An American in Paris!

Bonjour!  I arrived in Paris late last night, and Lauren and I promptly got the fun started with champagne and crepes.  Our hotel is so nice and very cute.  I was walking towards it from the metro, hoping the building decked in Christmas lights was mine… and it was.  Obviously pictures to come- you know how I am about Christmas lights.  The weather has decided to be on our side today, or at least for the time being, so I think we’re going to try and go to Pere Lachaise cemetery today.  Tonight we will probably “crush” some parties with Lauren’s friend from school.

Things I have eaten (clearly the most important information while I’m in France):

1. champagne

2. apple sauce crepe (YUM)

3. cafe au lait

4. croissant

5. baguette with jam

My journey here was long, but basically painless.  In true Italian fashion, my train transfer from Pisa to the Pisa airport was switched with under 2 minutes to spare, so I got my cardio for the day sprinting from platform 14 to platform 2. Two funny characters from the trip:

1. Old Italian lady next to me on Ryanair Flight 9976: Clearly this signora had a severe fear of flying, but also a strong desire to look out the window.  It was raining the whole flight, though, so there wasn’t anything but scary stuff to see.  After some turbulence and lightning, she started working her way along a rosary.  I’m not really afraid of flying, but when someone starts doing Hail Mary’s during turbulence, it worries me.  I thought she was going to break the chain from squeezing the beads too hard during our bumpy landing.  And of course, since it’s Ryanair, we all clapped when the flight landed safely.

2. Boy-crazy 16 year old girl on the bus from the airport to Paris: When this little Italian girl found out I was American, I knew we were in for a long bus ride.  I was riddled with inane questions (no, I have never met Lady Gaga, and no, my father is not a cowboy), which were mostly funny until we got to boys.  Italians just don’t understand how or why a girl my age could be single, so I’ve invented a boyfriend to placate strangers.  So when Marta asked if I had a boy, I told her about my fake one.  She bought it, but she didn’t understand why I didn’t have an Italian on the side… the country struggles with faithfulness.  The only thing that let me ride in peace was when our Twilight divide was revealed: she’s on Team Jake and I’m on Team Edward.  I wanted to ask her how it felt to be on the losing team, but clearly this was a disagreement we couldn’t talk through. She turned away from me and muttered about me being crazy!

On Italian time

Italians seem to live in a state of semi-contained chaos about most things, but especially about time. Despite most Italians’ philosophical attitude about being ten minutes late to an appointment, they always seem to be in a hurry.   They stand and gulp down an espresso instead of sitting and they drive like they’re taking a woman in labor to the emergency room.  But what’s the rush if you’re already late?

I spent the first few weeks I was here constantly on the go.  In order to get somewhere on time, you have to leave so far in advance! I hardly had time to breathe because I was so busy running to catch a bus or sprinting down a street.  After complaining about this to Aria, our program director/life in Florence guru/friend, she shared a crucial bit of wisdom with me: that semi-contained chaos of Italian life cannot be precisely enough manipulated to allow for promptness.  The only way to successfully get along is to quit fighting and simply eke out the easiest path you can through the muck.  Basically, you either spend tons of time and energy racing to get somewhere on time, or you slow down and accept lateness.

As my harried roommates can attest to, this is still an aspect of Italian life I struggle with.  None of our professors seem troubled by starting class 15 minutes late (one especially lax prof usually arrives after the whole class has assembled), but I am.  I can remain calm until we are actually late, then the panic begins.  Clearly my assimilation to the Italian style of time-management is only skin deep… On the plus side, my legs and my shoulders have gotten a lot stronger this semester, the legs for speed walking to site visits and the shoulders from muscling through hordes of fat tourists on the sidewalks.

My latest battle: my jeans.  My mom sent me some much-needed new jeans (remember my earlier complaining, Blythe?) but they were 4 inches too long, so I sought out a tailor.  After much effort, I finally dropped them off somewhere successfully last Thursday.  They said they’d be ready Friday, which is an awfully long time for one pair of pants to be hemmed, but whatever- we’re on that cute Italian time, you know??  But then I realized these infamous jeans wouldn’t be ready for my trip to Paris this Thursday, and that’s heartbreaking because I really wanted to paint a stylish and well-put together picture of myself for Parisians and Lauren.  So then I went back today to see if I could get them a day early (HA), only to learn that they will actually be ready later than expected because the tailor was “sick.” I say “sick” because Italians are weenies who deem any ailment fatal so they don’t have to work.

This small injustice aside, I love it here.  It’s beautiful and calm and delicious and perfect, but sometimes you just want your damn pants.

