Fiorentina game and wine festival: note the flying flags

 

 

 

My weekend in Florence

9/27/08

1. New blog format

2. All my friends left me, I’m sad

3. 5 euro sweater/ Just a taste of donkey

4. Behind the Glory: Adam Caniparoli, wine connoisseur (did I spell that right?)

5. Fortza Viola: Fiorentina soccer


1. What’s up, folks? I’ve decided to introduce a new “user-friendly” format for my blog. At the top there will be a paragraph-paragraph identification guide in case you’re in a hurry and you don’t want to read about all of my non-sensical blatherings (is that a word?). Also, I haven't written in awhile, so this is a really long blog. Maybe read it and take breaks in between sections.
2. So this weekend, all but one of my usual friends left to Venice and I was left to entertain myself. I found myself entertained with a lovely head cold for most of the weekend. But after sleeping for 30 hours over the last three nights, I’m feeling a lot better.
3. Yesterday was an outrageously exciting day. I met my friend Lauren in the early afternoon and we went to the market, Piazza Sant’Ambrogio to explore and buy stolen merchandise for prices so low, it should be ILLEGAL. It probably is illegal. I bought an awesome sweater for 5 euros and then bought some cheap fruit. It was then lunch time and we tried to eat at a number of places, but lost interest when there were too many people trying to eat there. We then wandered into a tiny little hole in the wall to try to buy some rolls that we could eat with fruit to have a sort of makeshift lunch. So using my superior Italian skills, I tried to order two rolls and the well-dressed man working behind the counter asked me (in Italian) what I wanted in it. Confused by this question, I sort of muttered and looked confused at him at which point he said a bunch of things in Italian, caught on that I spoke English and then started speaking in Italian. It turns out that what I took to be a bakery, was actually a large game shop. The options for the insides of our sandwiches were hare, wild boar, venison and my personal favorite option: donkey! We thought he was kidding when he said it was donkey meat. So I ordered venison and my friend, Lauren ordered hare, but the dude said, no no. “You must try taste of donkey.” Taste of donkey. So he gave her a donkey sandwich and he gave me a hare sandwich for some reason. In the process of all this, after we said we didn’t want anything to drink, he told us you can’t eat game without wine, so he gave us each a free glass of chianti. And the food was so good. It was in a sort of gravy and I suppose the closest thing I can compare it to would be brisket. But donkey and hare meat instead of beef. After that he brought us a bowl of grapes and then we paid, having no idea how much it was going to cost. It turns out that after the sandwiches we didn’t mean to order, the wine and the grapes, it was just 4 euros each. And then we were on our way.
4. After the market adventure, we went across the river to a big wine tasting festival to meet two of Lauren’s friends from the states. There were about 30 or 40 tents set up in three separate piazzas and each tent housed two wineries where you could taste their wine. The system is as follows: You pay 10 euros and they give you a little book on the wineries with room for notes on the different wine, a wine glass carrying pouch (it looks ridiculous, so I of course had mine on as much as possible) and a punch card good for twelve wine tastes. Wine tastes should more correctly be referred to as glasses of wine. My previous knowledge of wine tasting is you go and they give you a bout a mouthful of wine to swish around and then spit out. These people pour you whole glasses of wine! Sometimes they pour you a more reasonable amount, but usually, it was a lot closer to a full glass. And you’re supposed to be able to get through 12! Needless to say, I got through four and as we were ready to leave, I promptly dropped my wine glass on the ground in front of a church and a crowd of about 50 people. I picked up most of the glass and brought it to the place where I was issued a glass originally and got a new one. I figured it was time to go home then. On our way home we were greeted by a wine parade with men throwing flags in the air and wearing silly wine clothing. It was very cool. I went back to the wine tasting event today with my friends to try to finish off my other 10 glasses (I only got punched for two of the four glasses that I had the day before) of wine (ambitious, I know, but I love a challenge!). There were three of us, so they bought one more card and between the three of us, took down a good 15 or 16 glasses of wine. Then it was time to talk to the parents! I ate some breadsticks and drank some water, and then I was all set. It was a ton of fun and I got a wine glass out of it as well as a wealth of knowledge of Tuscan wine (This is, of course, not true. They sort of all taste the same to me.)
5. The final event of Saturday evening was the Fiorentina game. Un gioco di calico. A soccer game. Fiorentina is the Florence soccer club and apparently everyone in the entire city is a big fan. They were violet jerseys because the city flower of Florence is the violet. About 30 students from the school showed up and walked over together, led by our fearless leader, the director of the program. When we got there, we found some seats (there are assigned seats, but no one sits in them) and observed that the sea of purple was interrupted only briefly by four sections of the stadium that were all in a row. We learned that the away team (in our case, Genova) is given a police escort to and from the train station so they aren’t beaten up. They also are contained in their own two sections separated by large metal walls and two lines of security guards. As if that weren’t enough, the two sections on either side of them aren’t sold to either team to create a barrier between the two groups of fans. I couldn’t understand anything that either group of fans would cheer at each other, except for one cheer that our team did, which I managed to catch “Va fancola, Genova,” which means “Go [whoops] yourself, Genova.” I learned later, first hand, that when the Genovese wanted to buy concessions, they had to go to the metal wall separating the two sides and buy concessions through bars in the wall, like caged animals. There was literally no chance of fans from the two sides ever physically interacting. Of course at halftime, the two groups of fans would scream obscenities at each other and shake the metal wall separating them until the security guards broke them apart. It was very exciting. Very glad to be on the Fiorentina side of things. Incidentally, the game was also quite entertaining and Fiorentina won 1-0. We couldn’t really see how the goal was scored because we were on the end of the field, opposite that goal that was being scored on. I’m sure it was amazing. I bought a purple stocking cap and got my face painted by a very polite Southern architect major from Kentucky. I plan on coming to as many Fiorentina games as I have money for. They play at home every other week.

