Belgium forecast: FREEZING

so i was checking out the weather forecast for this weekend in Belgium and here's what it says:

Friday: Windy with rain showers likely. High 60F. Winds SSW at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 80%.

Saturday: Showers possible. Highs in the upper 50s and lows in the upper 40s.

Sunday: Mostly Cloudy. Highs in the mid 60s and lows in the upper 40s.

i am prolly the biggest wuss ever and hate hate hate being cold (or wet!); seriously on snowboarding trips i'm the first one back in the room drinking hot chocolate when it starts getting too cold... oh man, this is going to be tough; atleast now i get to wear all my new winter clothes that i brought (that still have tags on them!)

1 whole month

So right now I SHOULD be in class but I really wasn’t in the mood so decided skip it. We’re allowed, liek, one absence sooooo I guess mine’s today!

This morning I went to Italian though – Wednesdays are always pretty cool because it’s “culture day,” where we spend the day doing things to get acquainted with the way Italians live (last week we watched a popular movie; some classes went to the grocery store; some go out to a restaurant; etc). Today’s activity was actually really really cool.

We were sposed to meet in Palazzo Pitti at 11:05 for a little field trip. Marilena and I took the bus (we’re bus pro’s now) and OF COURSE got there late; I swear, every time I have taken the bus I’ve shown up like 20 minutes late because they never show up at the stop on time! Whatever, 2 girls in our class (that has 8 people total) didn’t even show up.

Anyways, Alessandro (our teacher that wears the SAME outfit everyday) took us to a workshop of an old man that restores sculptures for a living… I know, what?! The shop was a hole in the wall; there was stuff and dust and tools and other weird things ALL OVER the place. My first instinct when I walked in was to start sorting out everything… seriously I think I’m way too organized to be an artist!

This guy reminded me of Gepetto (from Pinocchio). His name was Luigi and he spoke ONLY Italian. I was impressed with myself because even though I suck at speaking (the right words never seem to come to my brain fast enough) I understood prolly about 80% of what he said. He told us about the process he has to go through when he restores sculptures and how he’s made frames for paintings that are hanging in various museums throughout Firenze. Then he gave us a little demonstration and whittled a little flower for us – this guy in the best whittler I have ever seen! It looked so easy that I wanted to pick up a tool and try it out… but I didn’t. My brain was pounding from drinking too much last night and all I really wanted to do was run out the door to the nearest bar to buy a bottle of acqua frizzante.

After class we went to a bar and had the best pizza ever – it had caprese on it as the topping; liek, real mozzarella and tomato slices. My hungover self was incredibly satisfied afterwards. Then the girls left and had to run to the Accademia for their art history class; it was about 12:40 and I was left with a choice: run and buy a bus ticket and hop on the bus and hopefully get back to school on time OR spend extra money to grab a cab… Eh, at that point I decided that I was going to skip my printmaking class and spend the afternoon alone.

Today is officially 1 month of being here in Italy. I love love love my roommate and all my friends here but as I was strolling around I realized that not once over the past month have I had time to be alone. It’s weird because normally I HATE being alone… it makes me really depressed actually. But today it was nice. I walked from Palazzo Piti (which is on the other side of the Arno, close to Ponte Vecchio) all the way back to my house; I think it’s prolly somewhere around 2ish miles?

It’s a perfect day here today: windy, and a cloudy, but the air is warm and it felt really good and refreshing. I stopped and bought a bunch of postcards cuz I decided that I really really really like sending/receiving mail so I’m going to start writing to people at home. I figured that if I sent stuff to people then maybe they’d send things back to me. I told my mom yesterday that I look in my mailbox everyday and never have anything… heh, it’s okay though. Mail is kinda old fashion and everyone’s prolly super busy anways.

God, I can’t believe I’ve already been here for a month.

Tomorrow evening Dan, Laura, Ben, and I leave for Brussels (that’s in Belgium bytheway). I know nothing about Brussels. Dan tells me that it’s famous for its good beer, chocolate, and french fries… um, sounds good to me!

It was brought to my attention yesterday that this weekend at home is the Hometown Fair; this will be the 3rd year that I will have missed it – god, I LOVE the fair. Oh well, it’s ok… I’m just going to tell myself the same thing I’ve been telling myself every time I get sad about missing something at home/at school: I AM IN ITALIA (well, actually, this weekend… I AM IN BELGIUM!)

