reading this. In Vienna I also did something different; something that I literally have never done before in my whole life, and which I'm glad I saved for the Music Capital of the World.

I went to the Opera.

Yeah, you heard me right. The Opera. That thing with the viking hats and the very large people in very large costumes... and also the stuff that's going on onstage.

What in the heck were you doing at the Opera, Maggie? You may ask. A legitimate question, considering that my current wardrobe consists of spandex, two increasingly threadbare pairs of jeans and Patagonia thermals... I'm not really fancy enough to be going to the Opera, right?

Actually, it seems that the city so renowned for its music has a rather large tourist industry having to do with... music. And so I wasn't the only sweaty, muddy tourist who decided to make a night of it at the grand ol' opera. But the opera is something like a lesson in class warfare. It's the only venue which I can immediately think of (although I'm sure there are plenty of others) in which social stratification is not only acceptable, it is implicitly part of the experience.

There's a concept you might have heard of called standing room only. In the States, we use this little bit o' jargon to connote an immensely popular happening, at which people literally have to stand in the back because there just aren't enough seats. In the Vienna Opera House, it's a different story.

Here's the tale of my standing room saga: I inquired of a man in a cape standing outside the Opera House where I might find the standing room tickets. He instructed me to go around to the back of the House (see the class warfare in action) and I would see a door that said STANDING. This I did, and I went inside, to find a pen full of cattle waiting to be led to their last final bit of culture before heading off to that big George Foreman in the sky. Or at least that's what this line felt like. We waited for about forty minutes in line, and then were herded up to the counter, where we expressed our preference of ground floor, mezzanine or balcony. The first option was going for four euros, the other two for three. Given the advice of the woman at my hostel, I splurged.

We, the citizens of the ground floor, were then herded through some more corridors, until we came to a door, where we queued for a few minutes before being instructed to remove a piece of clothing (woah! this isn't what I signed up for!) and tie it to the bar to mark our place to stand (oh.). We were then set free for the remaining forty minutes until the Opera began... more like free range chickens now than the cattle we had been. I celebrated my freedom with an correspondingly elegant dinner at Chez le Roi de Burger. I then made my way back to my alloted space of brass bar, where I stood among the other Plebians as the show began.

For those of you who have never experienced the opera, it's something else. The melodrama of the 'acting' itself would give you a nosebleed, but then you've got this chorus of a million people wailing and dancing and booming out music in some largely incomprehensible language... it's a little bit of an overload. Luckily, the plot was one I am familiar with: Othello, by Verdi. I consider Othello to be Shakespeare's most heart-wrenching tragedy, and Iago to be one of literature's most perfect baddies. He's just so despicable in every way that you want to punch him in the jaw and then make him a soprano with a well-aimed kick. Well, you could try that with this Iago, but if he sat on you, you'd basically go the way of Desdemona.

I understand the physicality of opera, and I know that blowing people's faces off with your voice causes your lungs to expand, subsequently broadening your rib cage... but it's still fun to see a fat guy singing opera. Who doesn't love a good cliche?

While I was reasonably comfortable with the plot in it's general sense, one of the best thing about the play is how heart-wrenchingly sad the build-up is, with Iago's elegantly worded speeches and Cassio and Desdemona's accidental escalation of Othello's anger... it's all just really beautifully written.

And so you can imagine how pumped I was when I noticed the little screens running across the bottom bar, translating the Italian back into English... it loses something in the translation to the operatic format, I guess. Iago's soliloquies are more trite... they talk about the devil a good deal more, and he feels the need to point out ("See, he is drunk as a lord!") what the other characters are doing. At all times. He becomes less a quintessential example of the depths humans will sink to for revenge, and more that girl in your sixth grade class who had to exclaim "EW! Johnny's picking his nose!" in the middle of a movie about the Holocaust. He's almost evil in how annoying he is. So, I stopped reading the subtitles and let the music do the talking.

I'm sorry to those of you who love the medium, but the music wasn't really any more moving than the stupid words for me. When I read Othello as Will wrote it, it gives me a pit in my stomach, like Desdemona and Othello were real people, and my friends. Or at least the Brad n' Jen kind of celebrities that you love to live vicariously through. I feel for them. I hate Iago. I feel so sorry for poor, oblivious Cassio. I laugh at Rodrigo for being a complete tool. They are people, and I care about what happens to them. In the opera, I was so distracted by the odd quality of their voices (me being used not to operatic theatre, but musical theater... which is not even in the same gene pool) that I totally forgot to be sad. And I got the church giggles when Desdemona temporarily awakes from death (I do this in the play, too, but this was funnier) and sings her final epitaph. It's funny, because she's just been strangled. Like, died from lack of oxygen. And then she sings this really freakin' high note. It just doesn't compute.

And so, I admit it. I am a Phillistine. I just didn't get the appeal. I'm not going to lie, I went into the thing kinda expecting, given my romantic disposition, to have one of the Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman moments where my life changed completely... but while she was in a gorgeous red dress and sitting next to the beautiful Richard Gere, who kept whispering in her ear, I was in muddy jeans and damp shoes and standing next to a rather large German lady with impressive BO. So, I guess it's not exactly the same thing. Maybe when a stupidly rich, very attractive man flies me somewhere on his private jet and borrows me jewels from Harry Winston, I'll like the opera better. Still, the experience is something I wouldn't have traded for the world.

That was the highlight of my time in Vienna, which also included visits to the art museum (duh), the Belvedere and Schonbrun palaces, and creeping around the Spanish Riding School, hoping to see a Lipizanner. Nope. Couldn't do it. But the Opera was certainly the most notable part of the stay. On to Budapest!

Hungary. It's full of Hungarians. Regrettably, I only got to stay there one night before heading on to what ended up being absolutely my favorite part of this adventure thus far (the part where I was not talking to myself all day), and it was definitely not enough. Especially given the less-than-favorable circumstances. The entire country got absolutely dumped on the day that I got there... we're talking like, two feet of the white stuff. I, being the intrepid explorer I am, nevertheless went out and tried to see some of the city via my usual method. But Budapest is one of those inconvenient cities that is not all located in the same ten feet of real estate. Like Rome, for example. And so seeing all the things you're supposed to in Budapest proved a lot harder than it would in other places.

I finally gave up after about two hours of trudging through the (unshoveled) snow, and went to partake in the part of Hungarian tourism that I was most looking forward to: the eating. The Hungarians have literally some of the best food on the planet, if you're forgive my superlative. It's just really good. And you have to remember that I'd been walking around in the snow, so I could have eaten a cardboard hamburger at that point, but instead I got to eat pork tenderloin with mustard sauce. Mmmm mmmm good.

There was another girl in the restaurant who kept regarding me curiously. As we were both single diners, of course. She came over and introduced herself as Sonja, and asked if she could sit with me. This all being in English, of course, since I haven't learned to speak Magyar yet. It's on my list. Right along with every other language that makes me look like an idiot. Currently Greek. Moving on.

Sonja and I finished our meals together, and then decided to go out for coffee. She's a German student working in the field of renewable energy, which is apparently a huge one in Germany. We talked for a long time about global politics and how hard it is to bake in a country that's not your own... basically everything. It was one of those nice random experiences that makes you remember that friends aren't built in to your life... in order to make any, you have to put yourself out there. It was also an awesome exercise in listening to the world through the point of view of a different culture. I like those exercises.

I headed to Beograd the next day, and then on to Tetovo, Macedonia to spend time with my cousins. This was easily my favorite part of the adventure, and I'll try to do it justice. Stay tuned!

Czech It Out! Bavarians!

2010-01-31T01:08:00.000-08:00

Prague is an amazing city. In a lot of ways, but in one way that stuck out to me in particular: it's Florence. Like, literally. Take Florence, construct it during the Baroque period instead of the High Renaissance, and add some latitudnal degrees, and you've got Prague. The resemblances are uncanny.

Prague is built in the hills on a beautiful, wide river. It's got beautiful bridges and spires pushing up towards the sky from everywhere around the city, and churches around every corner you come across. It also has a lot of sculpture arbitrarily stuck around the city. All of these are also characteristics of Florence.

Also, just as Florence had a historical moment where everyone who was anyone, the Real Men of Genius, were all living there. Prague had the same phenomenon, a lot later. Like, with Kafka and... well, it did have a Renaissance of it's own, with intellectuals and stuff, but I don't really care about the world post-Titian, so you'll forgive me if I ask you to Google instead of me having Google and then pretend I just whipped that info out of nowhere. But really, the cities are alike in more than just orientation.

I amused myself mostly, in my very abbreviated sojurn, by walking around Prague's Old Town, which is a beautiful example of Baroque architecture in it's most ornate and fully-developed form. I found this hilariously witty, since I, the Rome-phile, consider anything above Padua to be completely devoid of Baroque design and lacking the aesthetic to effectively pull it off. Basically, Prague blows my thought right out of the water. It is one of the most architecturally homogenous places I've ever been, though it still has room for some decidedly northern influences, too.

The entirety of the Old Town in an Unesco World Heritage Site, which means that you can basically frolick around the place and know that, even though you only have essentially twelve hours in which to explore the place, you can rest assured that it will continue to look almost exactly the same the next time you find yourself in the Czech Republic.

I amused myself by walking around during the evening I arrived, window shopping for the garnets that the Czech Republic is apparently renowned for, and discovering a lovely little treat which goes by the name of Spiced Wine. I am not a seventy year old man, and to the best of my knowledge I was born after the reign of Henry VIII, but for some reason this drink just made me really happy. I bought my first cup from a street vendor, and liked it so much that, gawl darnit, I wanted more. I figured that I deserved a nice meal, considering my frugality over the previous few weeks (subsisting on rolls pilfered from the breakfast bar in Oslo), and so I set off in search of some good Czech food.

I found a fun little tavern-type place with a promising looking menu and one of those guys standing out front who tries to seduce you into eating there. Generally, I avoid these guys, because I, like other Americans, hate to be solicited at dinner time. Which is inevitably when they call, isn't it? But this guy was sweet and gave me a cupon for 20% off the already reasonably priced menu, so I went for it.

One of the things this place did was set alcohol on fire. Professionally, and with much pomp. I didn't get any fiery alcohol, since I really enjoy my eyebrows, but I saw several groups of people get more and more ferschnockered, holding snifters literally bigger than their heads, which the skilled wait-staff continuously filled with booze, warming it over an open flame and then lighting it on fire. I was incredibly impressed, but content to just sip my mulled wine and leave the X-treme boozing to others.

I did do some (for me) X-treme eating. Now, I'm not a PETA activist by any stretch of the imagination. I am all for the ethical treatment of animals, but I also enjoy a good hunk o' cow now and again, if you get my drift. But eating a bunny... I've always drawn the line there. Chickens are dumb, I was raised in Montana, so cows have always been associated with food, and basically my favorite dinner ever is pork tenderloin, and I'm not about to give that up. I'm good with most of your normal meat products. Bologna excluded. That's not normal. But I've been telling myself in each new place I go that I should try one thing that I never have before. Be it Swedish design or herring for breakfast or inhaling putrid THC fumes... and when put next to those things, rabbit with cream sauce and potato dumplings seemed pretty safe. And depressingly enough, it was delicious. The experience of this little Czech tavern and this food was possibly one of the highlights of the trip up to this point. It was just warm and cozy, and I really enjoyed myself. Some of that was definitely the wine, but I think there was legit enjoyment there as well.

I amused myself the next day by walking around the Unesco Site, gawping. I hiked up to the cathedral, which has an astonishing view of the rest of the city, and walked around in the palace grounds for a bit. It was a surprisingly mild and sunny day, so I took advantage of it by being outside. I got attacked by pigeons when I tried to spread my infectious good will by sharing my final stale Norwegian roll with them. That's what you get for being generous.

Prague was wonderful. What little I saw of it makes me sure that I have to go back at some point, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. I hopped a train that afternoon and headed to Munich.

Munich was cold. Germany in general was freezing when I was there, but then again it was January, so I guess I can't blame it. I stayed at a hostel called Wombats... it's run by Aussies, and overrun by them, too. All of my roommates in the eight person dorm were Australian college students on their summer break. I laughed my ass off when I heard that. And the best part about all the Australians was the fact that the time I was in Munich happened to include Australia Day, which is, I gather, something like the 4th of July.

Imagine being in a hostel full of Australians, who are not in Australia, on Australia Day. There's a word for this: shitshow. We as Americans do the same thing: we get really excited about our national holiday and want to share our excitement with others, even when we're not in our own country. I remember being in Paris on the 4th and lighting sparklers and singing "America the Beautiful" on a bateau-mouche as we passed the mini Statue of Liberty. It was something like that, except with lots more beer and instead of 18 high school girls and two chaperones, it was something like two hundred college kids and no chaperones. Do that math.

Walking around towns cannot be well-described in words. Or at least I don't feel like putting the effort in right now. So you'll just have to go there yourself and see what I mean when I say that I think Munich is more of a summer city. It has a ton of parks, one of which, Englischer Gardens, is larger than Central Park. The Glockenspeil is very, very cool, but I think it would be cooler with a warm summer breeze blowing in your face as you gaze up at it rather than a frigid wind that makes you feel like you just swallowed a scoop of ice cream whole.

I loved walking around, don't get me wrong, but it seems to me that Munich will be much more hospitable in about two months, when it's thawed out a bit. I did eat a pretzel though, so you can relax. I've got the complex carbs under control.

I'm sleepy now. I'm going to try really hard to account for everything and everywhere here, more for my own sake than because I think you're waiting with baited breath to hear about Vienna and Budapest, but still. More soon. Sleep now.

The Belgians Share a Border With The Dutch... and the Germans, Actually.

2010-01-29T23:24:00.000-08:00

I'm not racist against the Dutch, like Nigel Powers, but having grown up with some pseudo-French influences, I might have a little predisposition to lump the Belgians in with the North Dakotans and the Ohioans. But going to Brussels made me appreciate some of the truly wonderful things about the Belgians: waffles and chocolate.

Admission: I was only there for about three hours. Prohibitively expensive hostel prices and a lack of really important art museums, etc. meant that I didn't give Brussels the consideration it deserves. Here's my thinking on this: I speak French. Not really well, but I do. This, plus the fact that France is home to some of the most important art in the world, indicates that I'll probably be back in that part of the world before I get a chance to go back to Budapest, Prague, Tetovo... so I made a sacrifice.

It wasn't actually that big of a sacrifice, since I did achieve the one thing that people are going to ask me about when I say I visited Belgium. I ate a waffle. And it was delicious. That doesn't actually do it justice, but since they honestly can't be made as well anywhere else in the world, I'll let you go to Brussels and discover what I mean for yourself.

I mostly just bopped around the center of town with my waffle, window shopping for lace and chocolate. They're really not joking when they say that's what Belgium is known for. Of course, I was right by the beautiful, if very touristy, Grande Place, and so it's a given that most of these shops were capitalizing on the tourists walking around, exclaiming at the admittedly mind-blowing, gilt-encrusted Baroque-ish buildings of the square. It was a good way to spend a morning. And, of course, it makes me eager to go back there when I have the chance to spend more than a few hours, but in this case, Berlin awaited.

Immediate impressions of Berlin: freaking Arctic. Literally. By this point, I have pretty much been to the North Pole. I mean, I was in a place just a few days before where they had REINDEER on the menu. (Okay, so that's probably not PC at the real North Pole, but still. Stockholm and Oslo are pretty far north.) But Berlin was SO cold. At first. I got in late at night, and it was as windy as anywhere I've ever been (and I come from Great Falls) and so I wasn't particularly favorably impressed at first, thinking I might just scrap this whole part of the trip and head directly to Greece.

But when I got to the hostel, I decided I was moving in. The Grand Hostel Berlin is amazing. Like, with fluffy white duvet covers and internet in the rooms. I wanted to stay there forever.

One of the people I was sharing the room with was a guy from Melbourne, Austrailia named James. He and I got to chatting about how unfortunate it is to be an English-speaker who can't speak German when you're in Germany, but how it doesn't really matter anymore, since English is literally a global language.

A quick word on this phenomenon: I am the daughter of a language teacher. As such, I have been raised with the idea that language is the key to culture, and that culture is the key to understanding how other people operate, and if we understand how other people operate, perhaps we wouldn't blow each other up as often. And so the fact that in each new country I visit, it's not required of me to even learn the rudiments of the language because everyone I encounter speaks English better than I do is something of a mixed blessing.

The wonderful part is that it's made it possible for me to connect with a lot more people and get their opinions of the world, which is so much smaller and more closely-knit than it used to be. It's encouraging for me to talk with people from Germany, Korea, Austrailia, Brazil and find that their opinions of a lot of the most pressing issues that we as a generation are going to have to face are very comparable to mine. The fact that we all share a common language has been enormously helpful in letting me get familiar with other ways of thinking and reasoning and how people's opinions are influenced by their upbringing. That the common language happens to be my native one is just very lucky.

The guilty part is: given the respect that both of my parents have for other cultures, and the mentality that they've raised me with that going to another culture means accepting the differences of that culture, language included, means that I feel really awful when I have to speak English when that is not the native language. Growing up in Bush2 Amuhrica, as a Democrat, I've grown used to thinking that the rest of the world thinks that we are a bunch of loud, violent, inconsiderate cowboys who want everyone else to do what we say is right to make it easier for us. From what I've encountered in some places here, it's not really that far off the mark. Or maybe I'm hypersensitive to Ugly Amuhricans. I don't know. But the fact remains that I feel like I'm playing into this stereotype every time I have to ask something in English.

My solution: British accent. I'm really quite pahssable aht tawking with a British accent, and since hanging out with James for pretty much the entyah toyme Oy was een Buhleen, I'm pretty good at Austrailian, too. I figure the Aussies and the Brits can afford to look culturally insensitive more than we can, at the moment. And so I never use an American accent when necessity dictates I have to speak English.

It really is quite amazing that essentially the whole world speaks English, though. I mean, most of the people I encounter are in the service industry, and so it's basically a necessity, but I'm beginning to get the impression that English is really the language in which the world is conducted. And that is giving me this whole new interpretation of America's place in the world, and Great Britain's place before us. To be so powerful that the whole world basically defers to your language as the one in which business is done... that's an awful lot of responsibility. I don't think we, the civilians living our private lives in the States, have any conception of just how influential we have been politically in the last century. Like, really. That might sound arrogant, but the fact that I can go up to basically anyone on the street and say (in my Brit or Aussie accent, of course) something in English, and they will answer me in English says a whole lot about the state of the world today. It also indicates just how careful we should be with the power it connotes. Or connoted. I think the United States of America is in a weird position globally right now.

Anyway. Berlin. It's... functional. Well, if you think about it, the whole city was bombed the crap out of less than a century ago, and so obviously there are not a whole bevy of pretty old buildings the like of which I have become accustomed to. It's a very modern city, and it's huge. I'm fairly used to cities where you can walk from place to place without feeling like you're Forrest Gump (he ran, but you get my point), but let me just say that it's totally plausible for Berlin to have been divided into East and West little more than twenty years ago. There's certainly enough room.

My favorite residual little quirk from before the wall fell happens to be East Berlin's jaunty little traffic guys. They're hilarious... Google image them right now. I'll wait.

Aren't they funny? And they're also really handy, for when you are walking around, in orienting yourself with the past, as to what side of the wall you would have been on if you were there in 1988. I mean, if you're an American, you would be on the West side, or you would be dead, but the thought remains the same.

That was really the most striking thing about Berlin: the immediacy of it's history. I mean, each and every place I've been to has some big historical significance, and you've heard me rhapsodize about Rome and how replete with world-changing history it is, but Berlin changed the world while people I know were alive. I mean, I guess if I'm feeling crazy I could say that I spiritually know Michelangelo or something weird like that. But, I actually know people who are now and were then functionally alive when Germany brought the world to its knees. Walking past the Brandenburg Tor and the Reichstag brings to mind haunting, frightening images of Nazi soldiers goosestepping, of Hitler orating, his creepy side part sticking to his head with fervent persperation... it's all very real. And it all happened a very short while ago.

Berlin isn't a place that dwells on the past, though. Sure, the reminders are all around, even in the absence of something. In areas where there are large swaths of new-looking buildings, you know that a bomb was dropped. The lack of the wall has its own substance, consisting of plaques and flowers and memorials and curious people gazing from one side of an invisible void or the other.

But Berlin is a thoroughly modern, incredibly cosmopolitan city with a huge population of really diverse people. James and I had dinner at an Indian restaurant that was literally some of the best food I've had in a good long while. We walked through the museum island, where the natural history, fine art, history of Germany and other museums are located. It was a fun way to spend the day, especially with a new friend with whom I shared a language but absolutely not a culture. I forgot how revelatory asking questions of someone can be. Did you know Austrailians, as a people, hate Dr. Pepper? Neither did I.

From Berlin I headed to Prague, then Munich, Vienna and Budapest. Tomorrow I'm off to Beograd, from where I will head to Macedonia to visit my cousins Connor and Kacey, who are in the Peace Corps. Excited! I can't believe how fast the days are going; it seems completely improbable that I will be back in the States in less than a month. I'm just trying to soak it all up as much as I can until then. I guess, in a sense, going back to the States after all this time and all these new perspectives will be an adventure all it's own. Onward! More soon.

Melancholy Danes and Gomorroah

2010-01-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

Hamlet really had nothing to whine about. Denmark is awesome. Well, I only saw Copenhagen, but if that city is any indication of the rest of the country, I see absolutely no reason to drown oneself in a stream or poison one's brother in the ear (as creative as that is... you go, Claudius!) or, you know... stab people who are hiding behind drapes. I just didn't see the provocation for that. Like, there are literally 7-Elevens on every street corner. Go get a Slurpee, Hamlet! That always cheers me up!

You might have heard about Copenhagen lately, because the President went there for a summit on climate change. And wherever the President goes, the news media follows with a cheesy slogan/spin. Hopenhagen? Ring a bell? Yeah.

My initial reaction upon getting into the city was "holy neon, Batman! They call this energy efficiency?!?!". It was pretty late at night, and the entirety of the town center was lit up with advertisements for Carlsberg (Probably the Best Beer... probably the best slogan ever) and T-Mobile and everything else you could think of. Diapers included. And so, you see, my initial reaction was that Copenhagen is a big old hypocrite. Big neon sign for disposable diapers? And you call yourselves green. Shame.

But when I woke up in the morning (after having spent the night with both my hat and gloves on in the sweltering dorm room for fear of bed bugs... this hostel was very sketch. I was glad I only stayed one night), I found myself warming to Copenhagen, and not in a global manner, either. The city is really clean, and it was the first place I had been thus far that did not make me look like I'd been wading in a river from the knees down. Oslo, Stockholm, take note please. This is how you shovel a sidewalk.

And Copenhagen really would stop if the sidewalks were slushy... or rather, if the bike lanes were. I can literally say that I had, up to this point, never seen that many bicycles in one place. They're EVERYWHERE. You have more liklihood of being hit by a bicycle in Copenhagen than you do of being hit by a car, because they outnumber cars probably 4:1. But don't let this go to your head and think you can just walk out into a bike lane all willy-nilly. Remember Pierre Curie? Yeah... nobody does. Marie gets all the press in that marriage, but he did do something pretty revolutionary in his own right: he was the first guy in Paris to die after getting hit by a bike. It happens. It almost happened to me on numerous occasions on this day. Be careful.

I amused myself for quite awhile in the morning by merely walking from one weird-ass spire to another. These are about as prolific as the bikes in Copenhagen, and much more entertaining to one who has been hanging out in the city of domes, but not spires, for a long time. I think there's some sort of meridian that marks where churches stop being topped with domes and start having really fun spires. I don't know where it is, but it's between Berlin and Copenhagen, anyway. The spires in Copenhagen are so random as to be a little confusing. I think, not having had a whole lot (read: no) experience with Russian architecture, that I wouldn't be wrong in saying that these were very Russian-inspired structires, with piles of balls and ice-cream swirls and dragon tails... I had a heck of a time just laughing at each one as I came upon it.

I also went to the Danish National Gallery, which was FREE and really fun. My favorite part was the modern-art (gasp! Maggie liked a modern installation?!?!?) show that had been set up by foud different artists as part of the climate-change conference. Two were films, one was a giant series of bio-domes, and one was sculpture. Reading the artist's abstracts sure made them easier to understand, and I agreed with a lot of the themes they were working with. Plus, one of the videos was visually just stunning. I think I watched it four times.

As for Danish food: 7-Eleven seems to be the national emblem. I come from a state where we don't have those stores, and I've only ever been in one once in Vegas at one in the morning. A Slurpee is welcome when it's still 100 degrees out in the middle of the night, but not when it's 20 degrees at noon. I don't get it. Also, I'm not a big breakfast food person, so I wasn't inclined to get that pastry we call a Danish, but I guess the Danish must just call a pastry... and I couldn't find any other foods that were authentically Danish. So, I went to a Chinese buffet.

WAIT! That really is authentically Danish! You would be shocked by how many times I saw the word buffet in only one day in Copenhagen. If 7-Eleven is to Eagle, then ethnic food buffet is to baseball, if we're comparing the States and Denmark. Even Let's Go Europe told me to try out a buffet. And the book don't lie.

So, full of MSG and frying oil, I happily (if a little shakily... MSG is weird that way, right?) made my way to the train station for the overnight train to Amsterdam. It actually wasn't bad. I didn't spend the money to get a bed, or even a berth, but the compartment I was in was deserted for most of the night, so I got a whole bench of seats to myself. Of course, it wasn't a full night of sleep by any stretch, since people were coming in and out all night, demanding my ticket in strange languages that I wouldn't have understood even if awake, but it wasn't a bad night. I'd do it again.

Amsterdam. (Que ominous Bob Marley-esque suspense music here). It's gorgeous. Seriously, I'm very sad that it has the reputation it does, because people should literally just go there for the buildings. You know how you want the Netherlands to look? With the water, and the tall, skinny, bright-colored houses? That's Amsterdam. It's beautiful. Just freakin' gorgeous. Google image the train station and you'll get an idea of what I mean.

But, unfortunately, Amsterdam has the reputation it does for a reason. Yes, Virginia, there really is a Red Light District. And it brought up some questions for me that I was surprised by the answers to.

I am an art history major. Specifically, I study the Renaissance and the Baroque periods of art history (that's not at all specific, but... I digress). Basically, this means that I study naked people and sex. And religion. But the Renaissance and the Baroque both really liked the Greek/Roman gods, and boy, did those guys have a lot of sex. And they never wore a stitch of clothing. And so, given Zeus's promiscuity and Michelangelo's penchant for naked guys, I consider myself pretty comfortable with the ideas of nudity and human sexuality. I am. Sex is a natural occurance, and none of us would be here without it. We were all born naked. It's our natural state. Nothing wrong with either of these things.

What really bothered me as I walked through the Red Light District (in the middle of the afternoon. I was not going out there at night) was not the stores selling sex toys and lingere or the theatres advertising private cabanas (ew!). It was the prostitutes. Women standing in windows wearing only their underwear, pressing themselves against the glass and, in many cases, looking really bored. Desensitized in the extreme.

I consider myself a feminist. I thought I was of the opinion that prostitution can be empowering when it is of the woman's own choice and gone about in a healthy manner. I thought that sex has always been a commodity, and in a supply and demand society, it should perhaps have the same economic opportunities afforded to the alcohol, gambling and tobacco industries.