All in all, my weekend mostly alone in Florence turned out to be a ton of fun. I got much closer to another person and got to catch up on some sleep. Florence really is a wonderful city. Una bella citta.

AJC

Gioco basket

09/23/08

This will be just a brief check in because I have a ton of work to do tonight and it’s almost one am. Today was acting workshop, spazio conversazione (locals come to the school and we sit around and try to talk Italian with them, while they work on their English), and basketball practice. Result of acting workshop: there is a really cute girl in it, but she already has a boyfriend (see disgruntled blog from sometime last week). Boo. But she has the most amazing smile. I can’t ignore her. The rest of the workshop was fun too.
Basketball was awesome! There were only four of us who showed up. I had heard we would be playing with another team and I assumed it was going to be a team of college-aged students. We show up and a 40-something man who speaks great English introduces himself as Andrea. The rest of his team is probably in their forties or fifties. We observe this unexpected scene and start warming up. It turns out this team of 40-50 year old men is actually quite hardcore. And most of them are named Marco. We did warm ups and drills for about 40 minutes and then scrimmaged for 30. They are all really good and in excellent shape. We kept up with them though. One of the Syracuse students who was playing with us is about 6’5” and enjoys effortlessly dunking the basketball. I think our team is going to be pretty good. I made some good passes and made about half my shots. Learned some new words: blocco means screen and stoppata means block. Andrea (the team captain, I later learned) taught me how to say these and other words, but those are the only ones that stayed with me. My highlights of the practice include taking a big charge from a different big kid from Syracuse and diving into the legs of the seemingly oldest member of the team and having him fall on me. All in all, it was amazing. I got a great workout and had a ton of fun. I think we play games some time as well – don’t know yet though. Gioco basket! I play basketball!
Everything else is great, I’m gonna try to do some reading before I pass out.

 

 

 

Merrily we roll along

9/22/08

Life is like a dream. Well at least parts of it are. Life is just so different than it has ever been before, I’m sort of just waiting for someone to punch me in the face to wake me up. It’s actually not a coincidence that I use the term “punch me in the face” because on Thursday (four days ago), after I left my buddy Luke’s birthday party, he was asking some people in a car for directions home and he and his buddy got punched in the face. They asked a couple in a car which way to go to get back to their house, and the guy got out of the car and punched first one and then while the first one is bleeding, he punches the other one in the face and then gets in his car and drives away. They didn’t get a license plate number. Weird. Italy is weird.
But enough about other people, let’s talk about ME! Dinner this evening was quite tasty, nothing outrageously bizarre, but when we finished with dinner, Giovanna cleared our plates and brought out bowls. Now, bowls usually means gelato that she pulls out of the freezer, but I guess you could say, there was something in the air that made me think that tonight was a different night. Something more miraculous than gelato was about to grace our presence. From the refrigerator, Giovanna whips out a cookie sheet of homemade Tiramisu. The only homemade Tiramisu I’ve ever eaten was Uncle Chip’s and while his was quite nice, I was reduced to primal grunts and occasional sighs of delight while I slowly took down the bowl of Tiramisu. I can’t describe it. It was probably the best thing that I’ve ever eaten. Giovanna says, “You like it?” and we don’t know how to express ourselves in Italian. Buonissimo. Molto buonissimo. Molto buonissimo di tutti mondo! I don’t know. I wanted to laugh and cry and do a little jig at the same time. All over a serving of desert. I’m going to get the recipe from her.
I took a spontaneous day trip to the Cinque Terre on Sunday. This was my dentist’s recommendation for the place I absolutely needed to go while I was in Italy. We caught the 7:45 train and made it to the third of the five cities at around 11. We bought our passes and started hiking. In trying to describe what the landscape around the Cinque Terre is like, I discover that it is sort of a combination of a number of both real and non real lands that I have seen pictures of. Combine the Shire with Narnia, the Garden of Eden, rural China, an orchard and the Olympic Coast. That is the Cinque Terre. Unbelievably beautiful. I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the hiking trip I led for freshmen before I came to Italy on the Olympic Coast. Both places involve rigorous climbs to the tops of hills where you get breathtaking views of the sea. It was spectacular, the photos I hope to include soon can only partially express the beauty that is the Cinque Terre. While there was a large number of tourists, I didn’t feel completely closed in by them like I do around the Centro in Florence or anywhere in Venice. The climb was pretty difficult, but the train stops in each city, so we could’ve taken the train anywhere around there for around 1.5 euros. For lunch, we ate fresh 1.5 euro foccacia. It was so good. That might have been the hike talking, but that foccacia was, in the wizened words of Bryce McKay, ridonculous. Other highlights of the trip included sitting on a beach in a rainstorm, seeing an enormous grasshopper (probably about 5 inches long) and watching other students form Syracuse in Florence sprint across the last town to catch a train back home (we were on the train after that).
I met some cool new people, took some sweet pictures and ended up spending about 30 euros the whole day (this included train tickets, two meals, wine and the trail pass). I got back home and deliriously finished my Italian homework before passing out. I still need to catch up on sleep. I think I’ll do that right now. Arrivederci e buono notte.