Happy 12:01 Navid!

After a long, but uneventful day in class, we hit the clubs to celebrate Navid’s 12:01 – his actual birthday is tomorrow. I thought it was his REAL 12:01 but then I found out that he’s only turning 20! Awwwww, Navid’s a baby! Didn’t matter though; there’s no drinking age in Italy and we can do basically whatever we want! Hahahaha.

After drinking a bottle and a half of wine at home before dinner I got up the courage to tell my Italian family, “Una notte nel futuro noi dobbiamo parlare solamente l’italiano perche Marilena ed io sappiamo piu che voi pensate. Io capisco tutti che voi dite molto del tempo ma non mi piace parlare italiano perche parlo lentamente e sono nervosa e ho paura di dire le parole incorette.” (um. Translation: “A night in the future we need to speak only Italian because Marilena and I know more than you think. I understand everything you guys say a lot of the time but I don’t like to speak Italian because I speak slowly and I’m nervous and scared to say the wrong words.”)

Okay. Our family speaks Italian and Spanish fluently and they speak to us 98% of the time in English due to a few things… the girls they had living with them last semester NEVER wanted to try to speak it. Susana and Kike say funny things about them; they say that they spoke English differently than me and Marilena because they “chirped” instead of really opening their mouths like we do. Hahaha. ALSO, Marilena is Italian and our family knows and thinks that because her grandma is Italian SHE can understand/speak way more than I can (we know the exact same). I think they think I’m an English-only, beer drinking, loud laughing, rebellious foot breaking, American party animal. Fabulous. (I’m really not though, liek, not even close).

After dinner, Marilena and i trekked down to the center of Le Cure to get a taxi. It took seriously 15 minutes. It was so weird; usually there are taxis everywhere all the time! Anyways, we ended up meeting all of our friends at the Red Garter (the bar we went to the first night we went out in Firenze). Literally all of SCU was there. It was awesome. Some of our friends played in the beer pong tournament. I danced.

It was nice having our SCU boys on creeper patrol again because the Red Garter has a bunch of them. Seriously, while we were dancing, boys would come up and liek quadruple team me, and tap me on the shoulder, or grab my arm, or put their arms around my waist, and I would be like UMMMMMM HELP! But the second something like this would happen a SCUer would swoop in and the creeper would totally back off; it was pretty cool. I must say though, there were a lot of cute guys there; it’s a very American bar but it attracts a lot of vacationing Europeans as well – I kinda have a thing for blonde ones… hahaha.

Around 11:45ish we left the Red Garter and trekked (with our huge SCU crew) in the direction of the Duomo to find another club to go dancing at. At the Duomo we ran into literally 50 other people from SUF and together we all herded to “Andromeda.” I’m not kidding when I say that we were herding… our group took up the entire street and everyone was loud and drunk and running around everywhere; it was a good time. We arrived at Andromeda with so many people that they waived the cover charge and just let us go prancing in!

The club was pretty cool. Big bar, big dance floor, cool lights, cool sitting areas… I danced the entire time. There wasn’t too bad of a creeper problem at Andromeda because I knew pretty much all the boys that were there since I see them all at school everyday!

Even though I woke up still drunk this morning (probably due to the fact that we were taking shots of vodka and calling the gum we were chewing the chaser…) I had an awesome time! I saw Navid and Kate today when I was ditching my printmaking class and they both looked exhausted but said they had fun last night too.

I took a million pictures and am pretty sad that our internet sucks so much otherwise I’d totally post them up here. I have a lot of pictures posted on Facebook and I’m going to try to figure out the link to my page so that everyone can see what we’ve been up to!

the italian language

Three times today I was totally confused all because of my inability to speak/understand Italian fluently.

#1 Le Poste Italiane: The post office is just down the street from the SUF campus so I left early for school and ventured down in that direction. Well… after 5 minutes in the post office I left and STILL had the package that I intended to send… let’s analyze what went wrong…

I spend 3 minutes trying to PULL open a door that is a PUSHer (strike 1). I walk through the door. I look around and realize that Italian post offices are nothing like American ones… crap. I notice that the crowded post office is full of Italian people that all look like they’re in a hurry (and don’t have time to help an American girl figure out how the system works). I try to figure out how the place works myself and begin to look for any signs (in English OR Italian) with directions on them… there aren’t any (strike 2). I sit down in a chair and spend a few minutes watching people trying to get a hint as to what I’m sposed to do. It’s so busy that I can’t understand (strike 3). I start to feel like people are looking at me, and KNOW that I have no clue what’s going on so I pull out my cell phone (something I do EVERYTIME I start to feel insecure). I text Marilena saying that I’m at the post office and look like a total idiot. I finish texting, put my phone away, put my backpack on, walk out the door, and walk back to school.