There is nothing empowering about what I saw in Amsterdam. It is not healthy for anyone, in any way, and reducing women's bodies to products that can be bought and sold like cigarettes is setting us back farther than anti-abortion legislation, workplace discrimination or any of the other challenges facing women in the developed world today. Prostitution can never be an empowering decision, because, even if it is an action undertaken of a woman's own volition, she is still making herself the object of a gaze that does not see her as a human being, but as a means to one's own satisfaction. Watching the dumbass young American and Austrailian guys oogling the women standing in windows like clothing mannequins gave me the heebie-jeebies, because I could also see the women, and see that they were used to this. They're used to much worse than just being leered at by young foreign guys.

I live in the 21st Century. I do. I know that my generation has a different conception of sexuality and sexual freedom than those of our elders, but I would also hope that we have a more egalitarian way of viewing the world, in which women are not inherently second-class citizens who can be objectified with impunity. I know this isn't true. Women are all-too-often reduced to a pair of breasts or a butt in the media, and so it follows, I suppose, that prostitution, which is the ultimate form of objectification and subjugation, should not be frowned upon. The fact that the Red Light District exists indicates to me that we have a long way to go before sexual equality is reached. The term "the oldest profession" indicates to me that that goal might never be achieved. As long as women minimize their worth to purely physical, to be enjoyed and approved of by men, we'll always be the weaker sex.

This is a very touchy subject for a lot of people. I don't want to sound like some man-hating, bra-burning militant. That's not how I mean this at all. I don't think that men are exclusively responsible for the sex industry, even if they are often the most prolific consumers of it. I think that there is guilt on both sides of the sex divide, and the only way to bring about any kind of meaningful change is by really examining the effects of it. I saw it in the eyes and postures of the women in the windows. Even if they chose that life, they're victims of it all the same. There's no passion there. No real emotion at all. Sex becomes merely the satisfaction of a physical need. What, then, is it that separates us from the animals?

There will never be an agreement reached on this topic, as there will never be an agreement reached on many others. You can't get everyone to look at things from your point of view, and the world would be far less interesting if they did. But it surprised me how vehemently opposite of my expectations my reaction was when confronted with the fact of prostitution, and so I'm asking you to think about it for a few minutes. Just think. Be aware.

That said, the women in windows were not the only shocking and usually illicit thing that they deal in in Amsterdam. I have never smoked pot. It's illegal in the States, and, apart of jaywalking and the odd house-party, I don't do illegal things. I was too scared to try it, even though it's legal there, but walking through the District, I didn't really get a choice. Ever heard of a contact high? I literally sat down on a bench after walking through some little side streets, and started freaking out because of how weird it felt to move my fingers. My legs felt like they were sinking into mud. I couldn't stop staring at the lights on the river.

I don't know how legit this is, but that's what I felt, and it was enough to make me sure that I will never try pot for real. It creeped me out. I really didn't like it. And the smell of that stuff... ick. So... this is a PSA from your local goody-two-shoes: pot will make you feel creepy. Don't do it. Eat french fries instead. They're delicious. And bad for you in a far less sinster and ambiguous way.

I went to the Van Gogh Museum, too. Literally, it was the most expensive museum I've ever been to. 14 euros! Vincent's museum is the proof that "if you build it, they will pay through the nose to come". I paid the 14 euros and entered, feeling all the time like I was at Disneyland, for all the crowds. Holy cow.

The irony actually depressed me a little. It was both the most expensive and most crowded museum I've been to in Europe (with the exception of the Sistine Chapel, but that's a different post), but Vincent died with basically no wider recognition. Dude shot himself in the chest in the middle of a field. You don't do that when you're happy. Selling paintings generally makes artists happy. He went from being completely unknown at the time of his death to having crowds lining up around the block to buy merchandise with his work on it. And he didn't get to see this. It's a little depressing, right?

But the museum is beautiful, and thought provoking. Actually, the entirety of Amsterdam was incredibly thought-provoking, from the angry thoughts about the women in windows to the amazed thoughts while standing in front of the Anne Frank house...

I think my favorite thoughts were still about the french fries, though.

The Nobel Laureates and the Vikings

2010-01-26T11:45:00.001-08:00

Wouldn't that be a funny sitcom? With the scientists working for years on delicate, earth-shattering experiments, only to have their roommates the Vikings smash and pillage them while the scientists took a bathroom break. I would watch. But I'm more talking about the cities that are closely associated with each of these rather disparate groups, in particular Stockholm and Oslo, respectively.

Stockholm, Sweden. It is, until I get to Athens, the farthest east of Montana that I have ever been. Until I got to Oslo, it was the farthest north I've ever been. But cartographical dithering aside, the city is amazing. No one bothered to mention that Stockholm is built on islands, and so it was a surprise when I woke up in the morning (I got in at two in the morning and so didn't get an immediately dramatic first impression) and found that I had to use bridges in order to get anywhere else. Which was fine with me, because I am of the opinion that there is nothing more aesthetically appealing than water, even when it's frozen.

Walking around Stockholm in the early morning, when very few other people were out and there were no cars to speak of, I was struck by how absolutely silent the city seemed. It's a big place, but the snow falling softly was the only sound, or lack of it, apparent from my vantage point on a walking trail overlooking the frozen river.

It is here that I adopted my current strategy for each new city I visit: walk. A lot. I don't think that there's a better way to acquaint yourself with the dimensions and personality of a city than to walk around in it, observe the people and get your feet wet. In this case, quite literally. One thing I did notice about Scandinavia: it snows there. And for this statement being rather a 'duh' one, the cities of Stockholm and Oslo were both pretty ill-prepared when it came to clearing roads and walkways. Or maybe those Northern people have just had to suck it up... walk uphill both ways, barefoot in three feet of snow, that sort of thing. Maybe I'm a weenie. But my clothing was absolutely soaked by the end of the day.

Stockholm has the feeling of a city who knows who it is. I've noticed that there are certain places in this world which seem to be having identity crises of some description, and feel uncomfortable in their eclecticism, stylistically and culturally. Stockholm is very modern in some parts, with neon clocks and wide boulevards with Swarovski stores, etc., and in some parts reminded me very much of Trastevere, with little twisting streets that open to reveal cozy piazzas. But neither extreme feels... well... extreme. The separation of each portion of the city onto islands certainly helps in making each section feel unique, but it doesn't feel like you're commuting when you cross a bridge.

Culturally, too, it embraces its Swedish-ness while at the same time making ample room for the requisite kebab stands and crappy Chinese food places, while also reveling in some of the most interesting looking international cuisine that I've yet encountered. Obviously, I didn't partake of any of it, since I am poor, but it looked cool, and creative. Of course, Stockholm needs to be appealing to the higher-end tastes, given its notoriety as the city where certain medals and money are bestowed upon a whole bunch of people that no one has ever heard of, but who change the world in tiny and profound ways in their specific fields, and one person who the entire world knows. Inevitably, we all know who won the Nobel Peace Prize each year, but can you name the guy who won the prize in economics? Yeah, me neither.

In spite of its international reputation, Stockholm still manages to be very, very Swedish. It's in the layout of the city, in the furniture in the stores and restaurants, and in the very tall, blonde inhabitants walking around. The thing that stuck me most about the city was the truth contained in that one little phrase "Swedish design". Everything in the interiors of Stockholm looks like a Volvo. It's those curved, sleek lines folded over each other like... I don't know... bronchiole folds or something. Accordions. It's the very odd colors and the burnished metal that make you think of what the Bradys' house would look like if they lived in 2015. I'm not sure how much I like Swedish design... but they're nothing if not consistent.

There was one area in which I found Swedish design sensibilities to be most intriguing, and that was in the National Gallery in Stockholm. Not being particularly interested in museum theory, I'm probably not the best person to talk about this, but I found it very interesting to walk through the galleries and see some of the concepts at play there. One gallery in particular was comprised of marble statues placed around a fairly innocuous room, but the interesting part was the lighting. Your basic flourescent bulbs being winched up and down and dimmed and brightened, seemingly at random, to create different lighting effects on the statues. It was very interesting to watch, and raised some good questions about presentation and the ways in which it influences conception. So I have to give the Swedish credit for that.

The journey across Sweden to Norway looked exactly like you want that journey to look. Huge expanses of white, white openness punctuated occassionally by dark black forests of pine trees. I really enjoy it when things look like they're supposed to, so it made me happy to just gaze out the window and think about what it would be like to live here. The answer I came up with: cold and dark. I don't know if I'd be willing to trade the sun for beautiful alpine landscapes and the opportunity to ski anywhere I needed to go. I really like the sun.

Oslo is totally different from Stockholm. Stockholm feels big, even if it's quiet, whereas Oslo is very loud and small. It's situated beside a fjord (!) and feels a little bit like Chicago in that respect. But it's still very different from a lot of other cities I've been to, especially lately. I walked around a lot here, too, and discovered a surprising difference that raised my eyebrows, even considering my background.

There are houses in Oslo. Like, single-family dwellings with yards that aren't attached to other people's houses. They have play sets and garages and mailboxes on the street. I can honestly say that I haven't seen that since I left the States. Most of the places I've been have been cities, which typically connotes apartment-style living. I literally just skipped (or sloshed, since Oslo and Stockholm seem to have the same sidewalk cleaning regimen) around, creepily looking into people's windows and remembering what it must be like to be able to sing show tunes as loud as you want while doing the dishes and not have your neighbors bang on the windows and tell you to shut the heck up. In Italian. So you might say Oslo, while being so very far away from home, also brought me a bit closer to the style of living that I grew up with than I have been in quite some time. Excluding the time we spent on the Burren. But I don't count that, because it felt to surreal to be at all mundane.

I initially intended to spend only one night in Oslo, at this hostel right on the main shopping street which is run by the Norwegian military. Up to that point, I had always expected hostels to be a little sketchy... the kind of places where it might not be a bad idea to wear shoes at all times. Even in bed. This place, however, was palatial. I got a shower in the room that I got to myself, since most people don't choose to visit Norway in January. I took full advantage of this shower. Showers are awesome. They're another thing that you should really feel grateful for when you have unhindered access to a clean one.

I say that I only planned to spend one night in Oslo, planning on taking the ferry to Denmark the next night. Well, my travel un-luck, which has been relatively dormant for quite awhile, reared its head this time. The ferry was in dock, only for that night. So I decided that it would just be easier to spend one more night at the hostel (I wasn't at all sad about this) and get the train the next day. So that is what I did. Oslo was an excellent experience, as was Stockholm, and they're two of those places that it's always kinda fun to say that you've been. Norway and Sweden are a long way away from everything else, and so having experienced them struck me as something I needed to do when the opportunity presented itself.

An observation: money is weird. Geography is weird, too. And when they merge, it's altogether catastrophic. At least for me. But remember how I've said before that I plan on looking like a complete idiot at least three times a day? Well, in Italy, where I had, by the end, gotten a fairly good handle on what to expect from life, that number went down to maybe once a day. There were a few times where I made it safely back to my apartment for the night without having embarassed myself for a full sixteen hours. Well, put me in a country where I don't even know what alphabet they're using, and add money that makes no sense to anyone raised in sane places where you don't spend 300 something for a hamburger, that number goes up astronomically. I've pretty much moved to doofus-ville.

Kroners would be fine with me. If they weren't different in each country. Sweden uses currency called the kroner. Norway uses currency called the kroner. Was it so weird to think that they'd be the same? They're not. The girl at the hostel didn't even know what the Swedish money was when I handed it to her. Stockholm is four hours away! It only makes me even more convinced (from a purely lazy standpoint, not an economic one) that the entire world should be on the Euro. When countries which lie about an afternoon's leisurely drive (by Montana standards) apart are using the same name for their totally different currency, it makes things difficult. It makes me look like an idiot. And life would be so much easier if I didn't have to starve myself for two days because I was sure as hell not going to spend 200 kroner for a sandwich. On second thought... maybe we should all use the kroner. It would sure cut down on our need for gym memberships.

Coming next week (or whenever I get around to it): Nothing is rotten, as far as I can tell, in the state of Denmark, but there's a pretty rotten smell coming out of the coffee shops in Amsterdam.

Chapter One: The Boy Who Lived

2010-01-25T10:32:00.000-08:00

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number Four, Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last ones you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense...

Approximately twelve years ago, my mother brought home a book which, I am by turns proud and embrarassed to say, was perhaps the single greatest turning point in my life thus far. It literally changed everything about the way I see the world and how I react to it. Really. You can ask anyone who has had a conversation lasting more than ten minutes with me. I grew up with the characters it introduced me to, facing the same quirks and challenges of adolescense right along with them. They comforted me when I thought the world sucked. When they overcame insurmountable obstacles and came out on the other side, they gave me courage to do the same with my comparably less earth-shattering difficulties.

I think you know which book I'm talking about: Hollywood Wives. Of course.

No. Harry Potter. Parts 1-7. Duh. And good portions of these books, and some of the most iconic and suspenseful ones, take place in venues like Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road and King's Cross Station. Do you know what all those places have in common? They're all in London. Which happens to be where Lane is studying right now, and where I happened to visit her about two weeks ago. It was a memorable visit filled with excitement and wonder, and made me think that London is definitely somewhere near the top of the list of cities (legit, cosmopolitan cities, of which Rome doesn't really count, since it's more of a state of mind...) in which I can see myself living.

Lane attends the London School of Economics (insert impressed whistles here), and lives in (get this!) a dorm with a lot of other college students from different schools in London. A dorm. Which is something that I've not experienced in its most basic form for a good long while now. Corbin lives in apartment-style dorms, I lived in an apartment... I haven't actually spent a significant amount of time in an actual dorm room since Ellen and I moved out freshman year. I loved it. It was like having a sleepover. Also, Lane has her own bathroom, and access to laundry, so that made it even better!

It was awesome to see Lane. After having pretty much stayed in Rome while I was living there and let my friends come to me and be given the Grand Tour of my city, I've really been enjoying being shown around their cities by some of my friends. Corb's tour of Dublin left nothing to be desired, and being shown around London (which is a large and very intimidating city, despite the fact that they ostensibly speak English there) by someone who has been living there was definitely a plus.

London is huge. Like, literally, I'm pretty sure the entire island that we call Great Britain is actually taken up by this city. And the annoying thing about it is, London likes to pretend that it's a whole bunch of little cities. Or towns. All mushed together. They all have different names and, from what I gather, different trash men and perhaps even different currencies. There's one that the Queen isn't allowed to enter (or something odd like that), and they're all really confusing. It's a good thing that the maps of London are so comprehensive, since it's just about as nonsensical in its layout as Rome is, otherwise everyone would be walking around, with their British accents saying "Sorry, terribly sorry to trouble you old chap, but do you possibly know where I live? Ah, quite alright, quite alright. No, I'm afraid I don't know where you live, either. Ah, well. Stiff upper lip and all that, what?". But the maps are good, so no worries.

And the confusion is kind of endearing... it's like London is trying really hard to be this hip, worldy city, but it can't really escape the fact that it's been around since the 1200s and earlier. It wants to be as well-laid-out as New York or Chicago, but it just... can't. But you still have to respect it for trying.

I have the luxury of visiting people who know me really well. Lane and I have essentially lived together in pretty close proximity for two years, and so she's aware of my penchant for staring at art and ignoring the rest of the world. She's also quite well-acquainted with my Potter-centric universe, and actually participates herself, albeit perhaps on a healthier level of dedication. She and I also share a liking for fanciness on occassion, and singing at extremely inappropriate times. She, being the wonderful friend that she is, managed to synthesize all of these things into what was, for me, the perfect first taste of London.

1) My penchant for staring at art: CITIES OF THE WORLD, TAKE NOTE!!!!! The British Museums, at least those owned by the state, are FREE. And let me tell you, they're most likely better than yours, so take a leaf out of their book and share the wealth, why don't you? Literally, I could have spent hours more than I did in the National Gallery. And I spent around 7 hours in the National Gallery. The British Museum is one of those places that is just hazy with the clouds of controversy surrounding it, but hell. I got to see the Rosetta stone and the Parthenon, and I didn't have to travel to Greece or Egypt to do it. Who cares if they stole them? Well, a lot of people do, but at least the British aren't really profitting outright from their thievery by making the Greeks and Egyptians pay to come see these things. Free is my favorite price to pay to see art. I went to the Tate Britain as well, and hung out with my newly-found favorite 19th century school, the Pre-Raphaelites. I creeped around at the Courtauld, trying to imagine myself as a student there. I could definitely do it. Especially if there's an ice rink in the courtyard all year round.

2) My probably unhealthy obsession with an allegedy fictional world: When she had class and so couldn't squire me around all day, Lane handed me a map, pointed out Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross, and set me loose on an unsuspecting city. So, obviously, I put on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on my iPod and set to work strolling up and down Tottenham Court looking for the coffee shop where Harry, Ron and Hermione dueled Rowell and Dolohov, and Charing Cross, where I stood staring at book stores and music stores, or, more specifically, the join between them, willing myself to see The Leaky Cauldron. When she didn't have class, Lane and I made the pilgrimage that I've been wanting to make since I was eleven years old, to King's Cross Station and Platform 9 3/4. The Muggle one (which is, depressingly enough, the only one I could find, despite running into a few different walls) is kind of lame... it's a sign on a brick wall, and there's a trolly stuck half way through the wall. You can push on the trolly and hope Hogwarts has a grad school... but alas. No cigar. (By the way, if there's a team of highly trained psychologists waiting for me with a straight-jacket when I get off the plane back in the States, I'll consider that situation normal. I know I sound insane, but the things I love, I love completely.) Even if I actually do have to resign myself to the fact that I'm probably not just a late bloomer and am, in fact, a Muggle... I'm still glad that I got to see these places. I couldn't have gone to London without visiting them.

3) Our shared penchant for fanciness: Lane and I are both big proponents of getting dressed up and going out to fancy meals (on a college student budget, this generally means the OP, but once we went to FoodDance), and so we decided to have afternoon tea at the National Gallery. This involved mint tea, legit crustless finger sandwiches, about 8 billion different tarts and a delicious scone apiece. Lane tried to save her scone for later by encasing the jam in a fairly impressive architectural construction of Devonshire cream, but, alas... it failed. And her bag paid the price later. While she was buttering it, though, we had a good laugh about how much she looked like Tegan preparing to eat a bagel. I can't wait until we're all together again.

4) Singing at inappropriate times: I'm often inclined to sing along when I'm at the theater and watching a musical. In most situations, this is frowned upon, and most companions are generally at least confused, if not outright mortified. Good thing that Lane and I, who both tend to sing along even when it's not kosher to do so, went to Mamma Mia! in the West End. At the end of that show, they tell you to stand up, dance around and sing along to "Waterloo". We did this with gusto. And continued the celebration all the way back to her dorm. We looked drunk, I'm pretty sure, walking down the street singing Abba at the top of our lungs, but we were stone cold sober. Unless happy is a drug now.

We also went out for dinner with Craig, another of the guys from K who is studying at LSE. It was refreshing to be with people who know what FAB, SIP and the Crime of the Big Red Bench are, and to giggle about the name of the street where we ate... Goodge Street. Go ahead. You know you want to laugh at that. It's funny! Goodge. Also, Steak and Ale Pie is delicious. I used to make fun of the British for having crappy, flavorless food. No more. Yum!

It was very hard to leave Lane at the station as I boarded the train that took me to Gatwick for my flight to Stockholm. I think it's because that was the very end of my safety net, and I was from then on, until February, on my own. Totally and completely. The prospect felt strangely daunting. Also, that was the last time I'll see Lane until at least July... which is a long time. Perhaps the longest I'll have gone without seeing one of my four roommates since I got to K. Weird. But thank goodness for Skype, right?

London was wonderful, and while I'm sure I'll be back there many times, I couldn't have asked for a better first impression. Thanks to Lane and Craig and Erin, Harry, Ron, Hermione... and everyone else (real and imagined) who made the time so much fun. Cheerio for now, London! On to see Alfred Nobel and the Vikings!

Green: The Blood of Angry Men, Orange: The Blood of...Other Angry Men...

2010-01-23T12:34:00.001-08:00

Not to make light of the Troubles. Far from it. Going to Belfast was one of the most revelatory and enlightening experiences of this trip thus far. And that includes the city of Amsterdam. But more on both of these things later.

We left off where Maribeth, Scott and Kealey set off to make the epic journey back to the States, arguably made even more epic lately thanks to Mr. Exploding Depends. Some people just want to make life harder for everyone. I wished them luck. But there were other things to contemplate, as well.

When you were a little kid, did you play make-believe with your friends? Were there very involved games with costumes and dialogue and plot twists galore? I did. Of course. I still do, actually, but mostly it's by myself and in the privacy of my own room, where there's no chance that I'm going to be overheard and institutionalized. But I digress. Never, even in my dizziest daydreams and games of make-believe would I have imagined that Ryan, Corbin, Teague and I would be in Ireland by ourselves, just the four of us. I mean, it's been just the four of us plenty of times before... essentially, that's how we grew up (family vacation-wise, anyway), but we've always been on a continent that begins with North and ends with America.

To be in Europe with these three boys brought about another of those crazy moments where I was stuck between the "you'll remember this for the rest of your life" feeling and the "duh we're in Ireland, what's the big deal?" feeling. It was very natural that we should be able to do this, but at the same time... who ever believes something like that is going to happen? And over your birthday, no less! That's right folks, I am officially never going to be too young to drink ever again. Of course, the effect was a little anti-climactic, having been able to drink legally for quite a while now, but we nevertheless made it fun. And I have to admire all three of the boys for putting up with me in an art museum as part of the celebration... that's love right there.

For the sake of everyone's sanity, I'll leave the birthday recap to this: art, prison (historical, not actual), burgers, beer, baby Guiness, WE GOT THE WINE! and some very awkward pictures. Also, Purple Rain at McTurcals Pub. Yummy. And that's all I'm saying.

The fact that we had no real plan going into this week of freedom didn't actually end up being a bad thing. We were going to, for instance, take a tour to Tara, New Grange and the Boyne (I have faith in nothing since the Boyne), but the Big Freeze won out yet again. So, we went to Howth instead. Howth is a fishing village north of Dublin, where we interacted with a lot of wildlife. When I say wildlife, I mean a seal that Teague and I both felt looks a lot like our dog, Sadie, two dogs whom we dubbed Winston and Churchill (they ate my sandwich. It's okay. I gave it to them), and three lobster tails named 3.49 euros each. See what happens when you leave four college kids alone to choose their own diet? They upgrade to lobster. It's a funny old world, ain't it?

Since none of us felt much like going out that night, we needed to find something to entertain ourselves. Solution: cut Corbin's hair. I know that there are probably some of you reading this who don't understand how very earth-shattering this decision was, but Corbin's hair was longer and, annoyingly, much better than even mine. And I love my hair. So cutting it and donating it certainly made some person very happy. Good for you, Corb.

The best result of this little activity was Krissy's reaction when she joined us the next day. Well, it has to be said that Corbin went about it in a very funny way: disguising his lack of ponytail with both a hat and a hood until he presented Krissy with a "Christmas present"... two big hanks of hair. It's always fun to be in on a joke before it happens. Me being in on things happens so infrequently that I relish each time it does. But this little hair-capade was not the most memorable part of the week, by far. That afternoon, with Krissy now making the battle of the sexes a little more even, we headed to Belfast.

A word quickly on money: Ryan disagrees with me on this, but I am fervently in favor of the entire world being on the Euro. It just makes a lot of sense. You can tell which coin is which, the money is easily distinguishable based on size and color, and if we were all on the Euro, there would be no exchange rate kicking my ass at every opportunity. The British Sterling Pound makes no sense at all. The 5 cent coin is as big as my head, and the pound coin really does weigh one pound. It was very disconcerting to go from the rationality and sense of the Euro to hexagonal coins. And so there's my two cents (not tuppence, because British money is nonsense) on the subject.

We stayed at a place called Paddy's Palace. If that name makes you want to vomit a little, join the club. But you haven't heard the really awesome part of this hostel. With two nights, you got a free tour up to Derry and the Giant's Causeway. FREE. Well... with the price of the bed. It was still a good deal. The night life in Belfast is, understandably, a little lacking. When you've spent time in pubs in Doolin and Dublin, renowned for their music (and their subsequent appeal to tourists), Belfast, with its surly bartenders who won't serve you if you're in possession of two X chromosomes, is a little disappointing. So, that first night, we went to Avatar. Now, I'm not going to bore you with my rapturous account of this outing right now (including the FREE 3D... they didn't charge you extra for the glasses!) but GO see this movie (in 3D. Don't bother if it's not in 3D) right now. I'll wait.

You back? Mind blown? Want to move to Pandora? Great. Moving on.

The trip to the Giant's Causeway and Derry was memorable, to say the least. Any time that you go to the Giant's Causeway is going to be memorable, because it's one of those places that makes you wonder how the world came to be. It makes you all at once believe fervently in science and know deep down that it really was a giant in Scotland who built the thing, wanting to come over to Ireland and kick Finn MacCool's (Anglicized spelling) ass. It's a place so improbable that it makes even the most improbable explanations for it seem possible, if not likely.

It was a beautiful, clear day by the time we got to the Causeway, and we enjoyed a rare glimpse of the Scottish coast, only a few miles away. Apparently it is rarely clear enough to see it, but we did. It was treacherously icy and probably really dangerous to be crawling all over it like we did, scrambling go get into a timed picture, but what's life worth if you're not going to take it into your own hands once in awhile? In any case, it's a place that makes you really stop and appreciate how cool the planet we live on really is.

It was not, however, beautiful and clear when we left Belfast in the morning, or when we got to Derry. On the contrary, Derry (hah. That rhymes.) was freakin' freezing, Mr. Bigglesworth. It was so cold, and foggier than I thought it was possible for a place to be. This was a little sad, considering the whole reason the Paddy Wagon (gag if you will, but it was fun!) tour stops in Derry is so you can walk along the walls and see the murals from during the Troubles. We could make out some things, but I was under the impression that what turned out to be a guy's shirt on one of the murals was a white jack o' latern... so it didn't quite have the emotional impact that it might have if there hadn't been a bank of clouds between me and the murals.

The boys did find a lovely international lunch at Subway, however, and I got over my point-blank dislike of the place through the introduction of a concept called Sweet Onion Chicken Teryaki. Sometimes it takes Europe to give you a new perspective on things.

The next morning, before leaving for Dublin again, where we would shortly have to say goodbye to Ryan and Teague, we did the one thing that you're absolutely supposed to do when you're in Belfast. It's called a Black Taxi Tour, and it takes you through the history of the Troubles and some of the most turbulent areas of violence. What was so jarring for me was to see all the evidence of continuing violence around the city.

Growing up in Bush-era Amuhrica, I've grown used to thinking of war zones as places which inevitably have a lot of sand. Seeing a city which is clearly Western, with people who speak English as a first language and to whom I bear a striking physical resemblance (in general terms... I don't think I particularly look like an IRA operative) that has been so obviously influenced by a very violent not-at-all-distant past and present was very eye-opening to me. Devastating, senseless bloodshed knows no geographical bounds, I suppose. The tour was extremely worth the money, and gives you the opportunity to see parts of Belfast that you wouldn't really be able to see otherwise. It's a must for anyone looking to broaden their conception of the world and become more aware of the devastating things that people do to each other, and not only people in distant parts of the world.

It was also very strange to go to certain places and be hyper-aware of the fact that, conceivably, my religion and religious background could get me in really big trouble. I never felt at all unsafe, but the simple possibility that there might be people around who might want to hurt me because of a few differences in creed (and, of course, a lot of political and economic oppression) made me really think about what it must mean to live in constant fear for your safety and the safety of those you love because of something as trivial (and, frustratingly, as all-important) as whether or not the Pope can make mistakes. He can. I've heard him. Can we all be friends now?