AJC

Photos

So, I have a picasa profile all set up. You can check out more photos at the following URL.

http://picasaweb.google.com/adam.caniparoli

I don't know how to use technology, so here's some more albums on picasa.

http://picasaweb.google.com/adam.caniparoli/Upload99?authkey=mSO_t_gSoJk#

http://picasaweb.google.com/adam.caniparoli/AdamSAmazingEuropeanAdventure?authkey=4JB8K3hLXrU#

Italian food is tasty (this should come before the assissi posting, sorry...)

9/17/08

Some fun things happened to me today. First off, Giovanna made a ridiculously tasty dinner tonight. Some kind of long, thick pasta with a tunnel down the middle a sicilia: with hard boiled egg slices, melted gorgonzola cheese, and an eggplant, tomato and olive sauce. It was the most delicious thing ever. I’m going to try to make it when I get back to the states. For secondi (main course), we had baked mozzarella cheese with tomatoes. After salad, we had apple cake she made herself.

It was the tastiest thing ever, even better than the pasta. How does she keep making the best food I’ve ever eaten? Ridiculous.

Today in Italian class, we did presentations on the streets we live on in Italy. I did an elaborate presentation with powerpoint and spent about two hours looking up exotic words to spice up the presentation. It turns out that after two weeks of studying Italian, I don’t know sentence structure well enough for that to actually work. It just came out like jumbled word mush and my teacher spent the whole time correcting all my mistakes. Which was many. But after that, the other boy in my class (there are two of us) did a presentation pronounced very poorly and admitted to using freetranslator.com to create his presentation. It made me look a lot better, so I guess that’s cool.

I briefly fell in love with a girl yesterday only to find out today that she has a boyfriend. Damn. Everyone already has a boyfriend.

Our Comedy class took a trip to see an ancient theatre ruins just outside of town in another tiny town called Fiesole. It’s an unbelievably gorgeous little town that overlooks Florence on one side and the rolling hills of the rest of Tuscany on the other. We’re shooting for a Sunday picnic there if weather will permit it. Our teacher continues to make a buffoon of himself at every possible opportunity. He tells us we have guest performers to entertain us at the ancient theatre. He then runs behind a rock wall and comes back out with a middle-aged woman’s mask and starts doing an over-the top impression that befuddles both our class as well as the handful of elderly French-speaking tourists who stop to stare at him. He then runs off and returns with an old man mask and continues his “witty banter?” as the members of the class, myself included, try to hide our faces in shame and pretend like we don’t know him. It was an adventure.

Things are really starting to settle in here. I am content.

AJC

Adrift assissi (sorry Stephanie)

Adrift assissi (sorry Stephanie)

So, we had a site visit today to the mountain towns of Assissi and Gubbio. About two hours from Florence. It rained the entire day and low clouds blocked the usually gorgeous view of the surrounding landscape. I still had a really good time in spite of the weather and in spite of the fact that my arch history professor was giving our tour and has the most boring things to say about everything. I’m not the best listener in the world, but his talks are exceptionally boring. You can’t pay attention to him for more than five minutes without your attention wandering to literally anything else you can find: pretty buildings, the landscape, pigeons, garbage, the back of your hand, really most things.

Last night we celebrated, my buddy Luke’s birthday and had to wake up at 6:30 to get an early start to Assissi. Not a good combination. I discovered a new drink that I had never seen before. They call it dessert wine. It looks like it should be sweet, but it is, in fact, much stronger than normal wine. I found free samples of it at this market near my house and after a free Dixie cup of champagne and two free cups of dessert wine, I was set! But then I had to go have some beers with Luke on his special day. I caught the last bus from the Duomo and got home at around 1:20. It was pretty sweet.

We had our first soccer practice of the season yesterday. About 20 seconds into the came, I took a shot squarely into the testicles and had to sit for about five minutes to ensure that both the boys were still with me. I also hurt my wrist blocking a ball from point blank range. We play on smaller fields made from Astroturf. The whole field is maybe 30 yards. Needless to say, goalkeeper, or portiere, is a lot less fun to play when you’re getting shot on from three feet away and the goal is about half the size of a normal goal. There’s a lot less room for the ball to get by, therefore people kick the ball harder and from closer. It hurts, and I find that I am now afraid of the ball. That’s great. There were also two girls playing with us who were really good at soccer. That’s hot. Athlete girls are hot. I love a girl that can kick my ass.