Gobble Gobble Gobble Honh Honh Honh (that’s how we think French people laugh)

Turkeys are hard to come by here in Europe.  One of my roommates really misses turkey sandwiches, and the harsh truth of their scarcity has hit her pretty hard.  I’m not much for turkey and I love ham, so I’m doing okay here in Prosciutto Land. Did you know (according to an uncited claim on Wikipedia) that Europeans named the bird “turkey” because they were originally imported to the Continent through Turkey?

There are so many Americans in Florence that you have to reserve a turkey weeks in advance and then go fight for it in the central market.  Italians have little to no respect for lines, reservations, or any organizational structure intended to deal with crowds, so the reservation is more a formality that just adds an extra layer of self-righteous conflict (“BUT I HAD A RESERVATION!”) than anything else.  Plus, Italians (rightly) believe that their food is the best in the world, so they don’t really carry international offerings in grocery stores.  Italians also have special disdain for the foods Americans hold dear like cheddar cheese, chili, soft baked goods, and obviously anything Thanksgiving-related. These sorts of international goods and ingredients are only available for unbelievably high prices in specialty grocery stores, and they all sold out of cranberry sauce fixings sometime around Halloween.  So since making a Thanksgiving dinner seems like such a daunting task, I’ve decided to embrace the holiday by participating in that other Thanksgiving tradition: travel.

Instead of a tryptophan-induced coma, I will spend this Thanksgiving in Paris with mon amie! (Read it so it rhymes! Cute, right?) Lauren and I became best friends during the dark, dark years of middle school, but now that our skin and social ept-ness have cleared up, we are classy ladies who holiday in Paris.   There won’t be turkey on our trip, but somehow I think I’ll survive in the land of crepes, the release of the 2009 beaujolais nouveau, cafe au lait, and brie.

I am positively giddy about this trip!  If you don’t love Paris, then you’re stupid.  It is beautiful and historically significant and delicious and fun and full of French people – what’s not to love?  Plus I’m taking “Making of Modern Paris” next semester, so now I can have the real deal fresh in my mind!  And even though my Italian is slowly progressing, I look forward to being in France so I can put my many years of French to good use and feel smart instead of stupid for a while.

I hope you all enjoy your football, your Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, your turkey, and your family tensions boiling just beneath the surface of the holiday season.  I feel a little homesick because I’m missing these gems of American culture and my family, but there’s worse fates than Thanksgiving with your best friend in Paris!

A risky weekend for the risk-averse

Don’t let the cynics get you down.  Venice has it’s overpriced, overtouristy bits, but it also has lots of beautiful and

che bella!

cool parts.  As a generally cynical person, I thought I would be turned off of Venice by it’s weird, expensive time capsule of yesteryear-ness and the pervasive sense of decadence that ignores all the serious problems that are literally coming up through the floorboards and paving stones of the city.  But once I saw the Grand Canal and heard the cutely quiet bustle of a city without cars, I realized how freaking dumb it was to fight this Venice’s undeniable charm.

post-opera stop on the Bellini tour

The Venetians have mastered decadence in a way I thought only 18th century French kings could achieve.  Everything there is beautiful!  And we had a pretty decadent weekend: a European casino, the opera, and non-house wine!  (No one in Venice is poor enough to order house wine, so they don’t even offer it).  Obviously we also went to see a lot of famous stuff you’ve already heard of and that I won’t waste your time with.  Except did you know that the Bellini was invented in Venice?  I took an unofficial Bellini tour through Venice…

As the most risk-averse person I know,  I planned on going along as moral support more than a gambler for the casino adventure.  Except did you know that Europeans gamble in deathly silence?  No flashing lights, no alcohol, no talking.  Unlike Vegas, pissing away your money over card games is apparently no laughing matter here.  To pass the time I bet (and promptly lost) 5 euros at a slot machine.  I didn’t really take to gambling, but I did take to people-watching in one of the most hilariously sterile settings I’ve seen here!  I’d have a picture for you to capture this alien world, but I think the flash would have blinded the slot machine zombies.

In a turn both classy and trashy, we saw the Cliffs Notes version of Verdi’s “La Traviata.”  Instead of the whole 4 hour commitment, we saw an abbreviated performance in an old guild building.  Sometimes it didn’t feel abbreviated.  Once you adjust to the fact that you’ve signed yourself up for a few hours of chubby, profusely sweaty people bludgeoning you with the strength of their voices, it’s actually pretty cool to watch the story and see if you can pick out some recognizable phrases and words in their old-timey Italian!