I don't mean to trivialize the intense beliefs and convictions on both sides that lamentably brought about the Troubles. It just really brought the senselessness of war and the stupid reasons we trump up for killing each other home for me. It made me sad, but I think it also has made me more resolved to be as tolerant as I can for other people's differences. Except Rush Limbaugh. He can burn in the deepest pit of Hell.

Back in Dublin, where being a Catholic is sort of like being a homo sapien... we hung out and watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Sometimes, that's what you need to do. Having Ryan and Teague in Ireland and getting to travel around with them, Corb and Krissy was truly a dream that I never thought would come true. It was a little odd to think that we're old enough to do that... it makes Real Life seem ominously close, but at the same time it's a memory-filled week that I'll never forget. So, thanks to everyone who made that adventure possible!

My sojurn in Ireland ended not long after Ryan, Teague and Krissy left for their respective homes (Krissy's being much closer than Ryan and Teague's. This is why study abroad is so nice sometimes). Corb and I hung out, I walked around Dublin by myself a bit, and we went out with some of Corb's Trinity/ND friends. I can totally see living in Dublin. It's really an incredible town and I wish I had more time to get to know it. Well, there's a whole life ahead for that, I guess. And I don't think Dublin would be conducive to the same mushy style that my writing exhibits when I talk about Rome, so it would probably be good for my range to spend more time there. There's my reason, and I'm sticking to it.

I'm making it a point to stay in places with Internet access now, so the blog should be getting updated fairly frequently. I've got plenty to document, from London to Copenhagen to Prague and all the places in between. Stay tuned!

More Tales of Big Adventure from the Land of the Little People

2010-01-21T05:12:00.000-08:00

So last time we discussed the merits of having a pseudo-local tour guide, Oprah solving your problems… or the unlikeliness of that happening, and bacon sandwiches as a diplomatic tactic. We also touched briefly on The Big Freeze and how infinitely amusing this label should be to anyone who has actually experienced the phenomenon more commonly referred to as winter, but also how, paradoxically, the snow that would only allow for, in Montana or Michigan, maybe waking up a few minutes earlier to wipe off the windshield of your car, makes the entirety of this island (including the intrepid Montanans, who might have been a little cocky) stop. Point blank. Well, now we’ve got another basically two weeks to cover in Ireland… and of course, this could get very long if I’m allowed to go off on a tangent. But honestly, the impressions that I got from this trip were so many and varied that the write-up is going to be tangential any way you slice it.

The house in Doolin was not actually in Doolin, but up on what is called The Burren, a huge slab of limestone upon which grow the most beautiful, unlikely flowers… but not in a foot of snow. The Burren was beautiful in the winter weather, and even more beautiful once the seemingly omni-present fog and freezing rain lifted after two days and Lo! there was the ocean, not two miles away. It’s one of those windswept sort of places where you can practically hear the wind whistling even when it’s still, and where, when it is windy, you’ve pretty much got no choice but to hunker down, because there just ain’t nowhere to hide. The house itself was luxurious by my current standards, which consider a shower in which shoes aren’t even necessary as a precaution to be some sort of unthinkable extravagance. It had beds with heating pads, a kitchen, a shower with no shoes necessary and (get ready for this) a microwave, a washer AND a dryer.

I know that those of you who are currently reading this blog in your kitchen (barefoot) making Easy Mac while you wait for your jeans to come out of the dryer won’t appreciate the epic-ness of this, but you must consider something: Europe is an incredibly high-tech place in certain areas, but, at least in Italy, a dryer is something that only the weak (the incredibly wealthy weak) possess and the strong scoff at. A microwave just takes up space on your counter, because you’re not eating anything microwavable, because they don’t sell that short of nonsense in Italy. The point is that these were two appliances that I had not seen in four months. The smell of clothes right out of the dryer is something that everyone should stop to appreciate whenever they come across it. There’s simply nothing like putting on something straight out of the dryer. Respect it. Love it.

Long story short, Doolin was an excellent place from which to explore the west of Ireland. It was nice to have a home base to go back to each night, from Galway, Limerick, the Cliffs of Mohr, Connemara, the Aran Islands… we certainly got a lot done! Go to Galway, if you ever get a chance. It’s a beautiful city, and there’s something there called a Galway Hooker that seemed particularly to pique my brother’s interests. But that’s also where the Clauddagh ring was ostensibly invented, and where there are allegedly a lot of black haired, blue eyed sirens who ask men to dance and then make them travel all over the world. Just get within a three hour radius of Galway and this reference will become clear. Go to the Cliffs of Mohr one, because they’re the freakin’ Cliffs of Mohr, and two, because that’s where they filmed The Cave for The Half Blood Prince. I know. I saw it. I freaked out and tried to get down there. I was restrained. Some people don’t want me to have any fun. Or to join the wizarding community to which I truly belong. Go to Limerick because there’s a really good place from which to watch the sunset, right along the Shannon. There’s a stone block to sit on and everything. Curious? Ask Scott the next time you see him. Go to Connemara because it’ll remind you a little of what the Montana Hi-Line might be like (this in reference to town size and the saltiness of certain local characters) if it were on the sea coast and in possession of any legitimate elevation.

And for Bob’s sake, go to the Aran Islands because I have simply never been to a more bewitchingly magical place in my whole life than Inis Mor. Part of the appeal for me was certainly the remoteness. Looking back on it now, when I’ve been out of Ireland and traveling for about two weeks, it appeals to me even more because I’ve been mostly in cities (this was true when I was in Italy, too), and I’m a girl who grew up under the Big Sky (proper noun), and so am, if not distrustful of big cities, then at least more cautious in them than I am when in small towns. There are just different sets of behavior for each of these places, and I was so happy to just walk around and feel the cold air on my face and look out over spectacular vistas and climb treacherous paths to beautiful things… it felt almost like being back in Montana. Except with ocean. And Dara.

Dara Molloy (yes, another maybe-relative) is a small, neat man, probably in his middle-50s, with a very well-kept white beard and a tam. He carries himself as if he is much taller than he is, looks you straight in the eye when talking to you, and seems to radiate this sense of purpose and serenity that is instantly attractive. It makes you notice him. Or it made me notice him. He was dressed in woolens the day that we met him, and looked very much the weathered islander… until, upon offering to take us on a tour of his adopted homeland (he’s originally from Dublin), he whipped out an iPhone and began speaking in rapid Gaelic to his favorite bus driver, Oliver. I don’t know what caught me more by surprise: the fact that this character out of The Playboy of the Western World should have an iPhone when I do not, or that he spoke Irish so rapidly, so nonchalantly, as if it were nothing at all. Not some huge revelation or great endeavor to safe a dying language, but just business as usual. I was immediately enchanted by the sensory overload that the smells, the sights and the sounds of this little island, and I think I had a goofy grin on my face as I gazed rapturously from one beautiful, historical, cultural site to another all day.

On an island that is 11 miles long and about three miles wide (I think… don’t quote me) at its widest, it is absolutely astounding how many of these historical and cultural sites exist. Beautiful doesn’t even begin to cover the isolation, the desolate limestone criss-crossed everywhere by stone walls, some without gates, which separate one man’s property from another’s, that comprise Inis Mor. For some reason, after days and days of, if not outright cruel, then at least very cloudy weather, the sun burst forth upon the limestone (it’s said geologically that Inis Mor and the other islands were once connected to the Burren), making it hard to look at it, and you could see for what seemed like ever from Dun Aengus, the crowning archaeological glory of the little place, which Dara told us about with professorial while at the same time encouraging us to hang over the ledge (a 300 foot drop) to take pictures. Oops. Sorry, Mom.

We ate lunch at a little café with Dara. We all had Guinness stew, which, after a morning of very cold ferry rides and windy cliff-tops was a very welcome warming sensation indeed. Dara knew everyone in the café and everyone knew him, and they were all speaking Irish to each other. It’s amazing how used you can get, in a little under two weeks, to being in a country where you understand everything again, and so hearing a different language spoken all around you is once again a weird sensation.

When he was speaking English, Dara proved to be a wonderful conversationalist. He’s a fascinating man with an amazing life story (for more on which I’ll direct you to his book, The Globalization of God). Suffice it to say that he retains enough of his ecclesiastical demeanor, even after leaving the priesthood and beginning a family, to make you really want to talk to him. And the encouraging thing is, it felt like he was really listening to what you had to say and recognizing the value in it. Sometimes, with people you’re only just meeting, and especially when you’re much younger than they are, conversation can seem more like the recitation of resumes in order to impress, but Dara gave the impression of really listening with the expectation of getting to know you. It’s no wonder that he works with young people.

I could rhapsodize for another four pages about Inis Mor and Dara and how desperately I want to go back, and the immediate plans to appeal to K to let me do my SIP there… but I’ll shut up. If you really need to hear more about this particular subject, it’ll probably be enough to just say the words Aran Islands when I next see you, and then sit back and enjoy the show.

We took final leave of Sean on Inis Mor, where he was planning to stay and talk more with Dara. I was jealous, but if my plan works the way I want it to, that won’t be the last time I see him. I think that I’m not out of line when I say that this trip was absolutely one of the most memorable of my life, and what made it so awesome were primarily the people that we met. A lot of those connections, including the ones with royalty, the ones that give me an excuse to write the word ‘chieftainess’ and the ones with magical islands with seals and cliffs and history, would not have happened without his willingness to get in touch with people. So, to Sean, from the bottom of my heart: thank you so much for the unforgettable connections. But onward.

Now Sean-less, the Johnson, and Teague and I (creepers on a family vacation) started southward, toward Cork. The entirety of Ireland is really more beautiful than you imagine when you’re sitting around thinking about it, mostly because it’s real. The vistas and the ruins and the sheep are all there, but they are tempered with gas stations and highways and people. And the people are awesome. We visited a town called Cobh, right outside of Cork, which was beautiful and from where the Corbett side of our family seems to have left Ireland on the boats. Well, the name Corbett was more present in the landscape than it had been in any other place we’d been, anyway.

There was one thing along our route which we were anxious to see, simply because it is what it is: the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle. I honestly don’t know why it’s such a big deal (since I still haven’t seen it), but for some reason you’re supposed to go kiss the Blarney Stone if you’re ever even in spitting distance of Ireland, so that’s what we were going to do.

Remember that Big Freeze we were mocking earlier? Well, we were thwarted once again by the Irish weather. The Big Freeze had, at that point (in our Montana opinion, anyway) dissipated beyond the point of legitimate threat. Well, that was not the case in Blarney. It rained, then froze, then rained and froze again before we got to the castle, and as we made our way across the increasingly treacherous parking lot, they closed the castle for fear of law suits. It was probably a good move, but disappointing nonetheless.

We did find Blarney Woolen Mills that day, and spent a few hours frolicking amongst the framed Irish Blessings and Waterford Crystal before heading to Kilkenny and a hostel to spend the night. This being a Sunday night, there wasn’t much open in the way of food. We had to resort to a little (read: kinda sketch) counter place called Uncle Sam’s, with a pizza place next to it. And here, a quite unexpected thing happened.

Some of our party ordered what was purported to be “Real Italian Pizza”. It even had the right names, like funghi and quatro stagione… but when it came, it looked like your average, not-terribly-good American pizza. Round, too much tomato sauce, too many toppings… I don’t know why, but it set me off. I couldn’t stop crying for a good forty minutes. I probably looked like a crazy person. It was probably tasty pizza, but the discrepancy between it and what I know to be possible brought about a wave of Rome-sickness that just about knocked me over. I basically took it easy for the rest of the night after that, grappling with what I’m sure will only become more persistent culture shock when I get properly back into one culture.

The next morning was an infinitely more successful culinary outing. If you’ve never heard of something called The Full Irish… well… here’s how I’ll explain it. Take the Atkins Diet and multiply by four. Add tea, a tomato boiled to within an inch of its life, and a ton of toast, and you’ve basically got the Full Irish. I loved the sausages, the rashers and the white pudding, but couldn’t get past the “blood” part in the blood pudding enough to enjoy it. The fried egg and baked beans further ensured that I am no longer protein deficient, even after four months of basically nothing but pasta.

This was the last day of Maribeth, Scott and Kealey’s trip. I honestly can’t thank my godparents enough for allowing me to hang out with them on this amazing, memorable adventure. I admit to a certain amount of loneliness and homesickness that crops up from time to time throughout this experience, but having them there was enough of a taste of home to make me forget that from time to time and totally immerse myself in the experience. Thanks for everything, godparents! Love ya! (And Kea, you’re an excellent bed partner and Glee DJ. Thanks!)

This is getting stupidly long again, so I’m going to keep you in suspense about the hi-jinks that the boys and I got up to after we were free of adult supervision and at liberty to roam where we pleased. Give me a few days… I’m getting way behind in this thing, mostly because I’m moving from place to place so fast right now, but I’ll try to update as soon as I can!

...Are Potatoes Roots?

2010-01-15T01:58:00.000-08:00

I'm a dispossessed Irish princess. But of course, you already knew I was royalty. It's pretty obvious.

This is just one of the many, many incredible things I had confirmed when I finally, after nearly 21 years of waiting, made it back to the land of my mother's fathers. Ireland. And Jaysus, was it an eventful three weeks.

I left Rome with a pit in my stomach, which then evaporated when I got to Florence, but then returned when I went back to Rome and realized that it was the last time I'd be back there until February. It's odd how attached you get. Anywho, after taking a header when rushing to get the Terravision shuttle to Ciampino and subsequently making friends with some Belgians and speaking French and English the entire VERY STRESSFUL bus ride when I didn't think I would make it to the plane on time, only to get there and find out that everything was being delayed because the Europeans are pansies and won't fly in little snow flurries. So, I didn't get to Dublin until about 2 in the morning. If you're ever in an Italian airport and they're threatening not to let you fly out until the next morning if you don't get off the ground by midnight and it's quarter 'til, make sure you're on a plane full of Irishmen. They're not shy about yelling if it gets the doors closed faster. What an adventure.

Got to Dublin, saw this guy walking along beside the taxi as it pulled up to the gates of Trinity College... pretty standard-looking Irish guy with a tam on, hands in his pockets... it was Ryan. The first thing that I noticed when I got to Ireland (besides the obvious point that people were once again speaking a language I understand, with much better accents than you generally find in Michigan or Montana, however) was that I looked like everyone else. This was an incredibly disorienting thing, after four months among the swarthy, slender Italians... I don't look like them, as much as I tried to pose. But I got to Dublin, and there are pasty, blue-eyed, dark-haired, big-boned people all over the place. It's no wonder I thought Ryan was just a random Irish creeper as he walked along next to the cab... we do look incredibly Irish.

It was so awesome to see Corbin and Ryan. It honestly didn't seem weird at all that we should be hanging out in Dublin. I know I've said it before, but that's been one of the strangest things about this whole Euro-adventure: I really do feel like it's not that big a deal that I'm here. Well, I oscilate between being abnormally, hyper-aware of where I am and the implications thereof, and living life with the nonchalance of one who really wants the whole world to be her oyster. The point is: it felt very natural to be there with them.

Maribeth, Scott and Kealey arrived the next day, and we all set out to explore Dublin. I cannot stress enough how beneficial it is to see a city for the first time with someone who really knows it. It may sound weird to say, but sometimes I think it's better not to do it the first time with a local/native, but someone who has recently moved there. Corbin knew all the cool local spots (MacTurcal's Pub, for instance, and a magical substance called Purple Rain...), but he was also aware of the fact that, with only a few days in a place, you kinda do need to do the tourist stuff. That's why it's tourist stuff, right? Because you're only there for a little while. My point is: Corbin was still excited enough about showing us around this city he's been discovering that he was full of information, but he knew enough about it to weed out the unnecessary, too. I feel like I was effective at doing this when people visited me in Rome, and seeing Corb in action makes me think it must be a study-abroad thing.

Dublin is so different from other cities in Europe. It feels a lot smaller than most, for one, and that's probably because it is. But it's also a completely different fusion of the old and the new than you find in cities like Rome, where the old is omni-present and totally its own thing, or like Paris, where the old has been given a spit-and-polish and made to look classy and completely up-to-date. Dublin wants you to know that it's been around for awhile, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. It's more matter-of-fact about its history, and focuses particularly on its Irish-ness. The most notable element of this is the bi-lingual signs. I don't speak a lick of Irish, but it was still fun to see the two different languages on basically every sign. It's an encouraging sign that, even in our increasingly globalized world, we're not forgetting the importance of preserving our heritages.

It was wonderful to spend Christmas with the Johnsons. I was sad that my family couldn't be there, but honestly, Maribeth and Scott have been like other parents to me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I don't remember a time when Ryan and Corbin and Kealey weren't like other siblings that I fought with less. So, if I couldn't have my own parents and siblings come for Christmas, I couldn't have asked for anything closer. We spent Christmas in a little cottage south of Dublin, near a town called Wicklow. It was fun, once we got it warmed up, and we went hiking on Christmas Day in the Wicklow Mountains. While we were up there, it started snowing. Now, for a girl who has spent pretty respectable portions of her life wishing she lived in Narnia and went to school at Hogwarts, the aesthetic was nothing short of perfect. The consequence that we were all soaking wet at the end of the day (eastern Irish snow has little staying power, and tends to turn into slush mid-air. The west is a different story). Corbin knew a lot about the area, and we got to visit an old monastic city that has been preserved. It was so cool to see this reminder of all the things that have gone on on this tiny little island.

The Irish are big on heritage. That's awesome, because post-colonialist diaspora is alive and well all over the world, and I, though from an extremely well-assimilated family who are American, have had my moments of really wanting a solid grounding in where we come from, more than just the hazy idea of Ireland.

Well, all the grounding I could ever want was brought home with all the force of a frying pan full of rashers to the face on basically one day. My cousin, Sean, who is the oldest of our generation of the Molloy family, has some pretty incredible contacts that we got to take full advantage of while in Ireland. Remember what I said about that princess thing? Well, there's a castle in Birr, which is in County Offaly, which is basically in the middle of Ireland. This is O'Molloy Country. It's also, problematically, O'Carroll country. Apparently the two clans were cousins, and, being family, decided that there was no better way to spend the time before the invention of Scrabble than to feud. And not the kind with Al from Home Improvement, either. Apparently, this is the kind that gets so destructive that the English can just get right on in there and steal your castle. The thieves (not really... it's just selective memory. They're wonderful people) in question are the Earls of Roth, and yes, that's Earl, like royalty. Not Earl like My Name Is.

We (including by this point Sean, who flew in from China, and Teague, my barely younger brother) stayed a night in the Bothy, which is apparently Irish for enchanted cottage in the middle of a ridiculous woodland park. The next morning we walked up to the castle through this beautiful park, and all the while I oscilated between noting good, defensive points for when we put the castle under seige and drive the intruders of 400 years out and composing my letter to Oprah, appealing to her love of helping homeless people get their homes back... or something to that effect. Dear Oprah, I'm an upper-middle-class, liberal-arts-educated white girl with an extremely supportive family and a Golden Retriever. Can you help me get my family's castle back from the people who have owned it for almost four centuries? ... yeah. That'd go over really well.

And the thing is, we didn't end up needing to storm the castle by force. The Earl and Countess (!) let us right in, gave us tea and the grand tour of their home. This included (I shit you not) three different secret passageways, a portrait of Anne Boleyn (they're related. Distantly, but still...) and a letter from a guy named Phelam Molloy (that's an ancestor, folks) dated 1645 or some ridiculous date. It all didn't seem quite real, even while the Earl was leading us around and showing us, white-gloved, this incredibly old parchment with my middle name written on it in this incredible old calligraphy. They were really the most wonderful people, and I can't begin to express how much that experience meant to me.

But Sean hadn't finished digging up the family tree yet. Not even close. We next made our way to Tullamore, which is the home, for you whiskey fans, of something called Tullamore Dew. I, who had never tried whiskey before this day, was fairly ambivalent about the whole thing. But I have to say that it was cool that a Molloy was the original owner of the distillery, and that I now know how both Guinness and Tullamore Dew whiskey are made. It makes me feel cool. What did not make me feel cool about this visit was the tasting at the end. Though the woman who gave us the tour was originally from Michigan and her neice is the student body president at Teague's school (the little dolls from that horrible Disney attraction seem to be following me around, singing their horrible song at every opportunity), the drinks she gave us made me gag. That's because all of them were whiskey, and despite my hard-bitten, lusty Irish lass exterior, I am a total weenie when it comes to whiskey. I'm glad that I tried it that day, and I'm fairly certain it was a once in a lifetime thing in more than one way.

We continued on, stopping a little while later at the house of, get ready for this, our clan cheiftainess. Yeah. We have a cheiftainess. Her name is Frances. And she gave us bacon sandwiches and tea, forever endearing her to me. It was incredibly surreal to be sitting here in this woman's, who I don't know from Eve, house, and her telling me that I look like a Molloy. Like, there's just nothing cooler than that. She announced to her daughter, when she called, that there were eight of her cousins from Montana there at the house. Hahaha... I love how far-reaching family can go, when you have the right mindset. Frances's mindset certainly made me want to get to know her better, and hopefully return the hospitality she showed us (bacon!) when she can make it to Montana.

This all happened in one day. You must remember that. We basically went on a whirlwind tour of our family origins in the space of about 15 hours. If I had any diasporic inclinations before this trip, they've certainly been quieted now. That night was the beginning of what the Irish call "The Big Freeze", which those of you who have ever experienced a Montana or a Michigan winter will find very funny. There was quite a bit of snow on the mountain passes, and I use both the words "mountain" and "snow" ironically, but the irony was lost on the tires of both our vehicles. Apparently gravity and what the Irish call snow tires do not mix, so we took the long way round (after about an hour of fruitless pushing... thanks, Volvo) to Doolin, where our home was to be for basically the rest of the stay.

Since this post is getting extremely long, I will stop there for now. Stay tuned for tales of Doolin, Galway, Lisdoonvarna, Kilkenny, more Dublin and Belfast, as well as later stories about London, Stockholm, Oslo and the other crazy places I'm currently exploring!

I'm Falling in Love with Il Magnifico

2010-01-03T14:05:00.000-08:00

Florence is the center of the world. Perhaps, geographically, this pronouncement is a little suspect, but art historically, at least in the Western tradition, it is the Gospel truth. It's been about a month since I was there, and I've been galivanting around Ireland with my family since (more on that later), but the experience was a pilgrimage not soon to be forgotten.

I made it to Florence from Rome in the middle of the day on Saturday, after a morning of frantically cleaning the apartment with Kelcie after our slovenly roommates left, leaving a fridge full of rotting food and full garbage cans in their wake. So, good riddance to them... I'm never going to see them again, so I don't feel bad for saying that the experience of living with them was one I am glad is over. But that's beside the point. I got to Florence, found my hostel after a little walking up and down the same street over and over before finally noticing the sign, and set out to explore the city in the late afternoon.

Ever had one of those moments where you know, categorically, that you've never been somewhere, and yet you know exactly where you're going? I guess, in this case, it's not a spooky reincarnation thing so much as a "I've basically studied this city exclusively for the last three years of my life... lots of maps involved in that" thing. But it was still a little unnerving to have the layout of a place so firmly lodged in my brain, while the on-the-ground scene was totally new.

Walking around, I was shocked by how close together everything is. Yes, that's what you hear about Florence all the time, but they also say that Rome is a very walkable city, which it is, but my hostel was literally a street away from San Lorenzo, which is a street away from the Duomo, which is only about 5 minutes from the Palazzo Vecchio, which in turn is only a hop, skip and a jump away from the Ponte Vecchio and the River Arno. You could hold your breath and walk from one famous, world-alteringly influential building/sculpture/site to another one and not even get woozy. I tried. Involuntarily, of course, because when I am confronted with things like that... which is basically the whole city of Florence, I tend to stop breathing.

I could go on rapturously about how much I loved Florence and how cool it was to see everything I've been looking at continuously for three years, but I won't. It was a lot more matter-of-fact than that. It wasn't like the first couple days in Rome, when I was wandering around, lost as the writing staff of Lost, and things like the Pantheon would just pop out at me from nowhere. The element of surprise was missing in Florence, because I know how everything in that city fits together, and where all of it is in relation to the surrounding areas.

And that was very exciting in its own right, actually. Because who doesn't like to realize that they actually do, when they're education is put into practice, know something? Sure, my education often seems sort of limited to the confines of once city, but I'm secure in that, too. Because the one city my education has equipped me very well to know things about and be able to share that knowledge is not Cut Bank, Montana. Nothing wrong with Cut Bank, you understand, but if I only knew stuff about Cut Bank, I would know decidedly less.

Florence is the cradle of the modern Western artistic aesthetic. It's the reason why a lot of Western people look at a very skillfully rendered Chinese silk-screen and not be as impressed as they are by Leonardo's Last Supper, because of the lack of Brunelleschian perspective. Sure, you can make the argument that it was the Greeks during the Golden Age of Athens who really developed the perception of conventional beauty that is still widely acknowledged, but it was the citizens of Florence (the Ninja Turtles in particular) who solidified the representational, perspectival ideal into a subconcious way of seeing that influences the way we judge all art, right up until today. They messed with our collective mind so effectively that we don't even realize, when looking at art, that we're being messed with.

And when you're walking around Florence, contemplating how this tiny little city changed the entire world, and probably gave rise to your discipline of study, you can't help but ask who is responsible. I am prone to put the blame to the Arno, since basically all of the influential players in the Renaissance (politically, literarily and artistically) came from Florence. There has to be something in the water. Galileo, Machiavelli, Dante, Donatello, Giotto, Brunneleschi, Michelangelo, Alberti, Leonardo... all of these guys were hanging out in Florence.

But if you look deeper... or maybe just more pragmatically, it's pretty clear that the Arno isn't to blame here. It's pretty, yeah. But not sentient, as far as I'm aware. There was just a very welcoming environment for innovation in Florence that allowed all these men, over the course of some years, to become what we remember them as: geniuses who changed the way we see the world. There was a particular burst of creativity and innovation at one point toward the end of the 15th century, and the blame for what we now know as the Renaissance can fall squarely on the shoulders of one man: Lorenzo "Il Magnifico" of the Medici.

With a nickname like "The Magnificent", you know this guy had to be good. He patronized Leonardo and his family fostered Michelangelo from childhood. He promoted humanism and scientific inquiry during a time when a lot of people were still rubbing bird poop into their skin to get rid of acne. He believed in the power of the human mind and free thought. He decided that it was good to be feared, great to be loved, and pretty awesome to be both. He's "The Prince".

The Florentines, up to this day, really enjoy Il Magnifico, but discreetly. He is, after all, the one who made them FLORENCE and basically invented their tourist industry. There are statues of him in a few select, highly prestigious places, but for the most part, he's part of the ether. The fact that Florentine is the language that was adopted as official upon the unification of Italy, the fact that they own more than 50% of the world's recognized artworks, and the fact that people like me will pay lots of moola to go to the Uffizi and bask in the glory of Bottecelli, del Sarto, Leonardo et al. make him the reason that Florence achieved the vaunted status it has.

So the next time you're giggling at a Dress-Me-Up-David magnet or staring at the stars with the surety that they are, in fact, stars and not fireflies stuck up in that big bluish-black thing or describing some exacting professor as being Machiavellian... thank Lorenzo. He's the man.

The End/Beginning

2009-12-09T02:40:00.000-08:00

I am currently sitting in my apartment, with a pit in my stomach as big as the cliche about having a pit in your stomach.