Padua and more

So I still haven’t written to tell you about the end of the class trip to Vicenza,Venice and Padua. Padua was beautiful! (I had falafel!) and I made another pretty good friend. It rained almost the entire time we were there and instead of wandering the city on our own for awhile, our professor treated us all to an amazing treat. It’s called pedrocchi. They only serve it at this one coffee shop in Venice. A specialty coffee, if you will. Espresso with mint whipped cream and chocolate. The cold sugariness from the whipped cream balances perfectly with the hot bitterness of the espresso and the chocolate just finishes the job. It was delicious and really great to have after wandering around in the rain all day long. The other students whined and moaned about the rain the entire trip. Even the girl from Corvallis. I still have no idea what this course I’m taking is about. It’s called the Mediterranean City from Antiquity to Modern day (or something like that) and at present, it appears to be about architecture rituals. Architecture is really boring for those of you who don’t know anything about it. This type of column is different from this type of column because there are more ridges – is more or less the gist of architecture. We got to see an old villa on a hill side near vicenza for about 45 minutes. We weren’t allowed inside, so we walked around the outside for 5 minutes and spent the next 40 hiding from the rain storm. A scene from the Don Giovanni movie was filmed there and on the bus ride home, we watched it. Or rather I watched it and got all excited when we got to the part where the characters walk through the garden of the villa and sing. No one else was watching the movie. Whatever, I can have my own party.
On the return trip home we experienced something I’ve never seen before. A giant rest area/ restaurant. It is so large, it goes over the highway. It has two parking lots, three stories and when we were there, I estimated around 200 people were in the entire establishment. It was huge and amazing. I had gnocchi and they were tasty.
I’ve recently started worrying about whether or not I am enjoying my experience in Italy enough yet. I’ve been here for exactly two weeks. I have friends, so I suppose that’s a good thing. I’m learning the language at a decent pace, so I suppose we like that too. I’m just expecting it all to be amazing and it isn’t blowing my mind yet. I guess I like the change of pace from Walla Walla, but I also miss everything about Whitman.
For once in my life I have a few very close friends as opposed to many friends and one or two very close friends. I don’t know everyone on this program yet! 280 students. I’m disappointed in myself. I’ll give it some time.
The last two days have been really good though. A few of us have decided to have a dinner date every Sunday night in the centro. Dress up and have a big dinner together in a relatively nice restaurant. Then we’ll get gelato. We did this on Sunday and didn’t get charged for the wine we bought. Maybe this was morally corrupt, but the portions weren’t very big, so we felt we were just getting our money’s worth. I think fate got me back later because when I was eating gelato, I either found the rind of some mysterious fruit, or a fingernail clipping. I’m banking on fruit rind, but I still lie awake at night pondering it.
I’m making plans for trips for the entire semester. My big plans include but are not limited to: Paris, London, Amsterdam, Sicily and Rome. If anyone has any destination suggestions for any of these places let me know.

-AJC

Look! This street is covered in water!

Part of Venice at sunset

A market place in Padua

Venice! Venice!

What’s up, my peeps? It’s been awhile since I’ve last written. Not a lot happened, and then all of a sudden, a lot happened. I just returned from my art/architecture history class’s trip up north in Venice, Padua and Vicenza.

Since my last entry, a few friends and I had a terrific night out on the town. We bought some wine and wandered to the Ponte Vecchio and a long the river. It is absolutely breathtaking at night. I then had a thoroughly enjoyable walk back through a new part of town I hadn’t really explored, followed by a walk to my friend Jocie’s house at 12:30 and grabbed the last bus home, which got me back at around 1:30 am. It was quite a lovely evening, and we just spent it mostly wandering around the town. This town is so gorgeous, you can just wander forever.

BUT speaking of gorgeous towns! Venice! Wow. I woke up at 4:30 to catch a taxi at 4:50 and get to school at 5:20 to get on the bus that left at 5:30. Needless to say, I know associate Venice with shear exhaustion. The more beautiful parts of our trip were of course the places without the vast seas of tourists. For example, we got a little lost trying to find the place to meet back up with the group and wandered down some sides streets and saw some gorgeous, old condos. Some of these buildings have got to be at least a few hundred years old. They’re always being renovated but it’s amazing to observe the dichotomy between the new and old buildings. There were honestly too many amazing things about Venice for me to possibly include in any sort of timely fashion, but allow me to take you paint you a picture for your minds. Imagine, rolling out of bed, having a quick breakfast, getting ready and then walking down your sidewalk to your boat to drive to work. That’s what they do. Or they ride the bus. Which, incidentally, also happens to be a boat. This might sound stupid to say, but Venice is actually a real, functioning city with taxis and police and ambulances and people commuting to go back and forth from work. But they do it all in boats. Boat taxis, boat ambulances. It’s truly amazing to witness first hand. Also, every square inch of the city is so old, it is just mind-boggling. Every corner you turn, every building you walk by is old and beautiful. I got a ton of pictures of old brick peaking through plaster or cement that must have once fully covered them. It gives the entire town a wonderful rustic feeling.

TOURIST TIP! – If you need to use a restroom while in Venice, it will cost 1 Euro to use the public WC. That is utterly outrageous. If you try to use the bathrooms in the hotels, the employees working there will follow you and kick you out, no matter how sneaky you think you are being. There are really only two good choices. The first is to find a bar or restaurant that has a bathroom and buy a drink for 1 or 2 euro and use their restrooms. But my personal favorite is to find a McDonalds! If there is a McDonalds in a ½ mile radius of where you are standing, you will see a sign for that McDonalds. The McDonalds employees hate working there, because let’s face it, no one wants to be flipping burgers at McDonalds regardless of age, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Erego, McDonalds bathrooms are like stumbling upon a vile, smelly, presumably disease-ridden hidden treasure.

St. Marc’s basilica is gorgeous! And let me tell you, I have seen a lot of amazing churches so far on this trip. I’m starting to become spoiled, with thoughts such as “Oh, this church only has three domes.” Or “Oh, this church only has one person’s weight in gold to make up the mosaics on the ceiling.” Top 3 churches of the trip so far in order of least spectacular to most spectacular (keeping in mind, of course, that “least spectacular” is a relative term. They are all unbelievable.) :

3. The church of Anunzia - Florence

2. St. Marco’s basilica - Venice

1. St. Anthony’s Church – Padua (To be discussed later)

Stay turned for updates on this list. Pictures aren’t allowed in the St Marco’s or St. Anthony’s, but I was able to get a few photos of the church of the Anunzia. I recommend checking out photos online on google or something like that if you want to see some pics. St. Marc’s is enormous and combined with the huge square in front, is the focal point of all of Venice. The inside is supposed to represent the various levels of the Earth. Art on the floor and lower parts of the walls is paintings and statues of normal people. As you move higher, the paintings become more divine (larger, more Gold and more holy people). The ceiling is made of gold mosaics of Jesus and Mary and all sorts of important biblical figures that have slipped my mind. We see this theme of artistic, theological pyramids in a baptistery in Padua as well.