Highlight/Lowlight of the trip: Someone on our trip jumped into the Grand Canal!  At the time this was uproariously hilarious, unbelievable, and totally worth the 5 euros I contributed to the reward pot.  Frankly, I didn’t think she’d do it.  The water in Venice is notoriously disgusting (a working port close by and hundreds of years of sludge and pollution aren’t a recipe for cleanliness), plus you could land on something sharp, and it’s cold outside.  If I’d been her, I would have backed out at the last minute – but that’s why I’m the most risk-averse person I know.  Unfortunately, it turns out that swimming in the canals is actually illegal.  So now we all get to make a short film about the consequences of reckless behavior abroad as punishment for our part in this (now a lot less funny) escapade.  Stay tuned for my directorial/screenwriting/acting debut!

don't you want to just jump right in?

 

We carpe-d the crap out of that noctem

I was wandering around Florence yesterday afternoon looking for this place my friend said had killer sandwiches, and then (what a small world!) I ran into the girls doing Vandy in Siena! After only an hour with these girls, my day’s plan had gone from a delicious sandwich, followed by homework and a quiet night in to going back to Siena with them and checking out a mysterious discoteca in the Tuscan countryside.  If fun were a drug, these girls would be pro-level pushers.

None of us had ever been to Vanilla before, but all the information we had seemed innocent and not at all creepy: you take a white, unmarked bus to the club, it’s the only building around for many kilometers, and one of their Italian roommates had gotten us “passes” to get in.  We rushed to make the bus, which was stupid because Italians don’t operate on any sort of schedule, so we were just as likely to be early as were late.  The bus arrived (technically 23 minutes later than expected), and forty minutes later (read: in the middle of nowhere) we were at Vanilla.

We made it!

Claiming to be a bingo hall on one exterior sign, Vanilla is actually the largest, most amazingly awesome club I’ve ever been to.  It’s hard to say if this greatness comes from any intrinsic value of the place itself, or just because we were a huge group set on having a good time.  Gianluigi brought some of his friends, half of whom are hilarious and wonderful and half of whom are stereotypical Italian creepers*.  We also appreciated Gianluigi’s friends valiant efforts to protect us from the more aggressive gentleman callers on the dance floor. Plus that Rocco guy can really dance impressively/flail around amusingly.

As proof of Vanilla’s greatness, here’s some notes about the music played.

Songs we DID hear:

1. “I Gotta Feeling” – The Black Eyed Peas.  Usually I hate it, but the DJ’s frenetic remix really brought out the best of Rocco’s dancing.  Plus it really WAS  a real good night.
2. “Sweet Dreams” – Eurythmics.  Duh.

Songs we did NOT hear:

1. “Party in the USA” – Miley Cyrus.  Europeans (like everyone except me, apparently) love this song.  But the DJ was merciful and we weren’t even in the USA, so we were spared for one night.
2. “Sandstorm” – Darude.  Duh.

For much of the night, when the weaker are sleeping, we danced and raged and took Vanilla by storm. Then, at 4 am we decided to call it a night, or an early morning, or whatever.  By the time we got back to Siena, it was 5 am and we were hungry and cold and ready to sleep.  And I had been wearing my contacts for far too many hours.  So we crammed ourselves onto the sketchy bus once more and headed home after a night of most perfect merrymaking.  Interesting revelation about partying with real Italians: you know how we eat crap like pizza rolls and pop tarts as drunk food? Italians make penne all’amatriciana (FROM SCRATCH).  I had that for an early breakfast (grazie mille to our talented chefs) and rolled into bed around 6:20.

Then we all emerged from our naps a few hours later and had some great hot sandwiches from Great Hot Sandwiches, and then we hung out in the Campo before it was time for my bus.  Although Siena could never compare to Florence’s beauty and grandeur and importance in my heart, sitting in the campo with friends is just about one of the best things you can do with your time.

Ain’t life grand?

–

Children: As an aside, I urge everyone with access to Facebook to gently view this group, which highlights the wonderful quotes and mannerisms of Peter (pronounced Pee-tah), my Renaissance Art and Architecture professor here.  The video of his thoughts on limoncello is a must-see.  Because Peetah did something wonderful: he did teach us all about the Renaissance and completely charmed us all, in a few months. Va bene? Ok, now we will go have one, maybe two, Heinekens.

* This claim may be harsh, but so where the crude comments some of them made to members of our party.  But pn the whole, they were all wonderful company and this writer looks forward to hanging out with them again.  To put it simply: Cheer up, Gianluigi!