Our very annoying collection of all the wine and booze bottles accumulated throughout the semester is gone, leaving the kitchen table looking naked and forlorn (and yet the dishes are STILL not done... hmm). My backpack and the suitcase I'm leaving here in Rome are mostly packed, due to my neurotic obsession with preparedness that leaves me without clothes for sometimes weeks, but this time only a few days, and they're sitting in my room, which is now devoid of any personal touches it might have accumulated during our time here. I finished my last final this morning, walked out of the garden at AUR and down the stairs to my house. It's a beautiful, sunny, sky-blue day, and Rome is no longer my home.

They call Rome 'The Eternal City'. While some places have names that are complete non-sequiteurs (read: The Big Apple, The Garden State, The Big Easy (ask FEMA about this last one)), Rome's is completely, 100% accurate. Not only has it been here forever, but it feels like it's going to be here for longer than that. Once you're here, you feel like you've always been. Once you start living your life surrounded by all the history of the world incorporated matter-of-factly into your everyday life, you start to feel as though nothing ever ends. Nothing really ever does. At least here.

Yes, I know that sounds a little melodramatic, but it hit me with all the force of the buses that I've gotten so adept at avoiding while J-walking... I don't live here anymore. Yeah, we have two days left until we're kicked out of our house, but those two days are going to be filled with cleaning, goodbyes, packing, goodbyes, and finally, leaving for real.

There's still a weird veil between me and realizing that I'm leaving and, after this European jaunt of mine is over, I don't have a clear idea of when I'll be back. I've become so completely at home here that most days it doesn't even cross my mind that it's only been a temporary thing. And yes, there have been some very annoying, even negative things about being here, but those things have just served as normalizing factors making life seem completely natural and ordinary. I had no idea at the beginning of this adventure that I would fall so hard and fast for this city, but it's taken me even more by surprise that, even after the honeymoon decisively ended, I'm still in love. And it's hard to have a long-distance relationship with a city.

My thoughts right now are all over the place, but I want to write some of them down, so we're going with list form:

Why I Love Rome:

*My inability to explain why I love Rome. I just literally sat here for five minutes thinking about how to start this list. I think the fact that I can't quantify the reasons should just be an indication of how important this city has become for me, and how very integrated into it I feel. It's an aura more than any number of things that I enjoy. Rome's personality and mine just match really well, I think. I'm a big-picture person who sees the big picture in the details.

It's a little counter-intuitive, maybe, but looking at the color blue in the Virgin's robe in a Venetian versus a Florentine painting will tell you entire volumes about trade and commerce in the Italian city-states during the Renaissance. The shift of a villa from the center of the property to one end smacks of the uncertainty and imbalance brought about by the Reformation and the Sack of Rome that changed the Renaissance into the Baroque. The palle in the Medici coat of arms run through the political unrest of Florence in the 1490s and all the way back to the saints Cosimo and Damian who the family claimed as their ancestors and who gave legitimacy to the power of Il Magnifico, who basically made the Renaissance possible. The little things are the big things.

Rome is like that, too. Everything means something else. The Palazzo Venezia built by the Venetian ambassador in the mid-1400s has a balcony from which Mussolini appeared to the people of Italy, and it now hold the art history branch of the Italian National Library. The ridiculously busy bus stop that is a hub for basically anywhere else in Centro is also the Flavian Amphitheatre... that's the Colosseum for the uninitiated. The beautiful little church where I've taken every visitor I've had here to see the spectacular view of my city is also the place where St. Peter was ostensibly crucified and sits at the top of the steep, winding stairs that lead down to my street. Everything is something else, but it's all connected into this living, breathing city that is still, even after all these centuries of shift and calamity and restored peace, the center of the world. At least as far as I'm concerned.

I wrote before I left Montana that I'd never encountered a place that could make you feel so small and yet so important at the same time. Now, I have. Having grown up in my beloved home state is probably the reason I feel such an affinity for this place. It's not necessarilly big in the same wonderful, natural gradiosity that I grew up with, but big things have happened here, big things that made the world. It's hard not to be surrounded by the achievements of all the singular men and women who changed the world over and over, for good or for ill, and not think that, no matter how big the world is, it's small groups and single people who change it. It's hard not to feel like great things are possible. That's particularly empowering when you're 20 years old and trying to figure out where you're going to take your life.

I love Rome because of the things that have happened here that infest the place like a constant fog of larger meaning. In every corner of town, there's been some decision made and acted upon that rocked the world, for entire populations or for only a few, but that sense of purpose remains the same. I love Rome because being here makes me feel like my aspirations and goals are entirely possible, because they're much more modest than the incredible things that have been done in the world before I showed up. I love Rome because it is Rome and I am me, and we understand each other perfectly.

Things I'm Going To Miss:

*Pizza: It's just pizza, right? I mean, of course, it's not even comprable to the fried bread and two pounds of cheese we eat back in the States, and I'm going to be in Italy again before I leave the Continent for good, so it shouldn't be that big a deal to not have regular access to pizza. Well, since pizza is basically the go-to takeout food around here, it's become rather a staple of my week to bop over to Simone's after my early class lets out at noon and get some funghi e mozzarella. It's just like going to the caf for lunch, except way more delicious and I'm allowed to take food out of the store without being chased by Eyebrows. And yes, I can get pizza that's good other places in Europe, and even some in the States, but Roman pizza is a completely unique thing that is a lot more suited to my tastes than the heavy stuff we eat in the States or the paper-thin, charred nonsense that the Neopolitans claim is the real deal. I'm like the Goldilocks of pizza, and my two places in Rome have gotten it just right.

*Water Fountains: The novelty wore off after a little while, and they became situation normal. I'm trying to forsee how problematic it's going to be for me when I go to places where they make you pay for water. It's not going to be pretty. I might die of dehydration.

*ATAC: The public transit system in Rome. So easy, so omnipresent, so necessary to my life. I've become a huge believer that public transit can be effective and easy, and it can be convenient. We don't all have to be martyrs for the green cause... if every city had a slick system like Rome's, we'd ride the buses and trams completely selfishly without even a thought for the good of the planet. But that's a plus, too.

*The sky: I'm from Big Sky Country. Michigan is hard for me in this respect. You can't see a whole lot of the sky through the trees, and it feels clausterphobic a lot of the time. Also, for a large portion of the year that I spend there, it's grey. And cloudy. Rome has this incredible blue blue sky and the lay of the land reminds me a lot of Missoula or Helena or one of the other more picture-esque towns in Montana. That's been really comforting when I've been homesick. And now, I'm headed north, where it seems that there is no big, open bright blue sky, and so the fact that I'm leaving Rome for a sojurn in a place with a sky much like Michigan's, only to go back to the States and the wonderful sky of Montana seems eerily full-circle.

...I've spent a long time writing this post. And this encompasses only a small, small part of what my experiences here have meant to me. For more, I obviously refer you back to the rest of this blog, or you could just wait til I see you again and bore you silly with the details. It's your decision.

I'm off to Florence in literally a few hours. Remember those posts at the beginning of this blog, where I gush like a thirteen year old at a JoBros concert? Lather, Rinse, Repeat. It is literally going to be a shambles. I'm happy that I get to experience it the first time on my own, because I think any friendship that I had with any travelling companion would be ruined as they desperately tried to escape my dramatic hyperventilating. Much better that no one sees this.

Internets, as many of you are well aware, don't grow on trees. This meaning that my posts might be fewer and further between on this next part of my adventure, but keep checking! I promise I will update as often as is humanly possible, for my own sake more than for yours, but you can pretend you're really that interested if the mood strikes.

Thank you, Rome, for everything you've taught me. I don't know precisely when I'm coming back, but you haven't seen the last of me. So... until next time... ci vediamo!

La Bella Figura

2009-12-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

Perhaps this is a foreign concept to you, perhaps it's not. 'La Bella Figura' is one of the most interesting facets of Italian culture that I've witnessed and yes, also attempted to adopt into my own life. It's really presented me with an interesting conundrum, but not a new one. Women for millenia have struggled with the same question, from the first woman who decided that wearing mastadon fir could be a fashion statement as well as a survival essential to those idiots in Victorian England who squished their organs into porridge trying to cut themselves in half with corsets to basically the entire state of California and the resulting thriving plastic surgery industry. The question: are looks really that important?

The answer: DUH! Seriously, in our society, one of the only ways women manage to make a blip on what is taught as history is through fashion. But this is not the place to get into that, so I won't. The point is: of COURSE looks are important. We'd all dress like Midwesterners if they weren't. Just kidding, Michigan!

For the Italians, though, appearances aren't just important. No, they're essential. To keep them up is basically the reason we exist. Now, that might be hyperbolizing just a tad, but think about it. What do you immediately think of when you think of Italy? You think of art, certainly, right? Is there anything more beautiful or pleasant to look at than a good piece of art? Right. There's not. And the Italians have been raised on this stuff. There's beautiful art literally sitting in the middle of piazzas here. You can close your eyes, spin around three times and walk in some random direction, and guaranteed, within ten steps you'll have hit something aesthetically pleasing and historically important. Trust me, I've tried this.

So the Italians have this desire to make basically everything as aesthetically pleasing as possible. It's in their blood. If they're serving you pig intestines (as they're wont to do in Rome, so you have to be careful), they're calling it trippa with their stupid, musical R sound that foreigners just can't do and serving it to you with such rustic elegance and simplicity that you'll forget what its function was just a few days ago. If you're walking through the supermercata pulling a jar of Nutella here, a box of pasta there, you can just bet that there's some girl who is dressed to the nines like no Meijer employee you've ever seen coming around after you and straightening the lines on the shelves again. People make a big show of interacting with everyone else with a confidence that often comes off as downright bitchy. The thing is, though: the Italians treat everyday life as though it were an opera. Emotions are meant to be felt strongly and articulated with the complete confidence that one is in the right. Think Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird mixed with the most enthusiastic orchestra conductor you've ever seen. That's basically la bella figura.

Conclusion: it's an attitude much more than it's a tangible style. Though that's certainly part of it. The Italians aren't as palpably judgy as I hear the French are on this subject (I made sure to bring only my trendy Euro-clothes with me to Paris, so as to avoid that sniff of disapproval), I think they take it more as a matter of course that you're going to want to look your best to take out the garbage or run to the store. They give you the benefit of the doubt, which means, of course, that if you don't, you're going to just look really dumb next to everyone else who DID make the effort this morning. Way to go, you silly americana.

Here's how la bella figura functions in everyday life, at least for me: you wake up, wash your face and brush the teeth, put on enough make-up to make yourself look put-together and, well, made-up, run your fingers through the wild tangle of curls that I had the remarkable foresight to procure before coming here, without even knowing how in moda that was, put on your clothes, which are, of course, colorful or accented by some interesting jewelry or pashmina, apply chap-stick to make your lips look softer and shinier without being too obvious that you thought about making your lips look softer and shinier, put some girl-power music on the iPod and walk out of your apartment like you own the world. That was a long sentence. It takes a lot less time in real life, since you get used to it pretty darn quick.

Fashion is very important in Italy. Maybe you've heard of Gucci, Dolce & Gabanna, Fendi... but most people aren't walking around looking like those ridiculous runway models. Nope. They're walking around looking ridiculous without any help from the runways, since for the Italians, style often means looking like you got dressed in the dark. At least color-wise. This is a phenomenon in which the Italians wear these really odd color combos (like... mustard and terra cotta orange and navy) and still manage to rock it. If I tried this, I'd be laughed off the continent. If they're not playing color-roulette, the Italians are wearing violet/plum, which, in case you're one of those poor souls who doesn't live in continental Europe (sarcasm here), is The Color. It's everywhere. Try to find a store that doesn't have an entire purple section. You can't. Which is nice, since I like the color, and it's an easy way to look like you know what you're doing.

Americans would tend to think, with all this emphasis on how you present yourself, that there would be a huge consumer culture here. Well, if there is, it's the tourists who are doing all the consuming. Romans (I don't know if I can speak for the rest of Italia, since the country is so localized in culture, but I think this is pretty much the same everywhere) do not spend a lot of money on clothing. They buy a few really basic, good-quality items and then supplement their wardrobes with trendy pieces that make them look completely with it.

The concept of 'shopping' as we understand it doesn't exist here, unless you're in the UCB right by the Trevi fountain... which is, I venture a guess, more like being in a mall in Novi on Black Friday than in Rome. This is because the Italians go into stores knowing what they need to be in style. They buy that thing. And they leave. There's not a whole lot of dithering about if it's useful or will I wear it or all the other nonsense that's part of shopping culture in the States, because they know it's going to be useful, and of course they're going to wear it... that's why they're buying it.

Is this a healthy way to look at things? That's an extremely complicated question. On the one hand, it's nice that the Italians aren't so hung up on consuming for the sake of consumption. Their take on fashion is more measured, less hysterical and fetishized, than it's become in the States. On the other hand, the reason it's more measured and deliberate is because there's basically only one style, with little variation, to which everyone conforms. On the street, no one looks exactly the same, but you'll begin to notice a pattern as to what constitutes la moda.

Basically, you conform or... that's really it. You conform. There's not a whole lot of variety, and people know what they want to buy only because they buy what they need to look like everyone else. Now, on the whole, they come off as pretty wacky-looking if you're not used to the colors and the big hair and the bigger attitude, but it's all the same kind of wacky. Is this a problem? Really, it depends on what your biggest hang-up is. Is individuality more important than responsible consumerism? Or is it more important to guard against becoming one of those horrible mall-girl cliches maxing out Daddy's credit card than to guard against becoming an unthinking fashion sheep in a purple puffy coat. That's hyperbolizing a bit, but you get my point.

I don't actually mind either way, since me trying to fit in here is like trying to teach cats to walk in a parade; it's ineffectual and dumb. I'm an americana, and in spite of my big hair and newly developed strut, I still look like a foreigner. I might not look like an AMERICAN, precisely, but I think I've become some sort of weird amalgamation of Montanan functionality (my horribly ugly tire-shoes) and Italian flair (that look-at-me-aren't-I-fabulous walk that still makes me laugh at myself every time I catch me doing it), with a little bit of Michigan college-girl and wannabe fashionable person thrown in for good measure. It's weird. It confused the hell out of the French. I've definitely noticed it as it's developed. And I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not.

La bella figura is incredibly interesting. It's incredibly problematic from a feminist perspective. It's incredibly hard to explain if you haven't experienced it for yourself. And it's also incredibly necessary for living here. I didn't come to Italy fooling myself that any person anywhere would mistake me for Italian, and nevertheless I'm sure I'm going to go home with some wacky colored clothing that will be totally out of place in the States, hair like I stuck my tongue in an electrical socket, too much makeup for a college girl, and a walk that might be appropriate for some girl on America's Next Top Model who doesn't make the top 25. Thanks, la bella figura. Thanks a lot.

A Pseudo-Italian American Who the French Think Is Irish In Paris

2009-11-24T04:29:00.000-08:00

There have been writers throughout the ages who can describe Paris a lot better than I can. Indeed, many of those who I'm thinking of loved the city so much that they were buried there, such is the allure of the place. There's a magic kind of energy in the air that immediately brings to mind the elegance, the grandeur and the creative vibes that have made the city a hot-spot for the great and the stylish since God was a boy. These great and stylish legends whose names will always be linked with the City of Lights could give the city its due much more articulately than I will be able to, but here it goes anyway.

We, meaning Christine, Casey, Michelle and I, went to Paris for the weekend. We needed a break from Rome (shock!) and the schoolwork that being here implies right now, and where better place to take a break than the city that invented joie de vivre? We could think of nowhere.

Christine and I left from Ciampino very early Thursday morning, and man oh man, what a way to start the trip. I was packed and ready the night before, with my clothes laid out fireman-style on the off chance that my traveling neurosis would fall through and I would actually get a wink of sleep. Well... you shouldn't tempt fate. I awoke to my phone ringing at 4.15 am... I was supposed to wake up at 4. Now, 15 minutes might not seem like a big deal, but when you're me, and you have my luck with travel, every second is crucial. So I saw the time on my phone after I accidentally hung up on Christine the first time and shot out of bed with an adrenaline rush that pretty much lasted the rest of the weekend. When she called back I yelled into the phone in a shaky, panicky voice that my alarm hadn't gone off while at the same time trying to hook my bra and pull on my leggings... humans need more hands.

So I probably looked like a crazy person as I flew out of the apartment building, with my coat half on, socks hanging out of the pockets, hair like Albert Einstein on his worst day, my leggings basically around my knees and my eyes still bleary from sleep. I sprinted the two blocks to the bus stop (it was important that I get THE NEXT BUS because they only come about every half an hour until 5.30) waving my arms and screaming as I watched it leaving the stop. And then I did something very stupid. I ran out in front of the bus and stood there to make it stop. This could have ended very badly, as I'm sure you can imagine, in a city renowned for its favorite pass-time of pedestrian bowling. But the driver stopped, opened the door, and thoroughly cussed me out for about half the ride to Termini. I deserved it, but I also didn't care too much. About 15 minutes after I was awakened, therefore, I was at the train station. This has to be some kind of record. Could someone research that? Thanks.

And then, as I sprinted once again off the bus to get the OTHER bus to Ciampino (the last one until after our plane took off), I realized that I had neglected to find Christine. Well, we tried the phone thing, but apparently I don't even speak English that early in the morning, because she didn't seem to be understanding my directions. We ended up playing a rousing game of parking-lot Marco Polo, during which I spent about two minutes screaming CHRISTINE! CHRISTINE! at a very confused woman who was, in fact, not Christine, but just hoping to get her commute over with... but we eventually found each other, and did some more dramatic running to catch the bus. We caught it. We got the plane. All was right with the world. On to Paris!

Beauvais airport is around 70 km from Paris. This is not ideal. But I'll be damned if Ryanair isn't still the best thing in the world, so I was willing to make some sacrifices. We got another shuttle bus and spent the lovely hour and a half ride to Porte Maillot looking out the windows of the bus and discussing the differences we saw. Difference number one: no palm trees. Now, I know this might seem shocking to you North Americans, but palm trees don't only grow in Hawaii. They are a common (though transplanted) part of Italian scenery. Not so northern France. However... I don't think I like anything more than I like the fun balls of mistletoe hanging in the oak trees. So, you trade one novelty for another. Difference number two: not really a difference so much as a Maggie-Freaks-Out moment. We saw a Buffalo Grill on our way into Paris. This doesn't mean a damn thing to most of you, but that was the first meal I ever had in France. It's this horribly kitchy cowboy place where they serve you hamburgers sans buns and really awful fake ketchup while you're sitting on a wooden bench staring at a Charlie Russell print on the wall. Yup. A little taste of what the rest of the world thinks Montana is like. Oh what fun.

But we got to Port Maillot and walked basically the length of Paris, from behind the Arc de Triomphe (by La Defense) to our hostel, which was in the East Latin Quarter (past Ile de la Cite) in Rue Mouffetard. This, my friends, is a trek. And this assessment is coming from me, the girl who doesn't really use public transportation at all, preferring to rely on her feet. But we got to the hostel in the end, but not before I had to ask several people where we were going. You know what rocks? Being able to ask people where you're going. I had forgotten just how amazing it is to communicate in a language you both speak and understand. Thanks, Mom! I basically spent the weekend starting conversations with random, very confused strangers for the simple pleasure of speaking to them. So, the French think I'm insane now. Check.

(Also, since I was speaking with such confidence and more ability than I think they're used to expecting, they couldn't seem to figure me out. I think the French really like to pigeon-hole foreigners, and they just couldn't get me. I think Italy must have changed me more perceptibly than I realize, because they didn't once guess American. I guess I dress and carry myself more like a European now. I said 'ciao' to one guy, and he gave me a funny look and asked me in French where in Italy I was from. I said Rome. He seemed satisfied. Most of the others (and there were quite a few) who asked me where I was from guessed Ireland before I could answer. That was fun. I would like to think that my ethnic heritage is that evident. The Irish people I know are awesome. It was also nice that they couldn't peg me as being from the States right away. I'm proud to be an American, but there's something to be said for being a citizen of the world.)

The hostel was called (please try not to vomit...) Young & Happy. Yeah. Ick. But it looked nice enough for how cheap it was, and Rue Mouffetard is perhaps one of the coolest little streets I've ever seen. THAT is what the Latin Quarter is supposed to look like. Christine and I spent the rest of the day wandering around (Michelle and Casey weren't supposed to be in until late that night) from the Jardins des Plantes to Notre Dame to Place de la Concorde to the Eiffel Tower to watch the light show. Yeah. The Eiffel Tower has developed this charming little habit of turning into the Vegas strip every hour on the hour. It's not classy, but most of the tourists (excluding yours truly) seem to eat it up. By the end of this day we were both about ready to die from the sheer amount of walking I had put us through, and Christine was sort of walking like an old woman due to her hip joints randomly popping in and out. So we took the Metro back to the hostel.

I love the Metro. It's so easy to navigate and it always feels like such an accomplishment when you can successfully figure out a route from where you are to where you want to be... I really enjoy the problem-solvingness of the whole thing. Also, musicians ride up and down the lines with everything from the old standby, the accordion, to the more innovative traveling jazz band, complete with their own amp, which is transported by dolly. And not the kind that little girls are given as a tool of gender conditioning. Although that would probably be more interesting to move an amp with. I digress.

The hostel, despite its initial appearances, was actually kinda sketch. But hell, it was a hostel, not the Ritz Carlton. But there were some particuarly special little quirks that made the three nights we spent there a heck of a time.

1) Never underestimate the awesomeness of clean bathrooms. It's very hard to effectively execute "the hover" while at the same time trying not to touch anything that is not necessary, and never with your bare hands, and trying not to let any of your stuff touch anything lest you contract some strange strain of alcohol-resistant-obnoxiously-loud-venereal disease. I think this is actually a real thing. I can't fathom how else many North American hostel-using kids exist. They must have contracted this. Tell your friends. Spread the awareness. Knowledge is power.

2) Structural integrity makes the world go round. Our bunk beds in the dorm would not have made the cut in a more seismically active area. In fact, if you had particularly bad allergies, one good sneeze would probably have brought the whole thing down on top of you. This was problematic for me, since I tend to roll around alot in my sleep. I think Christine feared for her life down on the bottom bunk. So I spent the three nights lying stiffly on my back, trying not to twitch so as not to cause a gravity tragedy, letting my body touch only my sheet sleeping-bag and the coat I was using for a pillow. The best nights of sleep I've ever had? No. The worst? Probably not that either, but hey, I was in Paris. It couldn't ever be super SUPER horrible.

3) Roomies. Two of the three nights, our fifth room mate was a large, silent, hairy naked guy. He was in bed when we got there each night, shirtless and apparently preparing for a long winter of hibernation, judging from the amount of hair on his chest. We didn't exchange pleasantries either night. Here's the kicker: it was a DIFFERENT large, silent, hairy naked guy each night! It blew my mind! How many of these creatures can their be in Europe? I haven't seen any... but then again, the places I've been have mostly been in Italy and France, where the men come in the more svelt, stylish, possibly gay varietals. It was very jarring to see not one giant hairy dude, but two. The third night, it was a mysterious suitcase whose owner never showed up while we were there. But whoever she was (I say she, since the suitcase was bright pink... gender conditioning again!), she was apparently very concerned about waking up at 5.13 am, since that's when her alarm was set for. And it reminded her to get up every four minutes from then on. So, Michelle finally got up and turned the thing off. I was a proponent of spiking it on the floor and leaving it as a surprise for her when she showed up, but I was overruled.

Enough about the hostel, as lovely as it wasn't. We only slept there, so blah. The city was the real destination. Since this blog is getting obscenely long (no great surprise) I'll just go through and list. Maybe. You know me. It probably won't end up being that. But I'll go in chronological order starting on Friday morning and ending Sunday afternoon. Here it is:

1) Pere Lachaise: Bury me here. For real. I love cemeteries... I'm very creepy that way. We spent literally like, four hours here. I couldn't have been happier. Plus, I got to kiss Oscar Wilde. Life: complete. Request: Come on, baby, light my fire.

2) Sacre Coeur/Montmartre: It was really amazing to come back to this church that I remember as being so very unique, and having the tools to recognize why that is. Very, very gratifying. Also, can you get better than that view? Methinks not. Also, Nutella crepes. They're the thing that proves the existence of a higher power. Yummers.

3) The Louvre: Okay, so really, being me, this deserves it's own post. So this'll be longer. Sorry. Casey had the wonderful idea of going to the Louvre on a Friday night, when it's open from 6-10 and it's a reduced rate. Turns out, that reduced rate is FREE! Can you imagine how cool this was? I'm stingy, but I would pay any amount of money to hang out in the Louvre, and it turns out that I didn't have to pay ANY amount of money! Yay! Anyway, we decided to split up, since we all had different priorities. For me, this visit was a very strong full-circle experience. The Louvre is the reason I'll be living in a box for the rest of my life. So I was wandering around, looking at all the things that once struck me as miraculous and foreign and incomprehensible and greeting them as old friends with familiar stories and completely relateable personalities. What a difference four years can make. If there was ever any experience that made me think that my life and work for the last four years have been worth it, this visit was it. It's fun to know things. It's fun to realize why I love what I love. That's why I can never leave Europe, I guess. Oh well. :) But as wonderful as it was to walk around the incredibly un-crowded museum (example: I stood face to face to the Mona Lisa, making unobstructed eye contact for a full fifteen minutes before leaving of my own volition, instead of being pushed out of the way. This is a once-in-a-lifetime, at best.) there was something better. The Louvre does this program where, three of four Friday evenings, college kids studying in Paris come to the Louvre and present very basic information and research on a work of art. Best volunteer job ever? Yes. But the fun part was that I could have discussions with the presenters. Some of them were American kids, so I talked to them in English and bonded over being abroad and what that means, but most were French, and I could talk to them, too, and discuss what I thought of the art they were presenting. SO COOL! I loved being able to actually say things other than "I would like some pizza with mushrooms, please" and "My name is Maggie. I'm American. Can I please have some gelatto?". The best part was finding other people my age who think that art and the meaning it brings to humanity's history are as important as I do. The Louvre is still a magical, life-changing place. (It was also fun to meet up again with Michelle and Casey, who were both Louvre virgins. I remember that feeling really vividly.)

4) Dinner: I forgot about prix-fixe menus. We basically shut down the Louvre at ten and then returned to Rue Mouffetard, where we found this little restaurant with no discernable name and a menu for 15 euro. Two new culinary adventures and two nostalgic standbys: escargot and duck confit, and creme brulee and cidre. YUM! I heart French food. Like, legit. It's awesome. We shut them down, too, around 12.30, and went to bed with full tummies.

5) The d'Orsay: I love this museum. Always have, always will. I found some new favorites, too. "Eve After the Fall" by Eugene Delaplanche, "The Young St. John the Baptist" by Paul Dubois, and "The Disciples Peter and John Rushing to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection" (a mouthful, it's true) by Eugene Bernand. Look 'em up if you're curious.

6) The Eiffel Tower: We had to take Casey and Michelle. Funniest moment: watching the stampede of vendors running for the grass like so many crazed bison at the sight of a cop.

7) The Christmas Market on the Champs-Elysees: The City of Lights certainly does cash in on the fetishization of Christmas in Paris. Also, Nutella crepes again. Win.

8) L'Opera Garnier: Holy tacky gold embellishment, Batman! It's a beautiful Opera house... I just wouldn't recommend going inside if you're prone to seizures. The tour guide, Martine, tried to tell us that the Phantom is a myth. Ha! That's just what he wants you to think.