I spent the tail end of the summer having my breath taken away by landscapes untouched by the filth and decay of humanity. I could see the earth, pretty much how it looked to anyone or anything that may have come across it for hundreds of thousands of years. The beauty of the earth. Now, I find myself having my breath taken away by the unbelievable inorganic side of this world. Absorbing all the beauty hat mankind is capable of producing.

To all those curious, we did not float in a fancy boat down the Grand Canal paddled by a plump little Italian man named Luigi, while his cousin Giovanni sang to us and played on his accordion. We could’ve gotten that if we had been able to pay anywhere from 80-120 Euro (depending on the number of musicians/ where you want to go). Venice is expensive! Using my smeller for the lowest prices in an area, I scoped out a place where we were able to buy a delicious pizza for 4 Euros! My friend Luke paid 9.

Thus ends the tale of Venice. Gorgeous city. Big too. We didn’t have a chance to see most of it. We stayed at a hotel in the town of Vicenza, which was about 45 minutes away. It’s pretty crazy to imagine that when the Venetians decided to build a city, they found some islands in the middle of nowhere and built on the islands to use the surrounding water as a defense from enemies, but also to allow themselves to become one of the most powerful trade cities in the Mediterranean. They were brilliant!

Original statue in a square near Duomo. Herucles and Medusa I think

This is what all the streets look like.

A view of our school from Piazza Savanarola (the red and white buildings

Sexy shop

A tower part of the Duomo

Some old building. A church?

Io Studio! :-(

So in attempting to solve the mystery of the stomach virus, I’ve narrowed it down to a few options:

1. There’s some sort of parasite or bacteria in the water here and it is not sitting well in my stomach
2. The change in diet from basically starving myself all day long on my hiking trip to grossly overeating each night followed by partial starvation the rest of the day is not being received well by my body
3. I have giardia from my hiking trip and I need to find a doctor.

Let’s hope it’s not the third. I’m going to wait it out and see if I feel better. If I don’t feel better by Wednesday, I’m going to see the doctor. And for those of you who were curious, no, beer does not in fact make an upset stomach feel better. I’ve heard this from… a friend… who shall remain nameless. I went out last night while feeling sick and stayed out till 12:30. On a school night. Molto stupido. I was very tired today for the first round of classes. I’m in a pre-architecture/ art history class about the history of city architecture in the Mediterranean. It’s pretty boring so far, but we get to travel to crazy places, so I think I’ll stay in it. I also had Comedy in Italy class with a crazy man who enjoys acting out examples of comedy, which is funny, but also kinda weird and uncomfortable. He’ll be in mid sentence and then whip out a mask and start acting out his favorite Comedia Del Arte (sp?) character. Or fake getting beat up with slapstick. We ended the class watching a Loony Tunes bit. It should be a decent class. I also had Italian with a wonderful woman. Donatella Palli. She was very funny and while she’s probably only about 40-45, she still pulls off the cute little old Italian woman very well. I know nobody in that class, so I had to make a few friends in the clutch. While everyone in the class is all beginners, I feel like I already know Italian a lot better than they do. I don’t think that makes me smart. I think that makes them apathetic and lazy. That’s cool though. Maybe this semester can boost my GPA!

I’m becoming friends with a tall, beautiful girl named Izzy. She should be a model. She must be about 6’0” and weigh about 115 pounds and she does crew. We went on an adventure to buy books for our classes (80 Euros. It’s on the credit card. Thanks mom and dad). She’s really good at Italian, so I think I’ll keep her around.

Other than that, I just sat around today and battled stomach cramps (maybe I’m pregnant? Maybe it’s just that time of the month?) Tomorrow I don’t have class until 1pm! Woot! I think I’m going to sign up to volunteer at elementary schools in the area to read Dr. Seuss books to small children in English. I also want to record books on tape for the blind. Both of these are programs supported and endorsed by Syracuse in Florence.

To end, I would like to further sing my praises to my pants and my mother. These skinny jeans also are pretty much pick-pocket proof (wow, say that 10 times fast). They are so tight that I can’t even get things out of my pockets when I want to get things out of my pockets. Maybe that’s why Europeans where such tight clothing…

Bacci!

-AJC

Ain't no party like my nana's tea party

Tonight’s blog will be short because it is late and we have school tomorrow morning. But allow me to share a few fun stories of the day for all you followers. First off, it’s official, I either have giardia or a stomach bug or I just can’t handle the amount of food I’m eating. My stomach hurts like a biznatch. But then at dinner tonight, I became really hungry again and ate a whole bunch. She may be calming down with the food though. Last night’s fried goodness wasn’t so bad and tonight we had risotto (I’m sorry mom, but this risotto was ridiculous) and bread with different cheeses as well as potatoes and salad. My friends in town tonight were buying food from street vendors while I’m trying not to vomit on them. It’s pretty fun. But it really is pretty fun. I may also be dehydrated because of the ridiculous heat, but we may be getting cool temperatures this week.