I guess I’ll have to wait til tomorrow to mail my package; sorry steph!

#2 Il Palestro: Marilena and I have decided to join a gym (since my foot is finally almost 100% better!) and after asking our friends which one they go to we set out to sign up. After walking well over the “2 block” walk our friends said it was we finally came across a “palestra.” We were slightly confused because the word that we learned for gym in Italian class is “palestro” (masculine ending). We figured it was close enough to what we were looking for and ventured down the driveway to the door… after seeing the door had a poster of dancing girls (think about it) on it we realized that the word “palestra” and “palestro” probably don’t mean the same thing… needless to say, we did not accomplish our mission of signing up for a gym today.

#3 La Pasticceria: Feeling defeated on our walk home from the “palestra,” Marilena and I decided to stop in a really cool looking pastry shop. She decided to get a little fruit tart and ordered it from a lady who spoke no English… the lady started saying things that neither Marilena nor I understood. To explain herself she started holding up various forms of packaging; a paper bag, some fancy butcher paper… Marilena kinda pointed at the butcher paper and assumed the lady would just package the pastry in it and we could go. Well, the lady proceeded to wrap up the pastry as if it was going under the tree as a Christmas present; literally there were bows and ribbons involved. We realize now that we have NO clue as to what she was asking us…

AH – WHY CAN’T I SPEAK FLUENT ITALIAN?!?!

Today in printmaking we started doing “dry point.” It’s a really cool technique – basically we carve an image into plexi-glass with a sharp tool then squeegee the glass in a thin layer of oil-based ink and rub the ink off so that the only part of the glass with ink is the area we carved. Then the glass is stamped in the press and voila (!!!): a really really really cool looking print!

I chose to etch a sketch I did (hahaha, “etch a sketch”… but seriously though) of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (since we saw it only a few weekends ago). I didn’t completely finish etching it but did a sample print to see how it would sorta turn out and everyone that saw it said it was really good, so yay! I’m happy I chose to take printmaking… at first I really didn’t like it OR the people in my class, but now I’ve really grown to appreciate both.

Other exciting things: I bought plane tickets for a trip to Dublin, Ireland coming up in about 3 weeks (yay!); I also bought tickets for my trip to Amsterdam with Amelia coming up in December (Ah!); congrats to my little brother for pledging Phi Psi… I’ve been to a few of their parties with my friends and it’s always been a good time; I talked to Pete twice over the past few days and for the first time in a long time it was really nice to talk to him: hi home friends - I miss you guys!!!. Ok, enough for today.

Wait, just kidding! I thought that it is worthwhile to mention that tonite at dinner the “Cuss Cards” (playing cards that have 52 different bad words in 7 different languages that my mom bought me) came out and Marilena, Manuel, and I had an awesome time teaching each other all of them in our different languages… I love Kike and Susana but when they go out and leave us alone at night, it’s priceless.

OMG it's already October!

Last night I took a Nyquil in hopes that I would be able to sleep better AND wake up without a cold – it worked pretty well. I slept for about 10 hours straight and feel great this morning! Today is homework day… for reals this time. Our house doesn’t have internet right now soooo I guess there is nothing to distract me.

Today I did a few calculations (I have a problem with procrastinating, okay?):
So, we’re here for 110 days total and we’ve already been here for 27 soooo that leaves only 83 more days in italy! :(

Midterms are already coming up in three weeks! WHAT?! It’s crazy. This is going to be a hard week of school.

We have 11 weekends left and I’m excited cuz I have trips planned for EVERY weekend for the rest of the semester! On the schedule is Belgium (Brussels), Parma and Milan, Rome, Spain (Barcelona and Madrid), Czech Republic (Prague), Hugary (Budapest), France (Paris), Holland (Amsterdam), and Switzerland… woo!

I type my blog out in Word before uploading it to the computer and it’s already 35 pages long; if I keep typing at this rate, my blog by the time my trip is over will be over 150ish pages long.