We did a ton of other stuff there, too, but these were some of the highlights. I forgot how much I loved Paris the first time I went, but I don't think I'll be likely to forget again. It has such a unique vibe, and I think, since I'm more acclimated to Rome now, and all the quirks of this city, I'm more in tune with those of other places. Cities are so, so individual. It's easy to forget that sometimes. I was happy to get to go back. It was an incredibly fun, but also very legitimizing experience. I can't wait to go back again! Hopefully there won't be such a long gap between this visit and the next one!

I Miei Genetori Sono Bravissimi

2009-11-16T06:18:00.001-08:00

Well, after a weekend of (allegedly) working my butt off on papers and research excursions to the Aventine, the Capitoline and Ostia Antica, and the rest of this week, which will doubtless be fraught with stress of varying shades and urgency, I'll be off to Paris for the weekend.

Let me say that again. I'm going to go to Paris for the weekend. That's one of those sentences that, if you're ever lucky enough to get to say it, you should take a close look as the reasons why you can. I am fully aware of the two main reasons I'm able to say it: their names are Kurt and Kathy Jackson.

I had another moment this morning, while standing in the Pantheon taking notes on centralized, domed structures of antiquity (find me a better place in the world to have this class, I dare you) when it hit me again. I've gotten used to the kind of suffocating joy that occasionally shows up when I take a mental step back from the mundane (hah!) of everyday life here and actually realize where I am and what I'm doing. It's at these moments when I realize how undeservedly, phenomenally lucky I am to have my parents.

For my entire life, which now borders on being 21 years long, my parents have basically done everything for me. They've provided me with every opportunity, every chance I could have possibly wanted and more. For my entire life in Great Falls, they not only sat through plays and awkward recitals in sweltering auditoriums, but they got more involved in my strange activities (judging for speech tournaments? ugh.) than I had any right to expect. They were constantly doing everything they could to keep me safe and happy and to give me a future and an education that they thought I deserved. They supported me and gave me everything, even when there wasn't a person on the planet who could have been less aware of how lucky she was.

And then they sent me to college. They didn't just send me to college, either. They drove me there. From Montana to Michigan. That drive sucks. And my dad has done it four times now. If that's not a testament to love, I can't think of one. Now that I've seen comparatively more of the world and have more experience with people my age and the concerns that they face, I realize that my chance to go to college is more of a gift than I will ever be able to deserve. College (mine in particular) is expensive. The economy is weak. There are two kids coming up behind me. And yet Kurt and Kath don't ever mention any of that.

In fact, as incredibly huge as the chance to matriculate at a school that literally seems to have been tailor-made for me is, they've given me still more: they've given me this chance to travel and experience new parts of the world. And every morning, when I wake up and head to class at the Vatican or the Roman Forum, and when I can plan to go to Paris for the weekend, I can't help but take a step back and marvel at the sheer generosity and love of which I'm the undeserving recipient.

I don't pretend to have been the easiest child to raise by any stretch of the imagination, and I know for a fact that I was often supremely, audaciously unaware of just how much they did for me, and are still doing for me. But right now I'm having a moment of clarity that compels me to thank them. I really like the person I am. I like the fact that I am able to deal with situations presented to me competently (a lot of the time...), the fact that I like to try new things, and the fact that I'm not intimidated by putting myself out there. I like my curiosity and my eagerness to learn. I like my work ethic, which is a lot less sporadic in real life than it manifests itself here. I like my sense of humor. I like my sense of right and wrong. And I know that I have my mom and dad to thank for all of these things I like about myself. I also know that these things have helped me get to where I am, will help me get to where I want to go, and most especially are helping me right now deal with the curve balls that life in a foreign country will throw at you.

I'm going to go to Paris this weekend, and I'll joyfully return to speaking a language that's always been such a constant part of my life. I try to emulate my mom's passion for French and transfer the joy she gets from speaking that language into my own academic pursuits. I try to remember her enthusiasm and interest in people as people in my daily interactions. I hope that someday I'll have the courage that she does to put herself out there and really try to make a difference, even in the face of indifference, which is often a more disconcerting enemy than outright antagonism.

My dad is going to celebrate his birthday while I'm in Paris. I feel like the only way I'll ever be able to express how much his constant, unerring dedication and commitment to giving me, as well as my brother and sister, the best of everything have meant to me is by applying those principles of dedication and commitment to my studies and my life, which he has worked so hard to provide for me. His love of learning and his intimidating knowledge of basically everything make me want to work harder so that I can make him as proud of me as I am of him. I can't express how much I appreciate everything you've done for me, Dad. Happy Birthday!

I'm a lucky person in so many ways. I'm sure this fact hasn't escaped you, as I recount my adventures, and I'm sure it'll be made clear to me once again with all the force of a frying pan to the face when I'm reunited with Mona Lisa on Saturday. And I really just want to acknowledge where all my opportunities have come from, and to thank my parents so much for my life. It's pretty damn awesome.

Visiting French Dignitaries and the Mob

2009-11-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

Two very random and unconnected topics, you say? Not really. I'll tell you what they have in common: Fall Break. I'll warn you right off the bat that this post is probably going to be one of those obnoxiously long ones that are not entertaining to anyone but me... but if you're trying to procrastinate from homework or are just flat out wasting your employer's time and money by not doing your job... glad I could help.

Fall Break is one of those intriguing mysteries that usually does not reveal itself to those students whose matriculating institution runs on the awesomeness that is commonly referred to as the quarter system. Going from a school that runs on ten-week terms to a school that runs on semesters is surely taking some getting used to, but after a grueling week of midterms, the week off was exactly what I needed.

Have you ever had one of those experiences where the life you're living is so far removed from what it normally is that you feel as though the two couldn't possibly be connected? This happens to me a lot, considering the geographical distance between the place where I grew up and the place where my life and most of my friends are back in the States... there's very little overlap between Montana and Michigan. There's even less overlap between Michigan and Italy, at least culturally. The nine of us on this program share the general experience and a lot the the personality traits that define K College students, but we've sort of been stuck in this world that is so different, both culturally and academically, from any shared experience we had before this. We've had to become friends on totally different terms than we would have if we were at K, which is wonderful, but sometimes you just get homesick for people who get the long-standing jokes and with whom you can be content just to hang out and be in each other's company.

That's why it was so nice when Elsa came to visit last weekend. We could just hang out and walk around and catch up, and it was as if no time had gone by at all since we last saw each other in June. We went to the market and bought food to make dinner one night (like we do at home... except we went to the delightful little street market in the piazza down the street rather than Meijer...), we went for numerous walks and just wandered around Rome, we went out for a delicious Italian meal at (where else?) Le Fate... we even watched some Glee!

And the incredibly wonderful and reassuring thing about her visit was this: it seemed absolutely natural that all of these things should be occuring on a different continent. The way in which we just kind of picked right up where we left off at the end of the school year, while at the same time walking around the Coloseum looking for an English-speaker to take our picture, makes me realize how lucky I am to have made such strong friendships in college. Study abroad can change you, make you a different person than you were when you went in, and this is completely as it should be; life is that way. It's just nice to know that the world does not completely stop with each new phase and experience, and that there are some things that will remain constant through those phases and experiences. Bleh. Philosophical mumbo-jumbo. The point is: it was wonderful to see her and get to show her some of the things I love about Rome. Thanks for coming, Els!

After Elsa left on Tuesday morning, Kelcie and I had to make our way to Fiumicino to meet Professors Gwynne and Higgins, as well as the other seven girls from K, to go to Sicily. At first, when I heard that this was going to happen over Fall Break, I was a little resentful. It's a class, after all, and we're supposed to have a week of vacation. But, since I am me, our time in Sicily wound up being, in all probability, very similar to what I might call my ideal vacation.

We arrived in Catania after an hour and a half flight... after standing at the gate for about an hour in what the Italians have the audacity to call a line. Oh, Alitalia... you suck. A little harsh? Think of it as foreshadowing. We got on a little bus that would turn out to be our home (ish) for the week, and drove the hour and a half to Siricusa.

Italy is constantly surprising me. Sicily bears only the tiniest bit of resemblance to Lazio (Rome), which is so different from Umbria that they could be on different continents, and Umbria and the Veneto (Venice) could not be any more different if they had brains and were trying... and all of these places (and these are only the ones I've experienced first-hand) are on this dinky little penninsula that couldn't kick even North Dakota's ass in a size race... and it's shaped like a boot! It is continually shocking to see how very, very different each new place I visit is, and how mind-blowingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful they each are in their own way.

Sicily reminds me of nothing so much as the Edenic myth. Sure, in order to come to that conclusion, you have to ignore a few big industrial works and some pretty epically crappy roads that are constantly under construction but never get any nicer... but really. It's an island, completely contained in and of itself, where there's such an abundance of fruit trees that you just can't see the forest through them... and it was the end of October when we were there, and every other plant that wasn't just eye-wateringly green and alive was blooming with these obnoxiously bright-colored, beautiful flowers. The weather remained balmy, in perhaps the mid-seventies with blue, blue skies and puffy cotton-ball clouds, with cool breezes coming off the expanse of turquoise water crashing up against the ornately craggy coastlines. So basically, October in Sicily is late May in Michigan and a myth in Montana.

The first night, when we got to our unattractively-named but nevertheless wonderful and cozy hotel, the Hotel Gutkowski, we took a walk with Professor Gwynne around the islet of Ortigia, which is Siracusa's historical center. Ortigia, formerly known mythologically as Delos, along with having some very beautiful views of the ocean and the hills, has the distinction of having been the 'birthplace' of Apollo and Diana. So, in the midst of the quaint little winding streets that have come to characterize my very favorite places in Italy (Trastevere, Asissi, Venice...), there's a massive temple to Apollo, and another to Minerva (the one to Diana was at one point next door) which is remarkably well-preserved for the simple fact that it now serves as the Duomo of Siracusa. Yeah. You can see the columns through the walls that have been put up to enclose the space, and what was once the cella of the temple has now been transformed into the side arcades of the basillica. We spent some time having class in there, pointing out the things that were consistent with both the architecture of a Greek temple and with a Christian church. Which is what I would have been doing if I'd been on vacation in Ortigia myself. Lame.

The week was so action-packed that I'll just give a few of the highlights. The archaeological museum in Siracuse and then the park that goes with it, containing a Greek theatre complex, a Roman amphiteatre, a who bunch of really cool tombs cut into the rock, and a quarry with big caves that felt like entering the mines of Moria, followed by a boat ride around the sea caves of Ortigia with five of the other K girls and a young, very nice French couple, followed by a delicious seafood dinner overlooking the water in a restaurant where the floors are glass and you can see the Greek grottos and the natural freshwater spring below... that was the first full day.

Driving up into the hinterland of Sicily is an experience that I don't think I'll ever have the opportunity to forget. There are so many allusions to Narnia and Middle Earth and Eden that I could make that it would sound trite and meaningless, as well as painfully dorky. But the sites at Agrigento, with it's massive, majestic temples looking out over the ocean, and at Akrai, where we nine performed the end of Theocrites' "The Persians" (I played Xerxes to great acclaim) and Pentalica, where my real Montana-girl roots came out as I clambored through viscious brambles and up limestone cliffs to see the tombs in the rock and then turn around and wave at those below... if those aren't good justifications for dorkiness, I don't know what would be.

One of the coolest things we did, however, was drive to a crater on Mt. Etna, which, in case you're unaware, is a gigantic volcano on the eastern coast of Sicily. The professors warned us to bring warm clothes, since the elevation changes so drastically from Siricusa to the crater, and boy, did it. You can fool yourself, when you're looking at the horizon, into thinking that what you're seeing there is just a bunch of particularly angular clouds... but up close, the mountain leaps up at you, seemingly out of nowhere, higher by far than anything else around it. The snow line is deliniated from the inhabitable area by a constant thick layer of clouds... you can see how the civilizations who lived in this and areas like it could believe the gods lived in such places... even by today's ostensibly more pragmatic standards, it's completely plausible.

The crater is like a different world, as craters tend to be. First of all, for the first time since coming to Italy, it actually felt like the time of year it's supposed to be. It was cold, but in that pleasant, expectant way that makes you think of Halloween... which was cool, because it was. It was fun and energizing to run around up there, and I don't think I've ever relished a cold nose like I did when I was there, just because it's such a novelty here... but I digress. Suffice it to say that if Sicily is an unreal experience, Etna is the pinnacle thereof.

We spent most of the week galivanting around southeastern Sicily, coming back each night to Ortigia and the Hotel Gutkowski, right on the edge of the ocean. The final night, after our trip to Etna, however, we spent in Taormina, which is the culmination of everything I loved about Sicily put into one tiny place. The town is built on a series of high, craggy cliffs and overlooks the sea. You can see Etna smoking in the distance. We watched the sun set from the ruins of a Greek theatre, and the breeze off the ocean smelled like salt water and flowers and amazing food... which we then proceeded to eat at a pizzaria by our hotel. The next morning, after a fairly early night (for Halloween, anyway), we took a cable car down to the beach, where Michelle and I, barefoot in the ocean, looked for sea glass.

Jealous? I didn't think that I could ever learn so much and have it be such an incredibly relaxing vacation... and I'm fairly enthusiastic about learning. The whole week was some sort of idyllic sojurn from the idyllic sojurn that is my life in Rome. The only bump came at the very end, when lovely Alitalia lost the reservations for only half of our group... including myself. The efforts of Professors Gwynne and Higgins, wonderful people that they are, were the only reason that I'm not still in Sicily waiting for some fat guy's daughter to get married so I can ask for a favor... and I'm not sure even the Godfather could finaggle his way through the idiocy that is the Italian national airline.

But we got home to Rome safe and sound, and BAM. Real life started up again. A week away from Rome has made me realize how much it really has become my world... and that fact, once grasped, has made me wonder and dread what will happen when I have to go one step farther back; when Rome was the vacation and I have to get used to life in Michigan again. It's a strange thought... but however it hits me when I get back, I'm sure that the week we spent in Sicily will be one of the most vivid memories I keep of my home here.

Fountains of Water, Mountains of Chocolate

2009-10-21T03:17:00.000-07:00

I don't really have any good words to describe Tivoli... it's a town southwest of Rome, and within its microcosm it's possible to see glimpses of two civilizations millenia apart, and yet living such astoundingly similar lives that one would think they were neighbors rather than ancestor and descendent. It is home to two of the most lavish, unthinkably grand residences in Italy; one belonging to the Emperor Hadrian and the other to Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este. So shockingly similar in intent and lasting effect are these two villas that I can't help but think of Tivoli as a testament to how, though our civilization has evolved and changed so much that sometimes it is beyond recognition, even to us (yes, I'm talking to you, 1993, when no one used the Internet), our essential natures are no different than they were thousands and thousands of years ago.

Tivoli, as is the case with many of the most significant historical sites, gives us glimpses not into the lives of those who lived modest, productive and private lives, but of the rich and the powerful who could afford ostentation and the immortality that comes with it.

The Emperor Hadrian was something of a megalomaniac; for evidence of this fact I'd like to direct your attention to a ginormous wall sitting complacently along some cliffs/fields in Great Britain. Also, the Temple of Venus and Roma in Rome. It's the biggest temple in the city. And the Temple of Jupiter at the Acropolis in Athens. It also has the distinction of being the largest thing in the Temple District there. The dude did not think it was appropriate to build anything smaller than your average high-school. Dr. Freud, interpret as you will. But Villa Adriana is no exception to this tendency... in fact, it might be the culmination of Hadrian's penchant for stupidly large structures.

We arrived there in the morning on a charter bus filled not only with my Roman Imperial Art class, but also with my Villas class and an archaeology class that I'm not in. Professor Gadeyne then zoomed off to parts unknown, leaving those hapless individuals who aren't used to his speed to struggle up the hills, through the olive groves and chunks of travertine sticking up at dangerous intervals, finally catching up without time to catch their breath.

As enthusiastic and knowledgable as he is in the city, Professor Gadeyne was truly in his element surrounded by the ruins of the villa. I'm not a big antiquity girl; I appreciate it mostly insofar as it influenced the creation of the art which I truly love. But majestic doesn't even begin to cover the ruins of Villa Adriana. I'm not sure how much I would have liked it if I had been a contemporary of Hadrian's, but in it's ruined state it has flown in the face of everything the Roman rulers wished out of life, namely, to be so godlike that they controlled the natural world around them along with everything else, and been totally reclaimed by the landscape around it. The brick and limestone of the skeletons of what were once grand entrance halls and frescoed baths now appear to spring up organically out of nothing. They belong there as much as the olive groves and anemone do. I guess millenia standing in the same place will have that effect...

Villa d'Este, on the other hand, hasn't been around long enough for it to not be a little tacky in it's lavishness. The Cardinal Ippolito was close to his geographical forefather in more than the power he wielded in the society he lived in. The ancestral residence of the Cardinal-Governor of Tivoli was a monestary of the Franciscans, an order which had a reputation for having a very... um, monastic aesthetic, even among monks. This didn't jive well with our man Ippolito. Nah, he had the whole think encased inside a ginormous villa... so technically he still lived in the monastary... it just had a lot nicer furniture and a little more leg room.

He and Hadrian had another thing in common: wanting to control the natural world around them. It's a funny thing about human beings that we can't just let the majesty of nature be enough for us; we have to put our stamp all over it. At Villa d'Este, this tendency in particularly evident. The place isn't known for being the luxurious residence of an almost-Pope who got booted from the College and relegated to the po-dunk town of Tivoli because he was too popular, even if he was of the d'Este family. For those of you who don't know, the d'Estes' were sort of like... well... who's a political dynasty that's not as big as the Kennedys or as stupid as the Bushes?... They were kind of like the Adamses of the Renaissance. Not the Mortitia and Wednesday type. The John type. But I digress. The villa is known for its water gardens. And man, these things are serious business.

The villa is built into the side of a hill, but it's a very steep hill that's not so good for planting gardens. Or, you know, walking. So what Ippolito ordered was for huge amounts of dirt, etc. to be dug up from around Tivoli and he made his own hill. The guy was sort of like what Donald Trump might have looked like in the Renaissance. But the good thing about that the little red skull cap would have covered any unfortunate hair decisions.

The gardens are this veritable wonderland of splashing, dripping, cascading, trickling and water in it's every other incarnation. There are fountains which just spray water in interesting shapes and some that have mythological and classical themes intricately built into them, and some that literally have little hydraulic birds that sing and move through water power alone. And all of this in the 1530s. Doesn't that just kill you? And the amazing thing is: they're still using the same hydraulics system that was originally installed. It blew my mind. The only downside to this garden is if you have to pee before you start your tour. They're big gardens, you see, and it's easy to get distracted when all you hear is the sound of rushing water. Not so relaxing in certain instances, it turns out.

The day at Tivoli was really fun, because of the historical continuity wrought by ostentatious, self-aggrandizing bastards about how materialistic one can get. Narcisism is really fun when you don't have to deal with it face to face. The bus ride back was relaxing... basically everyone was worn out from trying to keep up with Professor Gadeynne all morning, so we slept. Then a bunch of us went out for Chinese. Sigh. That's one thing that I really miss from the States. Rice Kitchen is the ambrosia of the gods.

On Sunday Kelcie and I got up early to go to the Perugia Chocolate Festival with some other kids from school. Well, we weren't really going with anyone in particular, but as you can imagine, American kids flock to the Perugia Chocolate Festival with the same fervor as Mick Jagger fans to a Stones festival. So we knew we'd probably meet some new people on the train. Turns out we did. We spent most of the day with Emily, the resident student who organized the trip, and John, Kevin and Rish, three other study abroad students.

As you can imagine, a chocolate festival is something like heaven on earth. It smells orgasmic, to begin with, but then there are the free samples and the relatively cheap and delicious tasties everywhere you turn. Some of the highlights: hot chocolate, which is not your Swiss Miss mix, let me tell you. It's basically melted chocolate. That's all. I had peperoncini, which was spicy as well as burn your tongue hot, which was wonderful considering the fact that fall has finally arrived in central Italy. It's like soup. So, one cup will have you groaning and begging to die, basically, because of chocolate overload. But of course, we didn't stop there. I also fought my way through the mosh pit to get some of the chocolate bits flying off of the chocolate sculptures that were being carved in the street. The boys and we bonded over chocolate covered churros, which made me feel like a giant zit after I ate them. But they were still a pretty damn good choice.

After meeting up with the three boys, the six of us went to the main piazza, where I geeked out to general disinterest about the fountain carved by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and we noticed a lot of people with these odd chapeaus. Basically, they were Burger King crowns in the shape of purple cow heads. Like, with ears and horns and stuff. Well, we saw the source of the cow hats, and that was a tent where people were moshing (there was a lot of moshing happening. Chocolate brings that out in people) to get in and emerging with a cracker covered in oozing fondue chocolate. This was Milka. We braved the choco-mosh to get the dinky little cracker, but Kevin and I were both way more interested in procuring those hats. So, we jerry-rigged our way to the front of a line that was comprised mostly of seven year olds (you do what you gotta for the purple cow hat) and after some negotiating in ItaloEngliSwedish, we got six of them. And then proceeded to wear them for the rest of the day. Some of the people you find randomly on trains really are the best friends you can make.

I actually had to admit choco-defeat a lot sooner than the others did. Don't get me wrong; I eat Nutella like it's my job and I'm going for Employee of the Month, but not all at once and not starting at 11 in the morning and going until 5 at night. I just can't do that. So I watched placidly as everyone else put their game faces back on and went on a chocolate binge to kill a horse or two. I did break my swearing off of chocolate to participate in a round of chocolate beer, which was actually surprisingly good. It didn't taste like chocolate while you were drinking it, just a very dark ale, but there was a chocolatey aftertaste that was really interesting and fun.

Huh. How many times can I say chocolate in one post? The one most crucial thing to note about this day, besides the deliciousness and the food coma that resulted that night, is the crowd. Holy crap, people like their chocolate. It was only through extreme good fortune in the morning and extreme pre-planning in the afternoon that we got seats on the train both ways. There were people sitting and standing in the aisle for the whole two hour trip. That's dedication, my friends.

So the moral of the story is: if you're planning on the Perugia Chocolate Festival at any point in your future (and you should be), make sure to A) get the train early both ways. B) bring your ipod to drown out the chocolate-beer drunk Italians singing Shakira on the ride home and C) always remember to wear your purple cow hat. It makes the outfit.

Thank You For Everything, Professor Kirk

2009-10-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

A lot of really great, fun things happened this weekend, but I'm not really in a place at the moment to discuss them with any kind of humor or excitement. I promise I'll post more about those stories a little later, more to document for my own benefit than because any of you are waiting with baited breath to hear about them, when the initial shock of this very, very sad day has abated.

An email was sent out yesterday to all the AUR students with the news that Professor Terry Kirk had passed away suddenly over the weekend. I don't really know any more than that, and it would be inappropriate and disrespectful of me to speculate. All I know is that it was very sudden and shockingly out of the blue. Professor Kirk had been teaching at AUR for over twenty years. Needless to say the news pretty much rocked our little corner of The Eternal City.

I am personally placed in a situation that I've never experienced before by this unquestionable tragedy. Of the death that I have experienced before, I was either mentally and somewhat emotionally prepared for that person, beloved though they were, to pass away, or the event was far enough removed from my immediate existence that I was saddened, but not stopped completely cold by the news. This is different. I saw Professor Kirk walking out of a classroom building on Tuesday night last week. I waved to him and smiled, and he grinned back as he zoomed with characteristic briskness toward Via Carini. On Thursday, Professor Gwynne told us in Art For Art's Sake that he would be leaving after that lesson and that Professor Kirk would be resuming the class. As much as I love Professor Gwynne, I was nevertheless excited by the idea of another class spent constantly on my toes, waiting to jump when a question was fired at me in a style which would have made Socrates proud. I was so eager to experience his teaching again.

There are those people that you rarely come across, and when you do you count yourself very lucky, who provide an incredibly accurate model of what you want to be when you finally reach that elusive point of "grow up". They reinforce and encourage that part of you that whispers "this is what I love. This is why I love it." They give you an outlet to express those things you already know while at the same time constantly giving you new things to learn. You can look at them and see why you chose the profession you chose, because they are an example of a person who followed their passion and triumphed. They set the example of continuing education not because it will get you more money, but because they genuinely find joy in their curiosity and in discovering new things for the sake of discovering them.

I only knew Professor Kirk for a little less than two months, but in that time he made such an impact on me that, though I came to Rome thinking that Art History could just be a neat thing to know a lot about but not necessarily an ideal career path, I now realize that I can't ignore something that makes me thrilled to go to class each day. The joy in his face when he spoke about the aesthetic theories of Kant and Winkelmann makes me realize that, even though what you're passionate about may be confusing to some people, if it makes you excited enough to make your life's work revolve around it, that's what you should be doing.

Again, I didn't know the man very long, but given the outpouring of devastation and grief that AUR is currently weathering, his indelible impact on me was not a unique event. If he could help me solidify my academic passion into a career goal in just two months of twice-a-week classes, I can't even imagine the impact he's had on the students and teachers he's been working with for over twenty years. There are some people who change people just by being themselves.

Here's my point: if there's someone out there who made a profound impact on you, whether it be academically, politically, spiritually, whatever... tell them. Tell them how much you appreciate the role they played in your life, and how their influence has stayed with you. Honestly, on Friday I would have thought that sentiment a little melodramatic and sappy, but the world can change just that quickly, and you never know when you might have already run out of chances to thank them for the person you are.

Religious Life in the Capital of Catholicism

2009-10-13T00:51:00.001-07:00

As many of you are doubtless aware (either because you're a part of my family, or because I can't ever seem to shut up about them...) I was raised as a part of a ginormous Irish-Catholic family. Like, the kind of big Irish-Catholic family who make Mass an integral part of almost every family gathering, do some pretty entertaining acrobatics in too-small kitchens/living rooms/dining rooms in order to link hands and pray before a meal, and where everyone is not only someone's cousin or aunt/uncle, they're also someone's Godparent or Confirmation sponsor... in the 'recipes' section of our family website, there's a Novena. You get it. We're Catholic.

And I'm so very grateful to have been raised in this family. Not only for the more obvious reasons of having a ton of people supporting you in what you do and having the pretty sweet added bonus of a built-in group of friends, but for one very simple reason: if my parents had decided to raise my brother, sister and I in another religious tradition, I probably wouldn't be an art historian.

Not that everyone in my family is Catholic; my paternal extended family isn't, and their faith is just as strong and just as inspiring to me. But having the traditions of Catholicism reinforced, the stories reiterated over and over again, and the penchant for ornate (by Montana religious standards) ornamentation presented to me week after week certainly cultivated in me a healthy interest, and a rather comprehensive elementary knowlege, of Catholic iconography before I even knew of the existence of a field of study called Art History.

When I went to the Louvre at age 16 and found myself able to identify events and even relatively obscure people in Christian artwork without looking at the placard, it was one of the coolest moments of my life, and certainly the one that doomed me to a field where I can hope for little more than an especially nice refrigerator box to call home after I finally finish school. But that probably wouldn't have happened (damn! I could have been a lawyer!) if I had not been raised in the tradition for which these artists had been working.