Story # 1. Our host mom parked and took us on a small walk (about 30 minutes) to the piazza michaelangelo that overlooks the entire valley that is Florence and the surrounding area. Una donna vecchio (an old woman) spilled gelato on me and my camera miraculously started working again (not related thoughts, but they happened at the same place. It was impeccable timing. I got some beautiful photos. Giovanna then took us to a beautiful old church above piazza michaelangelo. I got some sweet photos there (still to come). There was a part of the church where the pillars were all different types because the church had been rebuilt so many times and they kept some of the pillars each time. There are about 25 pillars and there may be two or three pairs of duplicates. The rafters were made of painted pine. And there were gorgeous stain-glass windows made of alibastre (sp?). Amaaaaaaazing. We then went to the Sinagoga! Synogogue! Found a kosher vegetarian restaurant! Ha! There was a festival for some reason that Giovanna saw in the paper and decided we might like it. We listened to a wicked awesome klezmer band for about an hour before we went home. It was an exhausting day and I didn’t mention when she took us on a walk down the Arno river earlier in the day.

Tangent: People paddle kayaks and outrigger canoes down the Arno. I want to play! I’m working together with Giovanna to see if they rent kayaks. So beautiful!

Story 2. I went downtown after dinner to play with some friends. There was a big festival celebrating the birth of the Virgin Mary. Food, toys for the children, beer, cotton candy, fiery paper lanterns (you see, this is a tradition: Parents buy paper lanterns with a candle inside. They light the candle and swing the lantern around while the children shoot little clay pellets at it with what could be described as miniature blowguns. It’s over when the paper lantern catches fire and the children huddle around and blow it out. Bizarre! But kinda neat. After that when I was waiting for the bus to go home, a group of three middle-aged, Mediterranean folks asked in Italian if I was waiting for the 14 bus. I said yes I was, in Italian. They then said something else I couldn’t understand, to which I replied “no parla italiano.” They then said something about espagnol and then laughed at me. I walked away laughing and thought to myself, “Self, what an odd, exciting adventure you’ve somehow gotten yourself on. I’m proud of you. But also kind of disappointed in you because you’re dumb.” Something along those lines. Anywho, this is my story and this is me loving Italy. I also tricked a group of Americans into thinking I was Italian and were startled when I was helping them find their hotel in English. Many times today, people spoke Italian at me. I’m blending in.

At this point, I would like to thank my lovely mother who convinced me to buy a pair of skinny jeans. They really make me look European. The shirts I have, I can’t wear because it’s too warm, but the skinny jeans! Io piaccio! I look fab-u-lous! I’ll try to show you some pictures. Until later, mi amicci e familia, ciao!

AJC

The first week.

09/06/08

What an amazing two days! No blog yesterday because my roommate Ryan and I went out con trei bella regazzi (with three beautiful ladies). I’m just trying to show off my extremely limited Italian. That’s pretty much all I’ve got. We got home at around 2:15 am. During the day, however, we did more registration and I met a bunch of Southern girls. From Alabama, Atlanta, and South Carolina. Tutti bella! I also have become really good friends with a girl from upstate New York who I just met yesterday. I also met a girl who looks like Liv Tyler (so beautiful: a little in love, but not the best personality, so I’m okay), and a fourth theatre major! Then at night, I had dinner with my host mom’s son, wife and grandson, Lorenzo. Lorenzo is five. We played cars together and he would shout things in Italian while I would reply, “si.” I had a good laugh when he said many Italian words, crashed his car and then yelled something about “morto!” (death). Giovanna’s son and daughter in law both speak really good English and we chatted about many things. They were quite wonderful and it sounds like we have them over to dinner frequently. I almost vomito’d again, but I didn’t come as close as the night before. We had pasta with pesto, and then turkey sautéed with peppers and molto sale (salt!!) (she made Ryan and I each have three servings), followed by salad and desert (some sort of delicious grape cake that she, of course, made from scratch). We then sat around and talked and then when the guests left, we headed out for the Duomo (giant church at the center of the city. Many stories will revolve around the Duomo.) at around 11. We missed the first bus and they only come every half hour in the evenings. We drank some wine on the steps of an ancient church we didn’t know the name of and had a great time. There were five of us. We drank two bottles of wine and two large beers. We were set. We had some drama finding taxis – calling them at 1:30 am, trying to order two in Italian and then not having them show up until 2 am. We got to watch some really drunk Americans make fools of themselves though. The buses only run until 1 am (12:45 where we were) and we wanted to stay out some more. We split cab fare and made our way home. It was quite a night. We spent some money, but it was good, safe fun.

Today was also wonderful! We got to sleep in until 9:30 and then we breakfasted and headed to the Duomo with Giovanna. She took us to the interesting and beautiful places. The best Gelataria near the Duomo, a neat market with all sorts of gross meat (nervi? I’m pretty sure it was chicken arteries! I have pictures.) and expensive cheeses, but they had the cheapest lunches we could find (3 Euro panini!) at a wonderful establishment called Pork’s.

Tangent:

My English is already deteriorating, I can see. I speak in broken pieces of sentences because I try to speak as much italiano as possible. When talking to Giovanna, I don’t always use sentences, because she doesn’t understand them all the time. It’s getting bad, but I guess we can also burn that bridge when we come to it.

She left us at the duomo to wander around so we called some friends, met them, showed them the marketplace and wandered the duomo a little bit too. The sun was burning hotter (seriously, it was not an okay temperature today. Someone told me Florence weather is just like Portland weather. This is a lie. Portland does not get this muggy.) and we decided we needed Gelatto and a park, so we went on an adventure through the town. My highlight of the day was during this adventure when we decided we needed to use the bathroom and didn’t want to pay 50 euro cents to use the gross-looking market bathroom. We realized we have these museum passes that get us into a handful of museums in Florence for free. The four of us (me, and three girls from all-girls colleges) decided to go look for one so we could use the bathroom on the way to the park. When were just about a block away from the museum, we stumbled upon Galleria dell’Academia, which was also on our museum pass and just so happened to also hold probably the most famous sculpture in the entire world. Michaelangelo’s David. This was a complete accident and since we were there to see the bathroom, we decided to stop and say hi to David and some more art in the building. This is going to be our new thing: use bathrooms in big museums we have on our passes. After all, they are very nice bathrooms, the buildings are air conditioned, and who doesn’t love a little art to spice up their lives?