In the land of gingers

Last weekend I went to visit Kathryn in Ireland, which was “brilliant,” as they say over there.

After a very rainy Friday, we seized the night: party Irish style! Irish old lady-style, that is: we made chocolate chip cookies and caught up on Grey’s Anatomy.  This may not sound that fantastic to you, but it was a magical evening.  McDreamy, McSteamy, pretending to make the oven mitt talk, learning to brown butter (!), and having a real, chewy cookie for the first time in months! (Why are European baked goods so disgustingly brittle?) Plus we needed to save our energy for a very full day of Irish sightseeing and activitydoing on Saturday.

And to think that we're known as hard partying hot messes in some circles...

On Saturday we took this delightful tour through the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher, both of which are impressive sites of physical beauty and imposing size in the general vicinity of Galway. Although much of the Burren looks a lot like the moon, it was apparently the place to be about 15,000 years ago.  Our cute and slightly senile tour guide, Desmond, really liked to say everything happened 15,000 years ago and make wildly inappropriate jokes. Sometime between 15,000 years ago and now, old Celts left all sorts of stone clues about their mysterious activities around the Burren. We saw lots of these remnants, lots of cows (apparently the Irish government prefers to employ grazing cows instead of lawn mowers), and lots of verdant vistas.

I don’t really know much of anything about Ireland, so the tour seemed really, really informative to me.  A certain grad student and Ireland enthusiast traveling with me sometimes corrected Desmond’s facts, but I was still  impressed.  Unfortunately, some aspects of the tour were a little murky because I am absolutely incapable of staying awake while riding on something as big and yacht-y as a bus (or a train, or the backseat of a car, or a plane, or the metro…).  But it added a touch of mystery and excitement to hop off the bus sometimes without any context about where we were.

The Cliffs of Moher - beautiful AND windy. I more glimpsed this place during brief pauses between gales of blinding wind than outright saw it...

antisocial ancient irish people used to surround their homes with huge earthen walls here... AND THIS IS WHERE LEPRECHAUNS ARE FROM! I FOUND ONE!

Saturday night: apparently Halloween began here to celebrate the Celtic new year, when the line between the living and the dead was thinnest.  So they had to wear scary costumes to look dead so the already dead folks wouldn’t take the living people… or something.  I’d had a fair amount of tequila by the time this explanation was being offered…by someone dressed quite convincingly as a zombie.  But the important takeaway from this information is that Irish people prefer more “realistic” and scary costumes. Ireland’s ratio of girls in lingerie with animal ears to girls who look like “Thriller” video extras is the exact opposite of America’s.

 

Seriously, though. Scary costumes

As Denny would say, "This is nor-mahl."

Despite a lot of scary costumes (but also a lot of slutty Snow Whites — why was that so popular?), Halloween was wonderful.  We went to one of Kathryn’s friend’s houses for a while, then we went into the crazy streets of Galway! All the pubs were overflowing with people and the party spread through the whole city.  It was great!!

This will come as a surprise since I’m studying in Italy and we all know Ireland’s reputation for food, but some pretty crucial culinary developments occurred there:

1. Guinness! I was afraid of it.  But it’s actually delicious!
2. Chinese food!  Mexican food!  Diversity! New flavors! (That said, I was really craving pasta by the time I got home.)
3. STARBUCKS. Let’s not talk about how overpriced it was, let’s focus more on how magical it was. I had a grande peppermint mocha because they were advertising the impending arrival of red cups and I decided to kick off the Christmas season with my coffee. It was so great!  (Actually it was not well made at all, but I guess Irish baristas just aren’t as skilled as their pro American counterparts) But after tiny Italian espresso drinks, a grande felt like the super gulp. I couldn’t even finish it!

On Sunday we oozed out of bed and went to Dublin.  Dublin was so cool!  All the buildings were so new and multi-colored! Basically, Dublin is the complete opposite of Florence, which was a cool change.  Favorite site? Oscar Wilde memorial.  Perhaps the first time stone has so perfectly captured a subject. Step aside, Michelangelo. This is a masterpiece:

 

Sass incarnate.

 

Conclusion: I was blown away by Ireland!  It was wild and beautiful, full of new stuff and diversity, but also a lot of nice Irish-ness. Italy is the beautiful family heirloom chair in the house where you aren’t actually allowed to sit, and Ireland is the comfy chair with the mid-century modern upholstery where you do all your best reading. Ok now it sounds like I don’t like Italy, which is obviously false because who doesn’t like la vita dolce?