Oh and 85 days til Christmas, and 117 days until my 21st birthday!!!

Ravenna with Neil

Today started at 6AM after a horrible nights sleep. It’s actually weird because lately I haven’t been sleeping well at all… I think it’s a combo of my cold (surprise surprise that I’m sick) and the fact that I have a lot on my mind. Lately before I fall asleep I spend a lot of time thinking about things that I miss at home and school. I mean, it’s not that I’m homesick it’s just that a lot of things that are important to me aren’t here and the whole “wanting” feeling is starting to weigh on me a little bit.

My solution? I’ve been reminding myself over and over and over WHERE I am and I’ve been keeping myself really busy.

Today, after our walk to school at 7AM we went on a three hour bus ride to Ravenna (a city in Northern Italy). Before we started driving our guides all warned us that we’d be going through the Apennine Mountains and that the roads are twisty and windy; all I could think about was the ride of death in Positano… Luckily I fell asleep about 5 minutes into the ride and didn’t wake up until three hours later when we arrived in Ravenna.

Ravenna, as all cities I’ve visited in Italy (with exception of Napoli), is beautiful. When we got there Marilena, Claire, and I made sure to get in Neil’s tour group since he was so awesome last time he took us around Pisa – god he was so freaking funny. It’s weird though… maybe we got in a lame group today or something cuz Marilena and I were the only ones that would be laughing at his jokes (blue and pink dolphins? What??).

We visited such sites as San Vitale, Galla Placidia, the Orthodox Baptistry, San Apollinare Nuovo, and Dante’s Tomb – it was crazy cuz I totally remember studying about those locations during art history at SCU! Seriously, the various places contained the most incredible, breathtaking, mosaics I have ever seen in my entire life. The walls and ceilings of each building were out of this world. PLUS, the buildings we visited today were built during the 500’s… yea, over 1,500 years ago!!! I’m still freaking out about it.

Then Claire, Marilena, and I grabbed lunch and spent the rest of the evening strolling around the city, lounging in the piazza and soaking up the PERFECT weather (it was about 75 today), talking about boys, shopping… I am proud to say that I exercised some major self control today; at Zara I found a really really really cute brown winter jacket and wore it around the store for about 20 minutes then put. It. Back. On. The. Rack. And. Left. The. Store. AAAHHHHHHHHHH… our latest adventure that we’re working on is a trip to Switzerland; maybe I can get the jacket for that trip…

On the drive home from Ravenna we watched the cheesiest movie I have ever seen. It was called “Don Juan de Marco” and the best thing about it was the fact that Johnny Depp was the lead character (hahaha, I watched the whole thing cuz of him).

Also, this is random but pretty cool, we saw a bunch of people skydiving! We saw them all landing in a field with their parachutes… I know that has nothing to do with Italy BUT how often do you see something like that??? Oh yea, we also saw a flock of a billion birds. I’m not kidding. There were billions!!! Heh… It’s the little things in life. :)

I think that my host family thinks I’m liek a crazy party animal or something because tonight at dinner they were telling us about how today in a pub they saw some men sitting at a table drinking beers and laughing and telling stories and stuff and Susana was like, “Tera, we thought that the tall, strong, blonde, guy drinking the beer was your dad!” Ooooooookaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy… maybe the fact the guy was blonde might make him my dad, but the fact that he was laughing loud and drinking beer isn’t exactly what I’m known for at home. I think that the whole breakingmyfootandstillwantingtogooutatnight thing is what makes them think I’m crazy… who knows?

I called Derek today – ah! I miss my little brother so much! It was about 11AM California time and he was definitely still sleeping; that’s what I like to hear! It sounded like he was loving college; I’m so proud of my little brother! We were on the phone for kinda a while (sorry dad if it turns out to be an expensive call…) but it was worth it cuz we had lots of gossip to exchange!!!

A few days ago I called Doddles too because I hadn’t talked to her since BEFORE I left for Italia (um, over a month ago!). I was excited to get an e-mail from her a few days later.

It’s funny because a lot of people have been saying to me “I know I haven’t talked to you for a while but I read your blog everyday and it feels like I’ve been talking to you.” Makes sense but hey, what about me?!? Everyone knows everything I’VE been up to but I haven’t got a clue as to what everyone else has been up to!!! At least leave me comments or something otherwise I might have to boycott blog-writing and MAKE people call me and e-mail me. :)