We then found Gelato, and chilled in the park, while watching Italian children and dogs playing together. It was fun. We got home at 7:00 pm in time for some relaxation before dinner. Giovanna made fried zucchini, eggplant, onions, sardines and French fries (not called that here). We ate a lot of fried food. She used a little less than 1 liter of peanut oil. We then had salad and had to finish off the grape cake from last night. Then we had fruit and chocolate. Every day is becoming easier to eat the sheer volume of food she flings at us. It is all soooooooo good. Almost as good as my mother’s cooking. We finished the night off by watching a very exciting soccer game: Italia vs. Cyprus. Italy scored an amazing goal with two minutes left that put Cyprus away. Giovanna didn’t watch, but she read the newspaper and sat in the room with us. Things are becoming a lot more comfortable with her. She is probably the cutest little old woman in the history of the world.

New addition to Adam’s blog:

Fun Italian word of the day: Zamzara

Def: mosquito

Fun fact about zamzari: they’re everywhere in Florence and they love Adam’s blood.

Thought of the day:

When complaining about all the students in the program being mindless, blonde idiots, my new friend Joci reminded me that we really haven’t been here too long yet (five days?) and I should probably give them a chance. She’s right. My new goal for the trip is to branch out and try to befriend as many people as possible. Give everyone a chance. On every coin there is a silver edge, or something like that.

Peace and love to everybody or anybody who actually reads my blog.

Ciao!

AJC

The weekendo! - part I

09/06/08

What an amazing two days! No blog yesterday because my roommate Ryan and I went out con trei bella regazzi (with three beautiful ladies). I’m just trying to show off my extremely limited Italian. That’s pretty much all I’ve got. We got home at around 2:15 am. During the day, however, we did more registration and I met a bunch of Southern girls. From Alabama, Atlanta, and South Carolina. Tutti bella! I also have become really good friends with a girl from upstate New York who I just met yesterday. I also met a girl who looks like Liv Tyler (so beautiful: a little in love, but not the best personality, so I’m okay), and a fourth theatre major! Then at night, I had dinner with my host mom’s son, wife and grandson, Lorenzo. Lorenzo is five. We played cars together and he would shout things in Italian while I would reply, “si.” I had a good laugh when he said many Italian words, crashed his car and then yelled something about “morto!” (death). Giovanna’s son and daughter in law both speak really good English and we chatted about many things. They were quite wonderful and it sounds like we have them over to dinner frequently. I almost vomito’d again, but I didn’t come as close as the night before. We had pasta with pesto, and then turkey sautéed with peppers and molto sale (salt!!) (she made Ryan and I each have three servings), followed by salad and desert (some sort of delicious grape cake that she, of course, made from scratch). We then sat around and talked and then when the guests left, we headed out for the Duomo (giant church at the center of the city. Many stories will revolve around the Duomo.) at around 11. We missed the first bus and they only come every half hour in the evenings. We drank some wine on the steps of an ancient church we didn’t know the name of and had a great time. There were five of us. We drank two bottles of wine and two large beers. We were set. We had some drama finding taxis – calling them at 1:30 am, trying to order two in Italian and then not having them show up until 2 am. We got to watch some really drunk Americans make fools of themselves though. The buses only run until 1 am (12:45 where we were) and we wanted to stay out some more. We split cab fare and made our way home. It was quite a night. We spent some money, but it was good, safe fun.

Today was also wonderful! We got to sleep in until 9:30 and then we breakfasted and headed to the Duomo with Giovanna. She took us to the interesting and beautiful places. The best Gelataria near the Duomo, a neat market with all sorts of gross meat (nervi? I’m pretty sure it was chicken arteries! I have pictures.) and expensive cheeses, but they had the cheapest lunches we could find (3 Euro panini!) at a wonderful establishment called Pork’s.

Tangent:

My English is already deteriorating, I can see. I speak in broken pieces of sentences because I try to speak as much italiano as possible. When talking to Giovanna, I don’t always use sentences, because she doesn’t understand them all the time. It’s getting bad, but I guess we can also burn that bridge when we come to it.

She left us at the duomo to wander around so we called some friends, met them, showed them the marketplace and wandered the duomo a little bit too. The sun was burning hotter (seriously, it was not an okay temperature today. Someone told me Florence weather is just like Portland weather. This is a lie. Portland does not get this muggy.) and we decided we needed Gelatto and a park, so we went on an adventure through the town. My highlight of the day was during this adventure when we decided we needed to use the bathroom and didn’t want to pay 50 euro cents to use the gross-looking market bathroom. We realized we have these museum passes that get us into a handful of museums in Florence for free. The four of us (me, and three girls from all-girls colleges) decided to go look for one so we could use the bathroom on the way to the park. When were just about a block away from the museum, we stumbled upon Galleria dell’Academia, which was also on our museum pass and just so happened to also hold probably the most famous sculpture in the entire world. Michaelangelo’s David. This was a complete accident and since we were there to see the bathroom, we decided to stop and say hi to David and some more art in the building. This is going to be our new thing: use bathrooms in big museums we have on our passes. After all, they are very nice bathrooms, the buildings are air conditioned, and who doesn’t love a little art to spice up their lives?