Naturally, when it came time for me to study abroad (I love how that's like, a right of passage in the American university system now), Rome, with its rich history not only of the art that has fascinated me from the word 'go', but of all that which influenced and inspired it, seemed a perfect fit. Not because I'm an especially devout Catholic; I have more than a few gripes with the political position of the Institution as it exists right now, but because of all the incredible art that has been inspired by the Institution, and maybe by the Faith itself sometimes, throughout the centuries. So, with my very faithful and loving family behind me, supporting me, and my mainly academic interest in something so very spiritual for so many people before me, I found myself stuck between St. Peter and a hard place.

I came to Rome with not a little trepidation on how I was going to handle my political objections to the Church coupled with my burning desire to enter every church I saw and analyze the altarpieces to within an inch of their metaphorical lives. I was afraid that I was entering a country where the Institution reigned supreme and left little room for wonder, love, compassion, comfort, education... all the things that I've learned from my big Catholic family back in the States. I was afraid that the Italians would be able to smell on me the stench of 'culturally Catholic academic who thinks she's so enlightened'... I've definitely caught a whiff once or twice myself.

But really, I couldn't have been more wrong. Instead of prancing into the middle of a religious oligarchy where one can't purchase condoms because they spread AIDS and women must be seen and not heard, I found myself in a country full of cultural Catholics. The observation has been made before the you can't help but be Catholic when you live in Italy. Churches in Rome are like Starbucks' in New York; there are at least two every block or so. Most of the major holidays when people get off work are also Catholic Holy Days. Your kid probably goes to a parochial school, not because he's the second son and so destined for the priesthood, but because parochial schools provide a really good education.

I'm constantly fascinated and delighted by the way in which religious life seems to permeate the everyday here without making a big deal about itself. The main identifying factor of my bus stop is an altar to the Virgin built right into the wall, complete with an entire brigade of marble and bronze plaques bought and placed there by families. There are usually burnt-out candles, wilting roses and prayers written out and folded up and stuck behind a plaque. Many people make it a habit, when they're disembarking, to touch the foot of the altar before absent-mindedly making the Sign of the Cross and continuing on their way, screaming into their cell-phones all the while.

For a few weeks it was always amusing to me when a priest or a monk, in full cassock, or a nun in her habit (this is even in 90 degree weather) would pass me on the street. Now it's just business as usual. I've even begun to be able to identify the different orders based on their dress. It was a bit confusing at first when a group of nuns came to the park I was sitting in and began to gaily set up for a picnic... I thought one of them was Mother Thereasa... I'd only seen that blue and white habit on one other person before. But they ride the bus, drive around town and go grocery shopping (there's another icon of the Virgin set into the wall on the corner of the grocery store, btw) just like I do. They buy less cheap wine... but that's their perogative I guess.

And these people arent' just relics of a bygone era of devoutness, either. These are pretty young guys with their backpacks casually slung over their shoulders, skillfully navigating the crowded 75 to Piazza Independaza... in a cassock. There's one especially mean calendar that all the little tourist traps sell, which I can only compare to a fireman calendar in the States. It's basically just a bunch of beautiful young men, one for each month, staring broodingly at the camera. Except they all have black shirts with white collars on. Grr. That's just plain cruel. Blasphemous? Perhaps. But funny? Yeah. And a little unnerving for me, who was raised with priests who were all pushing at least fifty? You betcha.

And you know how in the States the biggest, most grandiose and hallowed buildings are usually reserved for affairs of state? Like, how every capitol building has a big dome on it and we build giant suggestive obelisks to commemorate our general macho badassery? And how churches are generally not the focal point of a major city's skyline? Turn that around, and you've got Rome. Parliament is nothing to sneeze at, architecture-wise, but St. Peter's makes it look like a Fischer-Price dollhouse. Rome's skyline, although it's not a particularly high city and therefore hasn't got a really distinctive one, is dominated by the domes of churches, not the skyscrapers of capitalist temples of commerce or Greecian inspired buildings build to house democracy.

The point is: Catholicism has been the norm around here for so long that no one even thinks twice about it. You pray to St. Anthony when you lose something because it's what you do, not because you're thinking that some guy with a halo is going to tap you on the shoulder and hand you your cell phone. You cross yourself when someone else does it more as a reflex than as a sign of solemn devotion. And Jesus not only died for your sins, but He also gets you the day off work once in awhile. To quote poor jilted Diane Lane out there under the Tuscan sun somewhere, Mary is less the absolute paragon of feminine Virtue and Purity than she is everyone's aunt, who is just there, looking out for you, from basically every street corner.

If I've learned one thing about religion from living in Rome, it's this: Catholicism, and religion in general, I suppose, can be whatever you need it to be. It can be a habitual action that tells you something about where you've come from, or just an excuse to get off work a few days a year. It can be a very dearly held belief that compels you to go to Mass each day or join a holy order, or it can be simply a part of the life going on around you. It can be a comforting familiarity when you're far away from your family. It can be the inspiration for a chosen path of education. It can be a new cultural discovery and a safety net at once.

I've learned that religion is intensely personal, and that devotion doesn't come in only one flavor. For me, the most sacred and holy part about Catholicism is the fact that it has inspired great human beings to greater feats of artistic expression. And my way of praying, by marveling at what human beings are capable of and then learning just how they did it, is just as valid as receiveing Communion every day of your life. I've learned that, shockingly, it's easier to ignore the Pope when he literally lives about a mile away than when he's across the world issuing edicts from on high.

Maybe that's why Italy has such a healthy (in my opinion) relationship with religion compared to the places I've lived before. It's part of their lifeblood. It's in the very soil. They imbibe it every day and, much like wine, it looses its remoteness and mystery and becomes another important facet of a rich and deep understanding of who they are and where they come from.

The Fairies Tale

2009-10-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

Do you ever have those experiences where you're expecting something to be 'cool', and for it to be 'a great experience', but you're not expecting anything more than a story to tell? Or those faint but real suspicions that some necessity of life has the potential to be something so much more enriching, fulfilling, gratifying, completing than even you ever thought it could be? Or one of those times where the newness you're experiencing blend with the familiar in such a way that you're completely exhilerated at the same time that you're comforted? Well, if none of this is ringing a bell, you need to get your ass to Le Fate.

Here's the story:

Michelle had approached me and a few of our other friends several weeks ago with the idea to take a cooking class that's advertised on some bulletin board in the AUR A building. Obviously, this sounded really cool, since I love to cook and to eat and experience new foods, but it was 35 euro, and I'm also kinda stingy, so I was leery. She got in touch with Andrea (who she assumed was a woman), who is the chef and owner of the restaurant Le Fate, in the meantime, giving us all some time to think it over.

The deal was: we would show up at the restaurant at around noon one day, and Andrea would teach us and help us cook a traditional four-course Italian meal. Then, we would eat said meal and probably make a lot of yummy sounds, and all of this for 35 euro. Well, given my love of cooking, I decided that this was actually really reasonable for the experience and the tasty food that was sure to be included. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.

Casey, Michelle, Christine, Amanda and I met up this morning at 11:15 to walk to Le Fate, which is on Viale di Trastevere only a few blocks from my house, and close to the tram stop that gets the rest of them down from Monteverde. It's a beautiful fall day in Rome today, which is basically indistinguishable from a beautiful summer day in Montana, weather-wise. It's sunny and bright, but still pretty hot for what one expects of fall; it's about 70 degrees-ish. So we walk the few blocks to Le Fate, which I've been to before last week with Michelle to put the down payment on the class. We didn't meet Andrea then, but rather HIS (yeah, Andrea. Like, Andrew.) brother, who helped us settle the payment. I was immediately enchanted last week by this place.

Le Fate literally translates as The Faeries, and the restaurant, which probably seats around 25 people at maximum capacity, is all decked out like a woodland glen. The chief source of light, besides the big front windows, are twinkle-lights. There are carved wooden gnomes (but the effect is whimsical, not tacky) and big wickerwork chandeliers hung with grapes and little disco balls... it's trendy and sweet and homey all at the same time. I immediately loved it. Like, it's a restaurant with a faerie theme. Okay? But it totally works. It seems like it just grew up there; there's nothing contrived about it.

So we show up today and the woman who opens the door doesn't look to be much older than we are; turns out she's 28. Erica greets us warmly in English, and I immediately think "woah, this girl's from Michigan!". Yup. Turns out she grew up in the Detroit area (at this point, who didn't?) and went to college for awhile at Western (that's in Kalamazoo, folks. Queue the singing puppets...) before transferring to AUR. She now lives in Rome with her boyfriend, Andrea, and helps him organize what I guess have become a very popular restaurant and VERY popular cooking classes. She's totally chill and friendly, and seems the ideal young expat to me. She's still authentically American, but she gives off an air of being more a citizen of wherever she happens to be at the time. I feel an immediate desire to be friends with this woman.

And then Andrea shows up. It's not even possible to describe this guy. He's 32, but he's been in the kitchen basically his whole life. He's vibrant and funny right off the bat, and very, very beautiful. Like, what all Italian men should look and act like. Erica is one lucky woman. He starts off the class with this incredible, joyful intensity of a man who really loves what he does. He talks about the objectives of the class, which is to help us to experience real Italian cooking, and more specifically, real Roman cuisine. He makes it very clear that one of the four courses of our meal is going to be a very regionally specific Roman dish. He's Roman. Lived in Rome his whole life, though he's very well traveled and speaks beautiful, though not perfect, English. I am immediately drawn to the guy's energy. He knows that he's very good at what he does, and he wants to share what he knows with other people. I admire this quality, since it's one I hope to acquire for myself, in my own work.

Well, I'm chomping at the bit to get started, especially after he talks a little bit about Le Fate and what his values as a chef and businessman are. Everything he uses in the kitchen, the wines, the meat, the produce... all of them are local. Local, as in, he came back from the market with the ingredients for our meal about ten minutes before we got there. And not a market like Meijer, but the very street market with stalls and vendors that I passed on my way to his restaurant. Since everything he uses is local, he only cooks those things that are in season. On his menu right now are fiore di zucco, pumpkin flowers, which will only be available for about another two weeks before they're gone until next summer. He shops each and every morning and designs his specials for the day based on what he's inspired by at the market.

Here's what we're cooking: a soup (not a traditional first course in Italian cooking, but Andrea has a ton of friends from AUR who always bugged him about making them soup when he was our age, so he knows Americans like it, and it's a nostalgic thing for him to make it with us) of leeks, potatoes and pumpkin, flavored with sage, rosemary, bay and juniper, followed by fresh pasta (yeah, we're going to learn to make pasta) with a sauce of mushrooms and fresh cherry tomatoes with parsley and romano (yes, ladies and gents, thats romano as in ROMAN), followed by saltinbocca (beef, NOT veal, as Andrea explained to me when I asked, because the Roman area not like Montana is it's amount of open space, so it's not economical, and never was, to kill a cow before it was big enough to feed more than a few people. Why waste the potential for more food?), and finally individual chocolate soufles that, Andrea said, is not only the best recipe he's ever found for soufle, but will also keep in the fridge for up to two weeks before you cook it. Sweet in more ways than one.

We got in his kitchen, which was close quarters for the six of us, with Erica popping her head in every now and then to chat when she got bored on the computer. Andrea not only teaches the HOW of things, like how to chop leeks without cutting all your fingers off (I'm a lot more experienced in the kitchen than some of my friends), but the WHY, like the thing with the beef, or a very interesting thing about garlic: he said that Italians don't like to use it in the same quantities that Americans think they do. He ways that garlic is very heavy on your digestion, and the reason that Italians even use it in the first place is because of it's nutritional value, which is all in the skin, which Americans peel off. So, if you're cooking with garlic rather than eating it raw, you can just crush it and leave the skin on and it won't hurt anything, and will actually help your heart and your cholesterol. Fun fact and misconception I've always held about Italian cooking.

So anyway, we're cooking along, all getting to help with different parts of the meal; I actually made the pasta dough by myself, a skill which I've always wanted to acquire but was a little intimidated by. I don't know why, now that I know how. Fresh pasta is the best kept secret in the world, in my opinion. A) It's stupidly simple to make, B) It only has four ingredients, tops and C) these ingredients are cheaper than buying already made pasta like Barilla, etc.. Holy crap. What a revelation. I may not ever cook with dried pasta again, given the choice, because of how easy, cheap and wonderful the fresh version is.

The first course is finally finished (by yours truly) by blending the potatoes, leeks and pumpkin together with a stick blender (which is, incidentally, a good gift idea for me if you're stuck), and then served with fried bread. Yeah. Fried bread. Two of the best things in the world coming together at last. I can tell you now that this is categorically and without a doubt the best soup that I've ever eaten. It's warm and comforting and really, really simple. You can taste each ingredient and the freshness of it right through the beautiful, creamy texture. It was all I could do not to lick the bowl.

When Andrea brings out the second course, it's really funny to see the pasta we made by hand (pici, which is like hand-rolled spaghetti, but much fatter) in this beautiful, delicious and yet again very simple dish. We joked that we could pick out the ones that each of us made based on technique. The saltimbocca is next, and this term literally translates to "jump in your mouth", because the Romans eat it as a sort of finger food. It's a very thin slice of tenderloin, on top of which is placed a piece of proscuitto and a piece of Ememtare cheese (although Andrea said any mild cheese will work). This whole thing is folded over and a sage leaf is secured on top with a toothpick. Then it's cooked over low heat in butter for a few minutes. How could that be bad?

Throughout the meal, Andrea and Erica sit and eat with us, and we talk about everything from our majors to what everyone's opinon is of New Jersey (mostly not favorable, if you're wondering... NJ has a really bad rep here for some reason...) to where New England is. Andrea is confused because he's under the impression that it's a state, and that it's somewhere close to Wisconsin. It takes a little while, but we get there in the end. We laugh and drink wine and Erica and Andrea ask us what we like about Rome. They're both very impressed that no one says The Coloseum, but both make a face when I express my love for the water fountains. Apparently the water tastes like hose water. Apparently this is very okay with me. Andrea talks about how he and his dad started this restaurant, about how he and his brother run it now with their parent's help... Erica helps us enumerate the differences between Italy and the States... they're really warm and friendly; the kind of people you just want to be friends with.

The chocolate soufle comes out of the kitchen in Andrea's capable hands, each decorated with "Le Fate" and each of our names in Creme Anglaise around the edge. Delicious doesn't even begin to cover it. Finally, after around 5 and 1/2 hours spent at Le Fate, we take our leave of Andrea and Erica with hugs and kisses and promises to return for dinner sometime, and very VERY full and sleepy.

Rome in the afternoon is beautiful, with the soft light coming down through the trees that inexplicably still have leaves on them. I'm so content and happy, but also really excited by the things that this restaurant and the people who work there represent. Local, real food cooked with passion and love and tradition by a guy who really likes food and really likes people, and a couple who seem really cool and together, even though their cultural backgrounds are so different. The whole thing just seems like an essay on the way different kinds of love: familial, professional, personal, cultural... can all blend into such an amazing, satisfying and altogether unique way... rather like an incredible pumpkin soup. Moral of the story: best 35 euro I've ever spent. Really, the best expenditure of money I've made in QUITE a while. And worth a hell of a lot more.

If you're ever in Rome, and I sincerely hope that my descriptions have piqued your interest in this city I'm falling for more than they've put you off, I can't recommend this restaurant, or these classes highly enough. It was as close to a perfect experience as I can imagine. Here's the website: http://www.lefaterestaurant.it/home.html. I submit the above as the highest testament that I'm capable of. Buon appetito!

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Jerks

2009-10-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

Today, I have come to what I think are two pretty obvious conclusions about the universe. I'll try to explain them as accurately as possible, and relate the circumstances that lead to them.

Conclusion 1) Human beings are the most miraculous, incredible, improbably beautiful things that have ever evolved on this earth. And that may sound a little biased, considering that to the best of my knowledge, I am a human being, but I really do mean it. And this is coming from a girl who spent her entire existence until the age of 18 in Montana. And really, if you can apply the words miraculous, incredible and improbably beautiful to any place on earth, Montana would probably be that place. And perhaps I should qualify the above statement by reiterating that I'm an art history major, so basically, without human beings, I would have no field of study. Also, I wouldn't exist, so it wouldn't matter, but... that's just getting waaaaaaaay too existential... leave me alone! It's 11.00 at night and I've had an emotionally exhausting day.

Why, Maggie? You may ask. Why this convoluted existential quandry? What could possibly have been so emotionally draining that it's made you so euphorically arrogant, so philosophically woozy? Well... two words. Sistine Chapel.

Now, I flatter myself that after almost twenty-one years in my head, I've gotten to know myself reasonably well. So it stands to reason that I should have expected this kind of reaction from myself. And to a certain extent, I did. I didn't go immediately gallivanting off to the Sistine Chapel straight off the plane because I wanted some time to mentally prepare myself. People who haven't spent a good two years of their fairly short life studying the time period of which the Sistine Chapel is perhaps the piece de resistance have told me that the first time they saw it fundamentally changed them. I know myself well enough to know that I couldn't just let it be another tourist site.

Now, I know that sounds melodramatic. What makes that silly Pope-choosing room more important, more significant than say, the Raphael stanzae just down the hall? The Caravaggio hanging in the painting gallery downstairs? The Bernini adorning the entirety of St. Peter's? The answer is: it is precisely those things that make this one thing so significant. Whether by design, divine or human, or purely by chance, what I experienced today as I walked through St. Peter's and then through the Vatican Museums, seeing all of these works of genius both classical and modern, was a slowly escalating realization, something that I've brushed up against obliquely since I set foot in the Louvre at the age of sixteen, that human beings are capable of miracles. There is so much beauty and wonder and life inside us that we can't help but let it out in one way or another... and some people just happen to excel at this expression to such an extent that what they create acts as an outlet for others to realize the beauty and wonder and life within themselves. That is why the arts are important. That is why you have a coffee cup with the hands of God and Adam on it. That is why I've seen people's eyes mist over when they talk about the first time they saw their favorite painting in person for the first time, or the first time they experienced Shakespeare, Mozart, Longfellow. What Michelangelo, Leonardo, Chagall, Picasso, Gentileschi, Seurat, Monet, Van Gogh, Klee, Rodin... the list goes on... what they created touches something inside each of us that reminds us of why it is good to be a human being, when there are so many reasons that make us forget.

Now, that was all awfully sincere of me. I'm usually very flippant about this kind of thing... I call myself a nerd (to my face) a lot more often than anyone else does. I'm fascinated by the things that make art political, personal, heretical, whatever, but that doesn't mean that I don't have reverence for what I'm studying. It means a lot to me. It is both chosen profession and religion. And I know it's not that way for everyone, and for some people the Sistine Chapel ceiling is not some portal into deeper humanist awareness but rather just some paint on a ceiling that hurts your neck if you look at it for more than a few minutes... I understand that. Intellectually. Emotionally, viscerally, it's a completely different story. Which brings me to...

Conclusion 2) Human beings are cattle. Silly, stupid cattle. A statement completely at odds with the rapturous, Bambi-esque one above it? Perhaps. Or maybe just two sides of the same perverse and often-baffling coin of human nature. What makes me say this? Poor planning and flash photography.

The first: I knew that the Sistine Chapel would be a much more religious experience for me than it is for the general population. I've spent literally hours analyzing the fulcrum toe of the flippin' Libyan Sybil. It was just going to be more important for me. So I decided to wait until I could have the house to myself and time to process without talking to anyone when I got home... and with my roommates at Oktoberfest this weekend, it seemed like the perfect time. Except... the entire tourist population of Europe decided that today was a good day to move from in front of the Mona Lisa to standing in line at the Vatican. It was poor planning on my part to make my pilgramage on Saturday (the literal Latin translation: day on which we get through all the major tourist attractions in this city before moving onto... what was it again? Oh yeah. Paris.) I was sort of expecting this kerfuffle, but I was also niavely expecting that since the Vatican is considered by some to be rather a holy, sacred place, that that tourist population of Europe might find it within themselves to show some respect. Wrong.

The second: Fun fact-- did you know that there are guys whose JOB it is to stand in the Sistine Chapel all day and yell at people to shut up and quit taking photos? And do you know what keeps these guys employed? The fact that people never cease to talk in very loud voices and take flash photos despite the fact that they're being admonished not to in twelve (I counted) different languages.

While I was sitting and pondering the brilliant contradiction that is humankind, the humankind around me were busy moshing in an attempt to get right underneath The Creation of Adam to take their brazenly un-clandestine photos. Even though they're not allowed! Now, I get the idea that by taking a picture, even if it's a crappy, poorly lit picture of some other person's genius, you get to share a little in that genius. It's nice to bask in the reflected glow. I get that.

But honestly! How do you think these things have lasted as long as they have? When they tell you not to take photos, there's a good reason to listen! It's not just some uptight control-freak thing that all museums have in common; they're trying with all their might to combat your selfishness and stupidity and downright carelessness in order to preserve these things for future generations. And honestly, with the world as it is right now, those things that make us remember those things that are good and beautiful and wonderous about ourselves are more imparitive than ever.

And also, do you really need to talk for the twenty or so minutes that you're in a room where they specifically ask you not to talk? Is that so hard? Could you not just pay attention to what you're feeling inside yourself for a few minutes without having to point out to your companions "Look! There's Adam! Ohmygod, I can't believe it!". Really? Because you're holding a 20 euro bookbag from the gift shop that would suggest that this sight isn't a complete surprise. One would think that you would have been expecting to see the not-so-well-hung naked guy on the bag before you bought it. But that's just me. And I might have weird expectations about these things.

But really. In the paragraph above when I was spilling my guts about art history being akin to a religion for me... I felt like I was going to go all Jesus on their asses and start screaming "Myyyyyyyyyyyyyy temple should beeeeeeeeeeee a house of art! BUT YOU HAVE MADE IT a den of POPERAZZI. GET OUT! GET OUT!" (A reference to Jesus Christ Superstar for your enjoyment). But I held it in.

And nothing I can furiously blog about or bitch about is going to change the fact that, for a lot of people, the Sistine Chapel, really, the entirety of the Vatican Museums, is just another check on the list of things they should really see in Rome. And that Rome is just another check on the list of places they should see in Europe. And that Europe is... you get it. And that makes me so sad. I wish everyone could see these things the way I see them. I wish I could convey some semblance of the wonder they hold for me to the guy sitting next to me on the bench, feverishly reading his guidebook as though there's going to be a quiz in ten minutes.

But really, if everyone saw the world the way I see it, we'd all get bored pretty fast. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and if everyone saw everything the way I see it... well, we'd all take ourselves way too seriously, for one (which I think is already true, but in my case I know it to be fact) and I couldn't have even gotten into the Sistine Chapel today because the entire room would have been full of dead silent, reverent people wiping away single, artistic tears and not moving for hours. And I don't think I would have liked that any more than the poperazzi cattle.

But think of the killing I could make on neck massages.

The Post Brought to You By the Letter W...

2009-09-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

There's a concept that is talked up a lot during study abroad orientation at K called "the W curve". The basic gist is that your emotions during your time abroad will follow the curve of... you guessed it: the letter W.

Essentially, when you get to ___________ (insert place here), you'll be euphoric, happy, discovering new things, making plans to move there... please refer to the first couple posts of this blog. As the weeks pass, the trend indicates that you'll start to feel more comfortable, more at home, and therefore the novelty will wear off and you'll begin to return to the Land of the Actually Living from way up there on Cloud 9... please refer to the subsequent posts. Those of you who can follow a train of logic to its conculsion should be able to figure out what comes next: you begin to notice only the bad things, and they start to get to you, you feel homesick, annoyed, an even stranger stranger than you thought you were, I AM NOT AN ANIMAL! I AM A HUMAN BEING!, that kind of thing. Then things start to look back up again, and you'll once again return triumphantly to Cloud 9, and then: lather, rinse, repeat. You get it.

Personally, and I now recognize, niavely, prior to coming here I thought that this would be bullsh*t. Only for the weak-minded. Absolutely not applicable to me. Well, today tells me that I was wrong.

And the confusing thing is: I still love Rome. I love waking up and walking to class at the Villa Farnesina, walking into a room there and seeing Raphael's Triumph of Galatea fresco on the wall. Or walking into the next room and looking up at the ceiling to find Guilio Romano's The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche. It still never fails to amaze me that these things are just here for the looking. They still fill me up with joy and are hugely gratifying, as is walking past a vendor at a market selling fruit, smiling and being confident enough say buongiorno, and being rewarded with a smile and a free peach for my trouble. I still absolutely love Rome.

The things that are really starting to bug me are small and would normally not have this huge influence on me, but right now they seem to be eating my life.

I dislike being surrounded at school by people who seem to have lost the PIN number to their brains. I know how that sounds, and I know it sounds hugely arrogant and unapologetically rude, but I really am not used to this amount of outright indifference. And it's coming from all sides, and since I have to go to school, I can't seem to escape from it.

I dislike that my roommates have never been introduced to the concept of washing dishes. I don't eat with them often, but most of the time come home later and cook dinner for myself, if I can find one clean plate and one clean pot among the detritus of four days of dirty, moldy, starting to grow eyes and glare at me dishes. Really, I just don't like how dirty they are. I'm not a meticulously neat person, but I put my foot down at dirty. And I define that as having to brush the bottoms of my feet clean of Cheerio crumbs and shredded parmesean cheese before I go to bed.

Italian women have this really uncanny knack for making you feel as though you are the lowest, most unintelligent glob of protoplasm that ever oozed its way out of the primordial soup. I am absolutely not a moron, and I know this, but whenever I have had to interact with an Italian woman (a huge generalization, but accurate to my limited experience) I start to feel like a tiny little speck of nothing that they can't believe they've deigned to bother with. I hate feeling like this.

I really am kind of homesick. Not outright homesickness, like, "I want to go back to the States because everything's better there, and I want to move to Texas and not remember one word of any foreign language and call French Fries 'Freedom Fries' and forget the rest of the world and its cultures exist, hey hand me a Big Mac, will ya?". Not like that. Mostly I'm homesick for things like people who are passionate and driven in their education, or if they're not, who pretend to be. I'm homesick for my friends at home, and the fact that I could, without ruining any tenuous living relationship, tell them to wash their goddamn dishes. I'm homesick for being communally grossed out by all of our hair stuck in globs along the hallway, and then doing something about it together. I'm homesick for professors who treat me like a colleague more than a cretin, who are genuinely eager to share their knowlege and who would consider it unprofessional to make me feel as though my ideas are worth less than the oxygen it took to voice them. Really, I'm only homesick by comparison.

Yes, it was naive of me to think that I might possibly love every moment I spend here. Hell, anyone who has met me knows that that was an impossibility from the word go. I guess the one good thing about this whole W curve thing sneaking up on little 'ol unsuspecting me is that I'm getting to experience all of these emotions completely authentically... and authenticity is always a good thing, even if it's authentically bad or unpleasant or annoying.

Please, if you're reading this, don't feel bad or concerned for me. I'm not languishing away in some dark, unkempt corner of my apartment, starving myself and sinking into a depression. No, the more accurate description would be that I go through the school week pretty much consistently annoyed, and then the weekend comes and I get to do the things that I really like to do (this weekend it's the Galleria Borghese and the Vatican Museums) without the things that are annoying me interfering (my roommates are pretty much gone when I come home on the weekends). And I have friends at school who are fun, and with whom I like to do things, but alone time is essentially non-existent here unless I'm out in the city by myself, so the annoyances can really build up the pressure.

Just needed to vent my spleen a little; hope you enjoy it. I have to say that, from your perspective, this instance of negativity now and then will probably make for more interesting reading (I'm flattering myself that you're interested at all...), and that's the way I intend to think of it from my perspective, too: this instance of negativity will only make for more interesting living.

AdVeniceTures

2009-09-27T02:49:00.000-07:00

You know in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, when you get that first shot of Lando's cloud city and you're like: "woah, that's sure an unlikely place for people to be living! I wonder how that place came to be?"... you don't? Okay. Well, pretend you do. That is exactly the feeling/thought I had when flying into Marco Polo Airport in Venezia. You fly basically out over the sea for a little while, then loop back around and land. But the kicker is: the entire time you're over what is presumably sea, there are lines and patches that look decidedly unnatural and seem to indicate human habitation.

While I have always understood the concept of Venice, in theory, I don't think you can ever really appreciate the tangible reality of the place until you've been there. And even then, it feels like Epcot Center a little, because the idea of the place is just so unlikely. But all of that is beside the point, because, unlikely as it might be, Venice is real, and that's where I spent the last two days.

Amanda, a girl from American University in D.C., invited me and five other girls to join her in the floating city this weekend. We bought our plane tickets, which only cost about 68 euro round-trip, last week. I don't think I'll ever be able to get over the concept of "Oh, let's catch a cheap 50-minute flight to Venice for the weekend, no big deal". We all had some ideas about what we wanted to see there, but nothing set in stone. This is precisely the way I like to do things. I think being too regimented in what you need to do in a place kills the discovery of it. It is sort of like visiting Disneyworld and focusing so much on which rides and attractions you need to get to that you miss the parade and the fireworks. It's the best part!

Okay, no more Disney metaphors (I think). We left Rome at 4.00 am on Friday and took off from Fiumicino at 6.10, which kinda sucked, but you do what you gotta do. We arrived in Venice around 7.00 and took a bus to the city proper. We then walked around taking pictures of everything and nothing (and GONDOLAS! Gah!) for awhile... I dragged everyone along with me into some churches, which they all accepted with good grace, before we took a water-bus called a vaporetto to San Marco Square to really start the tourist day off right.

Now, a word on water buses. Did you ever stop to wonder how the people in Venice get around, and do all the stuff that normal, non-aquatic people do? They don't all just float around in picture-esque gondolas all day singing "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie"... that would get old really fast for everyone involved. No, Venice has all the same vehicles as Rome, Kalamazoo, New York, Great Falls have, except all of them are boats. Buses, taxis, mail trucks, cop cars, even ambulances. No, this isn't surprising for a city to have all these things, it's just odd to see an ambulance zooming down a canal, bobbing on the waves and blaring its siren.

But anyway, when we got to San Marco Square, I was chomping at the bit to go to San Zaccaria, a church not too far away which houses an early Venetian Renaissance altarpiece by Bellini, which I've studied in class. I was itching to see some of the really great examples of Venetian High Renaissance art now that I was in Venice and could grasp the stylistic influences more fully. Ultimately, we split into two groups: those of us (me, Darrian and Amanda, who were good sports and didn't abandon me to my own devices) who were going to San Zaccaria and then to wherever life took us, and those heretics who were going to one of the modern art museums. This isn't a good time to talk about my feelings on modern art, and especially that in Italy, so I won't.

San Zaccaria was all that I could have hoped for, and while I didn't have nearly the breathless reaction that I've had to things before (specifically Michelangelo), I was able to give Darrian and Amanda a brief lesson on Venetian style and Renaissance symbolism. Shockingly, they were both very interested and asked more questions! I'm used to being told in some capacity to shut up when I start rhapsodizing, wether it be with glazed expressions or quick changes of subject. Even more unexpectedly, they told me that they wanted to go to the Accademia (the museum of Renaissance painting in Venice) if I would tell them more of what I knew. I was basically floored by this.

So we made our way from San Zaccaria, leisurely through San Marco square (which is INSANE. Way too many people, way too many pigeons) and through the winding streets of Venice, none of which has room for a car to drive even if there was a way it could get there. Incidentally, Venice is extremely quiet compared to Rome. It IS the absence of cars. It's incredible how much of a difference it makes. We got cut off sometimes when a street would just end in a canal, so we did a lot of doubling back, but we saw a whole lot of Venice this way.

We got to the Accademia, and when I told the admissions lady that I was an art history student, she let me in free! It was so cool, and so gratifying, since I don't think I'll ever MAKE any money with this major, at least I might SAVE some from time to time! As we walked through, I would point certain things out in paintings, mostly those symbolic traits and common occurances that appear throughout religious art, and give a brief explaination of why it was there and where it originated (if I knew; I tried my best not to make stuff up) and when we came upon them again, I would ask Amanda and Darrian what it meant and where we'd seen it before. This is precisely the kind of puzzle-cracking that got me fascinated with art in the first place, and it was amazingly exciting and gratifying to see two other people make the same connections with my help. I had so much fun. Teaching is possibly the best thing ever. Granted, my first official lesson teaching art history came with the added bonus of being able to stand right in front of a Titian, Bellini or Veronese while I was talking about it, but that was just the cherry on top of the exhileration of sharing my knowledge. Best thing about the trip, hands down.

Later, a few hours after we had left that museum and wandered around for a bit, Darrian and I were waiting for Amanda while she was in a public restroom, and this middle-aged American guy came up to me and said: "You really should be a tour guide. I've never learned that much in a museum before. We were listening in on your tour. You know a lot." Wow. There's just nothing better than that. I thanked him and we talked for awhile. His lucky kids (the oldest of whom is twelve) are getting to experience Europe at a very young age. I really hope they can enjoy some of the incredible memories they'll make here; their dad gave me one that I'll treasure forever.

We bummed around for a little while longer, walking along the Rialto and exclaiming over all the beauty, surreality, blah blah blah, and then met the other 4 for dinner. We went to this little hole in the wall with a mostly local clientelle, and ate delicious seafood. What better thing to eat when sitting in the middle of the sea? Afterward, we went to this gellateria that Casey had heard about in her guidebook, and ate amazing, possibly some of the best I've had yet, gelatto. Green tea and ginger? Yes please.

We took two buses out of Venice to get to our hostel in Fusina. There was a little bit of a hectic patch where Casey failed to make it into our second bus before the door slammed in her face and we zoomed off. That was a bit stressful. But we finally all made it safe and sound to the hostel, Camping Fusina, where we shared tiny cabins which each slept two people. It was loud, and there were many many Austrailians drinking at the local pub, and all of them were basically turning the place into a giant shitshow, but we all konked out pretty fast. Waking up at 3.45 and going to sleep at midnight will do that. And really, the hostel was very pleasant, and not at all the horror show I was expecting. The Austrailians were more funny than anything, and, I'm not going to lie, the boys were nice to look at, too.

Saturday morning we split up into our groups again, with me, Amanda and Darrian going to Murano to basically lick the windows in front of the glassware, and the other four going to yet another modern art museum. The boat ride to Murano was so cool, and the island itself is very very beautiful, but not as beautiful as the stuff they make there. I won't try to explain Murano glass, because if you don't already know what I'm talking about, my explanation won't help you.

We went back to Venice to explore the Doge's Palace, home of the largest oil painting ever done (it's no giant ball of twine, but what're you gonna do?), then had lunch at another seafood restaurant, where Amanda and I ordered what we thought were 33 cent beers. Turns out the menu had a typo-ish thing, and our Italian obviously didn't help clear it up, because that was the size of the beer, not the price. Still, it tasted soooo good after walking around that I really didn't mind (too much) paying 5 euro for it. Oh well.

We met the others at Alaska (the gelatteria) again for one last hurrah before leaving Venice. At the airport, going through security, I got stopped because I'm an idiot and had brought my leatherman with me. I didn't get stopped in Rome, so it didn't even cross my mind until the security guy beckoned me over to him. Well, faced with the prospect of leaving my Christmas present from Mom and Dad behind in Venice, I began to cry. It's true what they say about Italian men: you cry in front of them, and you get what you want. He told me to go out and check my backpack and he would let me back through security with no problem. So, I'm out 22 euro for the bag check, but it serves me right for being an idiot.

Our plane was delayed half an hour, but that's nothing compared to my normal effect on aircraft of any kind, so I didn't mind. The French woman sitting next to Christine in the waiting area did ask her if Darrian and I had been smoking marijuana when we began, in our befuddled and sleep-deprived state, to recite "The Mysterious Ticking Noise" amid giggles and snorts that come from around 10 hours of sleep in two days. Bitch.

But we made it home to Rome around 11, and I immediately fell into my bed and slept hard until this morning. I'm off to the botanical gardens for the afternoon. Venice was an amazing, revalatory experience, but I'm glad to be back in familiar surroundings where I know where I am and where I'm going. I guess, now that I've had my first teaching experience, in more ways than one.

A Word About Professors

2009-09-23T03:28:00.000-07:00

I am of the opinion that how much you get out of a class is directly contingent upon the person teaching it. Having been born into a family chock full of teachers (and planning to become some semblance of one myself, someday), I'm always interested to experience the teaching style of any new professor, and how it works for me and how it doesn't. This semester marks the first time since winter quarter of my first year at K that I haven't known anything about the professor going into a class. At our very small, tightly-knit school, one can usually just shout out a professor's name in the cafeteria and chances are that someone in your immediate vicinity will have some helpful information on how to deal with him or her. So, essentially, I was flying completely blind coming into this. Not something I'm used to.

Being at an English speaking university in a country that does not speak English will get you some very fascinating scholars. A mix of ex-pats from all over the world who have made their home in Rome, and some Italians and even some native Romani who speak beautiful English and seem to know absolutely everything. My professors are a pretty comprehensive mix of these things, and since I haven't said a whole lot about the (formal) scholastic part of this adventure, I thought I would give some info about my classes and their very diverse group of leaders.

Roman Imperial Art and Architecture: Monday 9-12 with Dr. Jan Gadeynne

There's a reason that I love going to school in Rome, and this class is perhaps the best summation of that reason. None of the classes will ever be taught in a classroom-- every single class is on-site somewhere in Rome. Professor Gadeynne is Belgian, I think, but he's lived in Rome for a lot of his professional life, and no wonder. The guy is a positive fountain of information of all kinds on the Roman Empire. We were standing on an overlook out onto the forums of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and he could illustrate just from the scattered ruins just how the temples and malls looked. And I could imagine them! It was actually a very cool experience. He's very funny, too. He gives people who are late a lot of crap and his favorite segue seems to be "and all this shit I've just told you...". I love professors who swear. I don't know why. He walks very quickly, and seems to be impressed by the fact that I can handily keep up with him while the rest of the class is half a block behind us. Thanks, Mom! ;)

Intensive Elementary Italian: Monday-Thursday 3.40pm-5.05pm with Prof. Maurizio Mamorstein

It's an Italian class. And our Professore is an American (born in New Jersey to Italian immigrant parents... and yeah, I can't explain the Mamorstein) who moved back to Italy around 20 years ago and lives there pretty much full time. He speaks beautiful Italian, which is very easy to understand, given its similarities to French. The only complaint I would have about Maurizio is that he can very accurately explain and illustrate concepts, but he doesn't let us turn to eachother and talk, so I don't feel as confident as I might otherwise feel with using the Italian I know in real life here. I have this class everyday, which is good for my comprehension, but bad for my patience. I won't explain, because I'll sound mean and judgey. This is probably my most helpful (immediately) class.

Mythology: Monday & Wednesday 5.15pm-6.40pm with Prof. Manuela Giordano

Well, you would think that this calss would be fantastic, fascinating and really useful for the study of Baroque art... but it's a little disappointing. Our Prof is Italian, and while she speaks great English, she also has this way of making you feel like you're standing in front of a firing squad each time she asks you a question, which are always very vague, and if you don't answer in exactly the terms she would have used, even if you use synonyms... she just has a way of making you feel like an idiot. Now, for some odd reason I seem to know a whole lot about this particular subject without really trying, which means that I rarely look like a dumbass, but instead end up answering all the questions because everyone else is too intimidated by her vague questions to which she expects exacting answers to even volunteer. She also goes off on tangents that have very little to do with her subject, like proxemics. We spent twenty minutes in class on proxemics before getting back to Apollo. Oh well, hopefully I'll pick something up. If I don't get a concussion from losing control and slamming my head against the desk first.

Villas, Palaces and Gardens in the Renaissance and Baroque: Wednesday 9-12 with Dr. Paul Gwynne and Prof. Daria Borghese

Yup. Her name really is Borghese. Like the Popes. And the Gardens. And the Villa. And yup, that's not a mistake. She's Italian; the sweetest person and most knowledgable about her subject (specifically gardens). Dr. Gwynne is British, and awesome, and very, very sarcastic at the same time that he's scary smart. Possibly my favorite thing about him is the way he pronounces RenAAYYYYYYsahnce and Barack. Yeah, there's an artistic epoch named after the President of the United States. Who knew? This is another one of those classes that is taught exclusively on site. Yesterday we went to three churches, all built in the 13th century, and we visited a garden in a cloister of a nunnery. I accidentally made Dr. Gwynne aware of the fact that I aspire to teach art history, much as he does, and now he's gotten into the habit of grilling me at each new site about my analysis, and calling me Professor. Given his characteristic sarcasm, I don't know quite how to take this. But the class is fascinating, and I don't think I'll ever get over how cool it is to sit in a monastic garden while learning about monastic gardens...

Magna Grecia: Tuesday 6.50pm-8.15pm with Dr. Paul Gwynne

It's a class for the 9 Kalamazoo College girls that Dr. Gwynne himself has described as "basically an excuse to go to Sicily for a week." So more on that when we go to Sicily.

Art For Art's Sake: Tuesday & Thurday 2.05-3.30pm with Dr. Terry Kirk

I'm pretty much obsessed with this class. There's nothing really like it at K, and it's exactly what I feel has been missing in my education. It's basically a theory and methods class discussing the WHY and the HOW of the discipline of Art History. I've had some experience with the different schools of criticism, but only practically, and never in theory. The class is a lot of reading, a LOT of reading, but all of it is interesting. Also, praise be, the other around 9 kids in the class seem to actually like what they're doing and are happy to be able to discuss it competently with others who are just as passionate. It's my only class here that is full of people who actually look and act like they want to be there every class. The reason for our enthusiasm lies in the person of Professor Terry Kirk, our white polo-shirt collar poppin'-too much energy havin'-like, five languages speakin'-tiny pencil thin mustache right on top of his lip havin' brilliant leader. The guy has so much energy, and knows so much, that it's impossible not to feel energized, but at the same time mentally annihilated when you leave that class. He's a fervent supporter of the Socratic method, which means that there's no nodding off. Ever. Unless you want to look really dumb. Makes for some great discussion, which I thrive on.

All in all, it should be a pretty interesting semester. I'm taking the equivalent of 22 credit hours (whatever that means) and 6 classes in lieu of K's usual three. Who knows how this will go? Should be fun to find out!

Museums, Picnics and Umbria Again

2009-09-20T01:32:00.000-07:00

We, meaning Casey, Michelle, Christine, Rachel and I, decided that Friday would be a good day to go on a picnic at the Villa Borghese. These gardens, I do believe, put Central Park to shame both in sheer size and beauty... well, they're in Italy, so that's always a step in the right direction. Anyway, we met in front of the Panthaeon at 5.30 to walk up to the Spanish Steps and into the Gardens.

I had spent the entire day in museums; my Mythology class met at Centro Montemartini, which is an old industrial complex in which the entire collection is Greek and Roman statue. The juxtaposition between the marble and the pipes, rotaries, etc. is actually really compelling and has this really interesting aesthetic.

On Wednesday my Villas, Palaces and Gardens in the Renaissance and Baroque (hereafter: Villas) class went to the national gallery at Palazzo Massimo. This ticket was actually a little more spendy than usual, at 7 euro (still not a lot, but when you think of the exchange...), but the cool thing was that it got you into the four sites that comprise the museo nazionale d'arte antica (antique art), so I decided that after Montemartini, I would visit the two I hadn't seen yet (I visited the Baths of Diocletian after class on Wednesday). Both Crypta Belbi and Palazzo Altemps were very interesting, but really: I'm a Renaissance/Baroque girl, so I think I've spent enough time in the company of headless statues for a good long while. Incidentally, while it might have at first seemed to have been something of a dream day, walking around in museums for around eight hours is not the delight that it might seem. Things start to look the same. But I didn't have to pay for any of the tickets, so I didn't feel so bad if by the end I was just walking past some of the Great Wonders of the Hellenistic Tradition. Oh well. Not really my deal.

On the way to the Panthaeon to meet the others for dinner, I stumbled (yeah, I do that alot. It's fun to be surprised!) upon a church that I must have passed a good ten times without looking at it, let alone inside it. I don't know what compelled me to go in this time, maybe the fact that I had a good twenty minutes of waiting around in the tourist jam to look forward to, but I did. I was walking around and admiring the lovely decoration and marveling at the number of votive candles these places must go through a day, when a glint of bronze caught my eye. Now, normally this wouldn't intrigue me, but this was only a glint of bronze, and it was on a marble statue. It made me think similtaneously of John Ashcroft covering the semi-nude figures in the Department of Justice (didn't want to be photographed in front of another boob) and of the Church fig-leafing everything that looked like skin... ever. They did it to Bernini, Michelangelo, Ghiberti... bananas. Anywho, I went to have a closer look at this statue, it turned out to be, in fact, Il Christo by Michelangelo. And the little scrap of bronze is covering the most high God's nether-regions. Man, but I love the contradictions posed by this town. Of course, as happens whenever I am presented with Michelangelo, and especially when it happens unexpectedly, I plopped down on the steps and gazed adoringly for about ten minutes before realizing that I was going to be late for meeting everyone, and put my eyes back in my head and headed out.

Our picnic was beautiful, and afterward we watched the sunset from the top of the hill on which Villa Borghese is situated, the Pincian. Interestingly, the sun sets right behind the Vatican from that vantage point, so the view was breathtaking and a little surreal. We wandered around the Spanish Steps and Via del Corso (the shopping district) for awhile afterward, finally taking a bus back to Trastevere from Piazza Venezia, the site of VE, the Forum, etc.

Saturday was devoted to Spoleto, a little town on the way to Assisi which is famous for its theater festival. Casey works at the corresponding Spoleto Festival in Charleston, so she wanted to bum around and see what the real place was like. Well, Michelangelo and I seem to be playing a game of hide and seek. In the Duomo in Spoleto, there's a little chapel in which one of the main prophetic figures is a blatant, unapologetic and really not very skillful (but still better than I could do in a million years) knockoff of the Libyan Sybil from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. She's really quite a distinctive figure, and there she was, in imitation, bold as you please. It made me laugh. He just seems to find me wherever I am.

We at delicious pizza at lunch, and then took an impromtu hike through the wooded mountains surrounding Spoleto on some little trails that ran from the end of this old Roman bridge. Breathtaking views once again... Umbria reminds me of western Montana and Middle Earth wrapped up in one irresistably Italian package.

The only downside to the day was that when I got home, fate decided that last night would be a primo time for an asthma attack... ugh. So I'm sitting here wheezing my lungs out while trying to study and do some homework before classes tomorrow. My strategy includes not moving too much, my inhaler, a hot shower and a lot of cursing the changing seasons. Wish me luck!

Home Rhymes With...

2009-09-17T03:35:00.001-07:00

It's been a long time since I've had to acclimate to living in a completely new place... the last time was when I went to college. I guess I had forgotten how easy it is to feel at home somewhere, if you really love where you are. I don't speak the language here, I've only been to one other town in the country, and I am continually bewildered by the odd, idiosynchratic nature of the Italian people, but nevertheless I feel very at home here. I have favorite haunts and plans for my days off, I have a preferred gelatto shop and a favorite pizzaria, I've made friends with the proprietor of an English language bookstore... I recognize people who I see walking their dogs in the park, for pity's sake!

Some of the immediate wonder of being thrown headfirst into a place I've essentially mythologized for a large part of my life has worn off, and I'm starting to feel as though I might be living in a real, breathing city, not just a tourist attraction. Some of the urgency to see everything all at once has worn off, and I'm content to just be here, surrounded not only by the Circus Maximus and the Colloseum, the Vatican and the Roman Forum, but also Termini station, where people have to take buses to work each day, and the Todis supermarket down the street, where we have to buy food, since woman does not live by history alone... although that would really be nice for my bank account if I could.

Anywho. I guess the gist of it is: live somewhere else. I know most of you who might be checking this blog are in the process of doing that right now, and those of you who aren't have probably done it already, but still. I think the most important thing I've discovered while acclimating myself to this new place where I am still essentially the consummate outsider is that our comfort zones are a lot more elastic than we think they are. You just have to learn not to be afraid of looking like a jackass (which is certainly my most constant passtime) and to embrace the reality of somewhere, not just the nice postcard idealization of it. Because that's like buying Wonderbread when you're surrounded by ciabatta.

Assisi

2009-09-13T04:35:00.001-07:00

On Thursday my friend Casey from American University in Washington, D.C. and I decided that we would take the train to Assisi on Saturday and spend the day walking around and exploring one of the quintessentially 'Italian' towns that lie within a day's distance of Rome (not that Rome isn't quintessentially Italian, you understand, but Assisi looks like Franco Zeffereli's wet dream, and in fact, it's where he filmed Brother Sun, Sister Moon. An appropriate place to film St. Francis' biopic, no?)

We met at school at 7 and headed to Termini, where we stood staring confusedly at the arrivals/departures boards for a few minutes after purchasing our tickets from a friendly robot, trying to figure out which platform we needed to go to. Well, we figured it out with about ten minutes to spare, and boarded the train headed for Perugia at Platform 3.

Much to our chagrin, we couldn't find any two seats together that weren't occupied by someone's carry-on luggage. We tried three compartments before finding two seats, and sat down to enjoy the ride. Now, I had heard some horror stories from some vetrans of Trenitalia that indicated that we needed to validate our tickets or risk a good tongue lashing and some hefty fines from a curmudgeonly Italian train conductor. So I clumsily asked the woman sitting across the aisle from us dove validato (which is, incidentally, definitely not a word) bigletti? Luckily, she spoke more English than I speak Italian, and she directed us to the little yellow boxes that would punch our tickets... all the way at the other end of the platform. This just as the whistle blew. A little cliche, but we sprinted down the platform, punched our tickets like we were in a one-woman relay race and screamed back up to our compartment as the conductors were preparing to shut the doors. An exciting way to start an exciting day!

We spent the train ride to Assisi with our faces plastered to the windows as the Umbrian countryside flashed by the windows. It actually reminded me more than a little of Montana, with the mountains covered in trees and the farmland... it was oddly familiar and therefore comforting. The only difference is, Montana doesn't often have beautiful, picturesque medieval towns perched precariously on the sides of mountains... we just don't.

It was beautiful and sunny when we got to Assisi around 10:00, where we took a bus from the train station at the bottom of the hill to the medieval central (and admittedly VERY tourist/pilgrim heavy) town at the top of the hill. We decided, mostly at my urging, to dispense with buying a map and just see where we found ourselves. This actually turned out to be a good idea, and not at all risky, since Assisi is labeled on just about every street corner telling you where to find what.

Our first stop was St. Francesco, the basillica where St. Francis of Assisi is buried. To call this church beautiful would be the understatement of the century. It's beyond lovely outside, and when you go inside... there just are no words. Late medieval and early Renaissance fresco everywhere. It's so colorful and ornate (and ironically, given St. Francis's belief in the glory of God through nature, totally counter-intuitive to his message). There's a theory in Art History that has yet to be conclusively proven that Giotto, the great Tuscan master of the early Renaissance, is the painter who depicted the Life of St. Francis in the bottom chapel. Well, I'm not very educated in the inticacies of connosseiurship, but to me, you'd have to be blind as well as an idiot to not realize that this work is Giotto's. So it was a thrill for me to be able to see that.

Casey was excited, as a theater tech major, that there were some carpenters outside building a stage for a musical taking place that night, Chiara di Dio, about the life of St. Chiara. She was flipping out and wondering if she could purchase a house right then and there and stay in Assisi forever. I can't say I wasn't tempted by the same desire.

The city, with it's little winding streets and alleys that are actually just staircases, is so beautiful, with ivy and flowers growing all over the buttery stone of the buildings... but the thing that makes Assisi so incredible, besides the unbelievable amount of history of political, artistic and religious importance present in the town, are the views. I've never seen anything quite like them. Looking out over the Umbrian countryside, through the mountains and above and the blue blue sky populated by expansive masses of cumulus clouds... it's like a dream. I can't explain it any better than that. It was like flying. All day, each time we rounded a corner and were treated to a new vista, I couldn't help but gasp. Though it might be funny for me to say, given my chosen profession and area of specialty, I think I agree with St. Francis about where God can really be found.

We ate lunch gaping like fish out over one of these beautiful views from a terrace at a restaurant close to the top of the hill. The food was delicious, but we had an epic battle with two wasps, in which I and my chosen weapon of a fork ultimately prevailed. We decided that there is a reason why you're given two forks when dining al fresco: one is for bees, and the other is for the delicious food. I had linguine in a cream sauce with salmon. The revalation of this dish: black pepper. It actually tastes like something! Not only that, it actually made the dish. I will never be disparaging or underestimate its powers again. Casey had lamb, and that was also wonderful, and we split a liter of the house red. When we got up from the table, we were a little giddy from the view and the food, but I don't think the wine helped, either.

We giggled our way to a piazza where, with the help of some gelatto, we soon decided we were up to climbing to the Rocco Maggiore, the old fortress that protected Assisi. Lots of terrifying little staircases with steep and well-worn steps, and wind that would make Great Falls blush with inadequacy... we had a grand old time. After visiting some of the other churches around Assisi, we spent the rest of the evening people watching (and in Casey's case, stage-hand watching) by San Francesco, watching the sun go down, bright pink, behind the mountains.

We took the bus back to the bottom of the hill and decided, with the irony which make life worth living, that our trip to this authentic little town in the heart of Umbria would not be complete without a trip to McDonalds. Yeah... but we spent so much on lunch that it seemed silly to splurge on dinner. Also, McDonalds in Italy is so much classier. There were long gossamer-looking curtains at the windows and culturally significant artwork on the walls... McDonalds in the States needs to step up its game. Also: patates West. Waffle fries. Why the heck don't we have those in the States. Delicious.

We spent the train ride home watching The Office on Casey's iPod and yawning from all the stairs, the wine and the emotional highs of the day. Then we took the bus back through centro, passing along the way the still not-quite-real site of the Colloseum illuminated at night. I came back to the apartment and plopped into bed and didn't move until the church dismissal bells woke me at 11 this morning. I love Italy.

Lists Part Due

2009-09-09T13:14:00.000-07:00

Things That Make Rome Less Than Perfecto

1. Cigarettes-- And no, it's not just the Europeans. An entire contingent, what feels like at least 80% of the AUR population smokes. I think it's interesting that Americans get to Europe and suddenly are all uninhibited about this disgusting habit that many in the US probably guilt them about, so they downplay it. Not here. No, people will blow smoke right in your face, brazen as you please. It's gross, it's unhealthy, and it's making my inhaler my almost-constant companion. Now, I'm not that naive. I expected this coming to Europe, but it still grosses me out to no end. I'm proposing a new health initiative in which if you light a cigarette within 100 feet of me, and 500 if I'm downwind, I get to walk up to you and punch you as hard as I can in the body part of my choice for as long as it would take you to smoke that cigarette. I think it's only fair that you should know some semblance of the pain that inhaling your filthy second hand causes, and it might give you a premonition of how uncomfortable lung cancer is going to be. So just do us both a favor and stop. End of tirade.

2. Grafitti-- I'm actually getting used to this now, but when I got here I was astonished at the amount of grafitti all over everything, trees and sometimes timeless landmarks of human history included. I guess I should have expected it; grafitti is, after all, an Italian word. It made me sad at first, but I'm beginning to see it (optimistically and perhaps wrongly) as just another way in which the artistic and political history of this city is constantly manifesting itself, as it has done for centuries, millenia even.

3. Italians Who Insist On Speaking English To You-- Okay, bub. I can fully appreciate and respect that when the starving masses are practically knocking over your counter in hoards of millions to get a gelatto that it might be more expedient for you to speak English to the dumb Americana and get her out of the way. That's legit. But when I am the only person in the shop, trying valliantly to speak this language that I think is beautiful but am still in only the infantile, if not younger, stages of speaking, I wish you would let me try to figure it out. I know from personal experience how frustrating it can be to try to have an interaction with someone who is totally ignorant of your language, but if they're making a concerted and visible effort to improve, I think we should all have a little more empathy and admiration for that. You speak both languages, why can't I? That said, I am getting better, and so I think the more confident and less puppy-who-just-got-kicked look on my face is making people a little more amenable to letting me test my wings.

4. Obnoxiously Drunk American Kids-- These annoy me in the States, too, but I get positively mortified when I see it here. I understand more than I ever have why certain stereotypes are applied to American kids, and it makes me cringe to think that someone might ever make that assumption about me. Hence my concerted effort to treat alcohol as the Italians do: as an enjoyable and natural part of life and culture, and not merely as a means for me to make very bad decisions that I will then recount (provided I remember them) very loudly the next time I'm in a public place. Whoopee.

5. Being the Hermione-- I'd forgotten somewhat, after two years at K, just exactly what it feels like to make an observation in class that you think is fairly standard and not particularly brilliant and have everyone in the class stare at you like you just started speaking Venutian. I now sort of take it as a given that there will be at least a mildly interesting and in-depth class discussion in which people are willing to voice their opinions and analysis, and so it's disconcerting when that just doesn't happen. That said, I adore my professors on the whole, and all of my classes seem like they're going to be not only fascinating, but also really instrumental in my pursuit of a higher understanding of the practice and theory of art history, and also of writing. In short, I'm really jazzed about class, not so jazzed about having to censor myself a little for fear of looking like an obnoxious know-it-all.

These things aren't so serious that they're ruining this amazing experience for me; far from it. They're just sort of things I've noticed that I've been thinking about, and I think they're just as telling of what life is like here as all my gushing about famous works I've seen and idyllic moments on hilltops I've had. So there you are.

1st Day of School and Other Adventures

2009-09-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Well yesterday, on the first Sunday that I'm in Catholic Disneyworld, (if you'll forgive the extended metaphor) I thought I might as well stand in line at Space Mountain. So, I went to the Vatican. I just decided, since it was Sunday morning, that I would go to Mass at S. Maria in Trastevere and then just go where the bells took me. Poetic, I know. So I walked along the river, enjoying the sun, etc. when I came to a bridge which I took for (given the gigantic marble angels every two feet) Ponte Sant'Angelo. Across the bridge was Castello Sant'Angelo, which I have fondly dubbed the Pope's Pimpin' Party Pad (BLASPHEMER!) given its previous uses... and it's previous occupants. Just Google Roderigo Borgia/Alexander IV. You'll get it.

Anywho, I headed up the street toward the Basillica, supressing wonder, but also rather amused at how many tourist shops there were along the side of the streets, and at how many people were standing with their arms spread wide as if they were in front of Cinderella's Castle. Seriously, I don't think anyone in St. Peter's Square, or inside the Basillica when I went inside, was paying the least bit attention to anything around them. No one was really LOOKING at anything... just taking pictures of themselves and their friends in front of some Pope's tomb and then moving on like cattle. I call these peices of work Pope-arazzi. And really, all they're good for is the clever play on words.

But in all honestly, St. Peter's, while incredibly gorgeous and awe inspiring in its grandiosity, is one of the least holy places I think I've ever been. It doesn't seem like a church, and it doesn't feels like a museum. It does, in point of fact, feel most like an amusment park. This kind of made me sad. With all that incredible art and architecture created by devout (or not so devout but well-paid) men in the name of worshipping their God, to have it turn into some kind of mockery of itself and a hot tourist destination a la the Eiffel Tower seems really detrimental to the message. Ugh. Anyway...

Speaking of devout men who created beautiful art in the name of Christianity... there were a bunch of the Pope-arazzi sardined around a glass encased chapel at the back of the church, so I went to sneak in and have a look. Really, famous and beloved (especially by me) works of art should not be allowed to sneak up on me like that. I literally had to go stand in a corner and take slow deep breaths to keep myself from hyperventilating. I, like, legitimately started hyperventilating. I had no idea that Michelangelo's Pieta was in the church and not the museum. It just popped out of nowhere, and I almost had a heart attack.

For the rest of the day I just bopped around here there and everywhere... I ended up walking down by the Colloseum and around Circus Maximus... which was incredibly beautiful at twilight, my favorite time of day here. I ate gelatto for dinner, which I don't recommend doing every night, but it was delicious, so I allowed it this once. And then I came home and had wine and chatted with my roommates about school, etc.

My first class today was at 9, and a two minute bus ride from our house. That's nice, but I think that until it gets too cold I'm just going to get up a little earlier and walk. I really love walking. But it was Art and Architecture of Imperial Rome, taught by this scary smart Belgian dude... none of our classes takes place on AUR's campus. All of them are on site. Cha-ching!

I had a super long break between when that class got out at noon and when my Intensive Italian course started at 3:40, so I went to sit in my lovely park that I like so much. I read a new book that I got from an English language bookstore in Tras that gives you 20% off if you're a student. I'm sure the cute little old British dude who runs it and I are going to be tight by December. But Italian was great... the prof's name is Mauritzio Mamorstein. Yeah. Ethnic fusion, anyone? He's very funny and speaks beautiful Italian. Today he taught us some of the 'Italian sign language' that the very Mediterranean Italians use in their everyday speech. Some of it wasn't very polite, but good to know in case we're on the street and are getting verbally abused, I suppose. Hopefully I won't sound like such an ass after a few weeks of class with him.

Then I had Mythology, in which I am most certainly the Hermione Granger. Why does that always happen to me? Oh well, I'm going to get the most out of this experience, so if everyone else in the class wants to sit and listen to the prof and I have a conversation, good on them. I'm going to discuss, and the fashion and accounting majors are just going to have to keep up. (Side note: I don't mean to be disparaging about either fashion or accounting. I'm positive that I'm rubbish at both of those things. But it is frustrating when you're trying to discuss the theory of myth making and all you hear besides your own voice is crickets).

Tonight I made myself gnocchi (yum!) and Christine, Michelle and Rachel came over to walk around Tras with me. They live up on the other side of Gianucuolo, in a rather less quintessentially Italian neighborhood, so I told them I would show them around. We walked along the river and through the Piazza S. Maria, etc... it was fun, in no small part because I knew exactly where I was going the whole time. That was encouraging.

Well, more class tomorrow... I won't have a full schedule to report on until Thursday, since I have different classes everyday. I did find out today that I'm taking three more credit hours than anyone else from K (6 classes in lieu of our usual 3). I don't know how I managed to do that without them noticing, but since I like all my classes so far, I'm not about to tell on myself and risk having to drop something that I really should know about. Yay learning!

I'm. Such. A. Huge. Dork.

Lists

2009-09-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Things I'm Obsessed With In Rome

1. Walking- I haven't taken public transportation since I got here, and have just walked everywhere, from school to the center (the Forum, VE, etc.), up and down the Gianucuolo, and all around Trastevere. I saw the Pantheon from the top of the hill yesterday, so I have a pretty good idea of where I'm headed tomorrow.

2. Roman Water Fountains- I talked about them before, but seriously, they're becoming a problem for me. I leave the house every morning with two full water bottles in my backpack and by the time I get to the fountain at the end of our street, Via Mamelli, I have to fill one and then take a few sips from the fountain for good measure! I just love the fact that this city will provide you not only with cool things to look at and tasty food, but cold, delicious and FREE beverages at any time of the day or night, no questions asked. Moral: they rock my world.

3. Breathtaking Vistas- Seriously, this one you can't escape from. Rome is a hilly city, and I happen to live at the base of and go to school on the highest hill there is. Meaning I haven't gone more than a few hours yet without having to stop and appreciate the grandiosity of the city and the mountains beyond. It takes a little more time getting places when you're practically required by the view to admire it, but I'm willing to eat the few minutes I spend gaping like a fish.

4. Foliage- I've never ever been to a place where oak trees and their deciduous brethren grow in the very same soil, right next to gigantic weird looking pine trees, which in turn share the same square footage with palm trees! It's insanity. Rome is a paradox of botanical life, from the leafed trees that are, in early September, starting to lose some of their leaves, to the verdant oasis, indeed Eden, that I found today (which conveniently enough is right across the street from AUR) in which not only are all the trees still green, but some of the vines are alive with crazy fuschia flowers and little purple violets grow around the fountains. It feels like September but it looks like May. My northern Northern Hemisphere sensibilities don't understand this, but I love it nonetheless.

5. Art- Please refer to above posts and explanations involving Vulcans for the full extent of this one. Need I say more?

6. Pizza- Duh. You go into any of the little pizzarias which positively infest Trastevere and can get a delicious hunk of homemade foccaccia with fresh cheeses and delicious succulent veggies freshly cut and baked and wrapped in a walking-ready piece of parchment specifically when you order it? Yes please.

7. People Watching- It's fun to see if I can differentiate between the tourists and the Romani, but also to observe how different the vibes are at different times of day. Life here, and the activities which make up that life, are certainly regimented based on the time of day, and I'm beginning to understand that better from watching people. Hopefully I'll soon fall into that rhythm once I have a real life here instead of just a front row seat.

8. Roman Pick-Up Lines- If these guys know you're American (which they do... it's like they can smell it on you, no matter how much you might try to fit in) they'll use these insane pick up lines like: Ciao, Bella. You want to ride on my Vespa? The sad part is, thanks to Roman Holiday and the Lizzie McGuire Movie, that probably works more often than it doesn't.

9. Centrally-Located Housing- I'm not in my apartment very often, but it's nice to know that it's just a short walk from everything that I'm going to repeatedly want to make pilgramages to. We're only about twenty minutes on foot from the center, and I can't imagine, once I know how to get there, that it'll be more than an hour by foot to the Vatican. More on that estimation once I've tried the walk. Also, it's only ten or fifteen minutes to school. Granted, all of that is uphill, so I am always a little more sweaty than I would like to be, but who cares? I'm here to see stuff, and that doesn't include the back of the bus seat in front of me.

10. Twilight- No, not the movie, not the book. Screw vampires, actually. The time of day. It's kind of a magical time of day everywhere, but here, when I'm sitting in Piazza S. Maria and just watching all the people just beginning to come alive for the night while the sky becomes this really beautiful (and if you were an artist in 15th Century Florence, super spendy) lapis lazuli color, it's so peaceful and so contenting that I just can't help but look forward to it each afternoon.

A Nearly Perfect Day

2009-09-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, I have achieved the nearly perfect day. For me, anyway. I've always had a flair for the melodramatic, but I can literally feel myself falling in love with this city. I've been here three days, and each of those three days I've been looking over my shoulder checking for the movie cameras. There's just so much life and energy here, and I find myself really wanting to talk to the people, and being ticked at how little Italian I know. I can't wait for school to start just so I can learn to speak better, so I can feel more a part of the scene rather than just a passive observer.

Anyway, the day. I decided that I wanted to wander in a different direction today, down toward the center of town. I walked along the Tev, enjoying the early morning traffic. The Romani use their horns with gusto, even at 8:30 in the morning. It was raining when I left, which cut the humidity nicely, and cooled me off after a stuffy night in our otherwise great apartment. Walking through old Trastevere is starting to feel more familiar, and I have landmarks that make the winding maze of streets less intimidating. I crossed the river at one of the pedestrian bridges, the end of which afforded a great view of the Vatican, and as tempted as I was to turn around and run screaming "MICHELANGELO!" at the top of my lungs (think the hysteria the Jonas Brothers induce in 12 year old girls and you're just about there). It's actually a really good thing I didn't.

I stumbled upon some old ruins that were being excavated and through which a path had been cleared, so I walked it. It's astounding (and many others have said this before me... nothing new here) how the old OLD and the new meld so seamlessly in Rome. Everyone passes by these treasures of human history like they were a hot dog stand or something. Well, maybe I'm exaggerating, but the city treats its history with such nonchalance that you can't help but feel wonder that is only heightened by the sheer normalcy of it all.

I continued walking up toward the Victor Emmanuel "Wedding Cake" (you think the French don't like the Eiffel Tower? Heh. Kid stuff), which is really VERY conspicious due not only to its height but to the fact that it's made out of gleaming white marble, while everything around it for miles is made of more golden or grey stone. But before I got there, I suddenly remembered, with quickening excitement, that the VE is right next to this old medieval church which is right next to... yes! The Campadoglio! The Capitoline Hill! When some hoity toity ambassador from somewhere came to Rome in the late 16th Century, he said that he wanted to see the birthplace of Rome's glorious history: The Capitoline Hill. Only problem: The only stuff up there were a few old crusty medieval buildings and some sheep. Embarassing. So who did il Papa get to design a new and grander piazza worthy of la citta eterna?

You guessed it! MICHELANGELO! Basically, it was like if you were a big time Trekkie, with like surgically enhanced Vulcan ears, etc. and someone showed you the Enterprise. Not a copy, not a set, but the real space ship. What would you do? You'd cry. And that is precisely what I did as I stood in the middle of the oval-in-a-trapezoid-NOT-a-circle-in-a-square courtyard and looked up at the Pallazzo della Conservatore. I looked like a psycho grinning idiot with tears in my eyes. And to make things even better, inside this building and its twin is a museum. And it's got a lot of really incredible, renouned works, including some of the earliest Carravaggios, an entire room of Correggio and the Torso Belvedere as well as the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelieus, a copy of which stands in the courtyard outside as its centerpiece and which was only allowed to survive the Counter-Reformation because the big Catholic muckety-mucks thought it was Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome... are my Vulcan ears showing?

Anywho, I could go on forever about the museum, but I'll continue to after, when I actually did make it all the way around the Wedding Cake and to the Forum, Thaedran's Column, the Arch of Constantine... you could say that I cried again, and you would be right. I couldn't help noticing, while I was in my reverential quandry, so high up on Cloud 9 that I could basically see all the way to 568 BC, that not everyone shares my awe of what the hand of man hath wrought... or whatever. While I was in the museum and then wandering around in the Forum, etc., I actually heard people complaining "Okay, we've been here twenty minutes! Come on! We're already half an hour behind schedule!"

For real. Snap a photo and move on. I don't understand that. You're in a country where everything shuts down from one to three each afternoon. Where do you possibly have to go that's so important that you can't savor this experience? I think that's what I'm learning most about the way the Romani, and maybe all the rest of Italy too, do things. You can have an incredible energy, blare your horn loudly at a Vespa while talking on your cell phone on your way to work, but still take time to really luxuriate in something good. Wine, art, an afternoon at the Forum... listen to me. I sound like an idiot. I've only been here three days, so what the hell do I know? There's just such a vibe here... I don't know. It seems like the Italians take time to really DO things, SEE and TASTE them. It seems to me a richer way to live.

I went to orientation for school in the afternoon... informative, but since nothing starts until Monday, not very pressing. Afterwards I wound my way up to the Gianucuolo again to read and to admire these incredible breathtaking vistas of the city. When an Italian guy (about 30) sat down next to me and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride on his scooter, I decided to adios. I got to watch the sun setting up there before this happened, though. Surreal-ly beautiful. Walking back down the hill in the dusk, I stopped to watch this giant Amazon woman in silver spike heels and her camera crew shoot a car commerical next to a fountain... entertaining to say the least. The director, who was (I am not making this up) wearing a little black beret, yelled STOHP! every take at the same time... I don't think they're done yet!

I found my way back to Trestevere for a late night pizza and gelatto, then back to the apartment. Tras at night is still full of barking dogs and screaming, laughing kids in the playground and the noise from the public fountains on the street corner. The sky right now is this incredible dark dark blue. All I can say is: if you're not just about to explode from joy when you're walking around this city... well... you're just not paying attention.

Getting Lost

2009-09-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

This everyday blogging probably won't be sustained when school starts, but until Monday, I have nothing better to do when I'm at our appartemento, so why not?

I woke up this morning at around 11 to the sounds of dogs barking next door and Vespas revving like we're all racing the Indy 500... I'm going to invest in some ear plugs. Anyway, I got dressed and headed out, intending to go straight to AUR, where I would sign up for my appointment to get my Permesso di Siggiorno (Permit to Stay) and look around the school a bit. It seemed from the drive to our appartemento yesterday that the directions to AUR were pretty straightforward. I went left our of the building and promptly got lost. No big, I had plenty of time to find my way, so I kept walking in what I thought was the general direction of school. I ended up way WAY far from where I was supposed to be going, and climbed this massive staircase on the Gianocuolo (Janiculum, the highest hill of Rome's 7) in order to get my bearings.

When that didn't really work, I stopped anyway to enjoy the view, then made my way down the Passaggio di Gianocuolo, which reminded me a little of Central Park. I wasn't really paying attention to where I was going or anything, and was trying not to die crossing the street (incidentally, Roman drivers are exactly as insane as their reputation indicates) and when I got to the other side and looked up, St. Peter's. Right in front of me. I was at eye level with the dome and it felt like I could see forever. Rome is, from what I can tell, chock full of incredible
surprises like that.

For instance, later, after I had finally found AUR and done all that needed to get accomplished there, I was trying to find my way home. I made my way down the hill again, getting effectively lost along the way. Really, it wasn't scary or anything, since Rome in the afternoon is all bright and buttery and... well... hotter than hell, but who cares? Everything smells like pine trees and forest fires (it's fire season here, too) and this neighborhood I was in was full of gorgeous, swanky, vine covered apartment buildings. It really was a perfect afternoon for a leisurely, if aimless walk.

I found myself along the Tevere, bumming along and looking at the river and the bridges, when I stumbled across the Villa Farnesina, the smaller of two big giant houses built by the Farnese when their family were Popes in the 17th Century. Around the outside there are a few Roman sarccophagi and inside (though I didn't get to see) are some incredible works by Raphael. That's a project for another day!

I finally got back to old Trastevere, the neighborhood where 17 Via Mamelli resides, and decided that now that I wasn't lost anymore, I'd get some food and people watch in Piazza S. Maria in Trastevere, where there's an incredible Byzantine church with amazing frescoes on the inside and a cool fountain with steps from where I ate my delicioso pizza with tomatoes, artichoke hearts, arugala and some kind of sausage that tasted vaguely of when I was in France.

I got water from one of the communal drinking fountains that you find all over Rome... they're awesome. Basically it's just a faucet that runs continously, and in which I've seen people get water to cool their faces off, or wash their feet in the stream. It sounds a little gross, but there's also a little hole that when you plug the faucet at the bottom with your finger, shoots water for you to drink. I was a little unsure at first as to how sanitary these things might be, but then I just thought: hey, when in Rome... they're actually a godsend for a girl with an empty water bottle and no idea where she is, or if she's anywhere near her appartemento.

Trastevere is exactly what you think of when you think of Italy. In it's center, it's a maze of little cobblestone streets with pizzarias, gellaterias, fornarias, and all the other little 'rias' you could name, tucked into tall stucco buildings with ted tile roofs and ivy crawling all over everything. Vespas and little European cars abound, but pedestrians take the day. People yell at each other from tables set outside the pizzarias and little kids play on the playground that's in the middle of one of the main piazzas.

Every few blocks there's another church, and inside of these there's always (from the five or six that I visited yesterday and today) at least one old woman praying in front of an icon of the Virgin. These churches are astounding, like little modest looking jewel boxes with these astonishing rubies and 80 carat diamonds inside. At least, for an aspiring art historian that's what it seems like.

I could totally imagine myself living in Travestere for a lot longer than four months, and from the very tiny bit of what I've seen of Rome, this city is way more amazing that ever thought it would be, and I hyped it up a lot. I've been here around 28 hours now, and already I can tell why people have been mesmerized by this city for as long as they have. I've also discovered that getting lost is my new favorite passtime.

O.M.G.

2009-09-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

This place is like 80,000 times better than anything I could ever have imagined. In my wildest dreams. And, if you know me, that's pretty damn impressive. I'm rarely at a loss for words... and this is one of the rare times that I can't really think of anything to say. Now watch me write another three paragraphs in contradiction of that statement.

Our flight from Detroit to Frankfurt was pretty painless. I watched Star Trek, which was decent, but not altogether enthralling. I guess this comforts me on some level... the level that really doesn't want to see the rest of me telling people to Live Long and Prosper accompanied with appropriate hand sign. I get obsessive sometimes. I followed that up with a glass of white wine with dinner and then two Tylenol PMs a little later. Maybe not the brightest idea I've ever had, but it worked like a charm. I woke up about an hour and a half before we landed, just in time to catch the crappy breakfast service and then walk about ten miles through the Frankfurt airport to the A terminal for our next flight. They talk about German efficiency? HAH! Don't make me laugh... it sucked. But we finally got there and waited for awhile until our flight was called, then boarded and took off for ROME!

Flying in was like nothing I've ever experienced before. Try to imagine the anticipation of flying into somewhere you've been dreaming about for years. YEARS. and then realize that yeah, you get to live here. We flew over vinyards and a church that I recognized from a slide in Billie's class... and I choked up. It was lunacy. I've discovered in my walks through airports with the other 8 girls who are on this trip that I'm totally my mother when it comes to walking. I go FAST. Madame speed part II.

And then we came into Rome proper after another hour of waiting with the reps from AUR until everyone got there. I was thrown into a bus with Kelsey, one of the girls from K, and a bunch of other kids. We drove through the insane Roman traffic for, I'm not kidding, three hours. Or at least that's what it felt like. It had to be at least two. I was trying as hard as I could to take in every second, but sensory overload coupled with only about four hours of sleep made it a little overwhelming. But all the waiting and driving around was totally worth it. We drove right past our school, down a hill and this gigantic vista opens up in front of us, with the Victor Emmanuel monument right there and downtown Rome right in front of us. We could see all the way to the Vatican. I almost died. It really hit me right then, as Alex, a guy from AUR pointed out the fountain on our left, the huge vista on our right, and then stopped the car and unloaded our bags right in the middle of all that splendor.

We're sharing the 2 bedroom apartment with two fashion majors from Philly, and they seem great. We're all going out in a minute to explore, get lost a little bit, and find some delicious Roman food. I can't believe I'm here. It's way too good to be true. More later, when my computer's not dying.

A Meditation on Airports

2009-09-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

I got here to Detroit yesterday around 2. Nothing went wrong during the flights, which is a certifiable miracle if you know anything about me... which if you're reading this blog I'm assuming you must. Elissa and I were planning to meet at baggage claim, and then catch the shuttle to our hotel. Well, we played phone tag for about an hour trying to find each other with tactics like "I'll meet you at the top of the escalator", which might have worked... if we had been in the same terminal. She was in the north terminal and I was in the south. These are two miles away from each other. So... communication: check? We spent our lovely time at the Super 8 (which was just as swanky as I thought it would be...) staring at the TV from 4 to 11 pm. It was totally impressive. And then this morning we checked out at 11 and sat at the airport... outside of security. Until 1.45. Now we've gone through security, after meeting Christine purely by happenstance at security. We're sitting here at our gate, just chatting and chilling out. And Connie just showed up! Hooray!! Now I'm really getting super excited... we're almost gone! Three hours. Three. Hours. All I need before we leave is some good fake American food with some real American ketchup. But THREE HOURS! Bye!

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I Love Ya Tomorrow...

2009-08-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

Yup, now that Teague's away at college, the waterworks have officially begun, courtesy of my mother. It's nice to know that I'm loved. But, in the words of Peter, Paul and Mary (the band, not the apostles... common mistake, I know.): all my bags are packed, I'm ready to go... I'm leavin' on a jet plane, and I really don't know the exact date that I'll be back again. That's all part of the fun, though!

Just doing some last minute things... updating the blog, Twitter and Facebook (and yes, I do know how gross and Millenium generation that sounds, but what can I say?) loading the iPod with some new tunes, and soaking up these last few hours of Big Sky.

A Meditation on Montana

Really, if you've never been to Montana, I don't know how to explain this phenomenon. There are other places that have wide open spaces, but I've never seen more sky anywhere else I've been (this includes the god-forsaken Dakotas) than I do here. Sometimes in Michigan I get stressed and claustrophobic and I can't figure out why... but then we go to the beach or something and suddenly I feel this release; there's something about feeling so small that makes you feel larger inside. I was actually talking about this with Ryan and Katie the other night... Montana is addicting and annoying in its contradiction. When you're young you can't wait to vamoose to somewhere more exotic (like Rome), exciting (like Rome) and far far away (you get it). But there's something about this place, the people and the fact that the same drive through the canyon to Helena or over the pass to Missoula can still yeild such breathtaking, heartbreaking beauty that seems different each of the thousand times you see it. It gets in your blood. I don't know if this attatchment to a place occurs in other areas, since I'm a Montana girl born and raised, but I know that however far away I get, I'm still going to have this place in me in a very fundamental way. So, I can't wait to leave, mostly because I have the comfort of knowing that when I come home, 'home' will be the same, but I'll be able to appreciate it through different eyes.

With that sentimental detour, I'll sign off for right now. The next time I write, chances are it'll be from our Roman appartemento... so keep your fingers crossed that everything goes the way it's supposed to!

Arrivederci!

G-Funk, Montucky

2009-08-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

Alas, I am not yet in La Citta Eterna, but rather in La Citta G-Funka, packing, running errands and generally being my lovely yet neurotic self until I leave for Detroit on Monday. I've created this blog so you can keep up (if you so desire) with my adventures in Rome, Florence and the surrounding environs (aka: everywhere my Eurrail pass will take me in two months) first hand through my own scintilating prose. I jest. Scintilating is just not strong enough a word. I jest again. I do that.

I head out for Detroit on Monday, August 31st. I have a feeling this is going to be a rough week for my mother, considering she and my dad will be taking my brother Teague to college roughly two days before I jet off to parts unknown. If you happen to see us at the Great Falls International Airport that morning, don't worry. Nobody died.

I'm meeting Elissa, one of the other K Kids going on this adventure with me, and we're spending the night at the uber-swank Romulus Super 8. For those of you who are confused as to why a day between connecting flights is necessary: well, you obviously haven't heard about my luck with planes.

We leave from Detroit Wayne on September 1st (so very Harry Potter of us) for Antwerp, and then catch our connecting flight to Rome, where we will become contestants on the reality show The Real World: Rome. I say this because, as of yet, we have no idea where or with whom we will be living. All I've been able to beat out of the CIP (Center for International Programs at K) is that we will be occupying apartments of some sort, and it is possible that these apartments will be in Rome. I've also heard a rumor that there might possibly but not certainly will be a balcony in said apartment, but more on that when the occassion arises. We're most likely living with other K Kids, so I'll let you know more about my roommates when they materialize.

I know, all of my details are kind of sketchy, but that's sort of how I like to do things. I'm looking at this trip as an incredible learning experience that I've been fortunate enough to stumble into, and I know that every little weird occurance will be an adventure. Maybe they won't all be adventures I'll enjoy at the time, but think of the stories they'll make for your entertainment. 6 days until the travels begin! Bring 'em on!