We then found Gelato, and chilled in the park, while watching Italian children and dogs playing together. It was fun. We got home at 7:00 pm in time for some relaxation before dinner. Giovanna made fried zucchini, eggplant, onions, sardines and French fries (not called that here). We ate a lot of fried food. She used a little less than 1 liter of peanut oil. We then had salad and had to finish off the grape cake from last night. Then we had fruit and chocolate. Every day is becoming easier to eat the sheer volume of food she flings at us. It is all soooooooo good. Almost as good as my mother’s cooking. We finished the night off by watching a very exciting soccer game: Italia vs. Cyprus. Italy scored an amazing goal with two minutes left that put Cyprus away. Giovanna didn’t watch, but she read the newspaper and sat in the room with us. Things are becoming a lot more comfortable with her. She is probably the cutest little old woman in the history of the world.

New addition to Adam’s blog:

Fun Italian word of the day: Zamzara

Def: mosquito

Fun fact about zamzari: they’re everywhere in Florence and they love Adam’s blood.

Thought of the day:

When complaining about all the students in the program being mindless, blonde idiots, my new friend Joci reminded me that we really haven’t been here too long yet (five days?) and I should probably give them a chance. She’s right. My new goal for the trip is to branch out and try to befriend as many people as possible. Give everyone a chance. On every coin there is a silver edge, or something like that.

Peace and love to everybody or anybody who actually reads my blog.

Ciao!

AJC

Home dolce home

09/04/08

Wow! Today was a doozie! I am currently in my bedroom in my homestay! One other student and myself are staying with an older woman named Giovanna who teaches cooking professionally from time to time. Needless to say, she almost made me “vomito” on the dining room table. This was the breakdown of dinner this evening:

Course I: pasta:

Spaghetti with homemade sauce: fresh tomatoes, garlic, salt, olive oil, fresh basil (picked from her back porch), oregano (pulled from the stem) and more salt.

Bread

Course II:

Chicken cooked in white wine with a ton of fresh cilantro, garlic, olive oil

Potatoes fried in olive oil with garlic, salt and fresh rosemary (rosemarino!)

Bread (pane)

(noticing any trends)

(At this point, I needed to excuse myself to use the Toilette)

Course III:

Salad (insalata) with olive oil and vinegar

Bread

Course IV:

Fruit

Course V: Gelato! (We went out)

When we went out for Gelato, we stopped and picked up Giovanna’s 5-year-old grandson, Lorenzo and we found this part of her neighborhood that has this big celebration every Thursday in September. Free food and merriment. Many Italians of all ages out at 10:00pm on a Thursday having a good time. There was not a single American here. My roommate and I stood out like sore thumbs; people were pointing at us and whispering. I’ve come to accept this as a fact of life and will do my best to reverse it as much as possible (just wait until I can really break in that pair of skinny jeans! Molto italiano, eh?) I’m going to gain so much weight from Giovanna’s cooking. This must be the highly coveted Junior 40 that I’ve heard so much about... shoot. Oh well.

While the guys are usually pretty reasonable to talk to, the majority of the girls here continue to be unimpressive. I saw a girl today whose legs were the color of tree bark and her face was quite pale. Another girl last night asked if we were going to have wi-fi in the homestays again. For about the 80^th time, the answer is no. But how am I going to check my facebook every 5 minutes? Get over yourself. You’re gross. These people here kind of make me sick.

However, through thick and thin, the cool people who are real people with real thoughts stand out and it’s easy to snag them. I’m so unused to being at the top of the class because of Whitman, that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be back there. I realize I haven’t started classes yet, but as of right now, it sounds to me like we would be lucky for most of the group to show up sober to school on the first day.

I am still recovering from the jet lag, but I feel like I’ll be fine in the next few days. Giovanna doesn’t know a ton of English, so I think I’ll be learning Italian a lot faster than I originally anticipated. I’m optimistic about the way things are turning out. I’ll drop back in hopefully tomorrow. Registration! Katie Phelps, you’d best have answered my facebook wall post.

Ciao!

AJC

Secondo giorno!

Wednesday, 09/03/08

Well, it’s day 2, I guess. Or should I say, secondo giorno! Ha! I’m actually learning a relatively respectable amount of Italian and we still haven’t met any real Italians. The other students are quite helpful. It’s our second night here and everyone is out getting trashed again. I found a little group of people who are actually real and don’t need to go out and get trashed all the time. I found another theatre major and a theatre minor! I’ve become really good friends with the theatre major. She’s a Syracuse student and from Connecticut. We sit in the lobby of the hotel right now drinking a little wine and filling out registration forms. She and I wandered back from the Syracuse University center to the hotel (1/2 the way across the city) and were able to get a relatively decent feel for the way things run around here. It’s time to go to sleep, so I’ll make this brief. Main thoughts of the trip thus far: Florence is unbelievably gorgeous, everyone here is really dumb (which incidentally makes finding real friends here a lot easier) and my main goal of the trip is not to get run over by any of a combination of the following: buses, cars, bicycles, vespas or large dogs. All of them are here in great abundance and all move very quickly.

Bonne notte di Firenze!

(I have no idea how to spell that, but I think it means ‘good night from Florence!’)

AJC

Day 1! Travel!

Bonjour mes amis et ma famille. Wait, wrong language. I’m on an airplane flying with Air France and I’ve been trying out the scant amount of French I somehow managed to retain from Junior year of high school. The flight attendant spoke to me in English and I responded in French. I think she likes me… not really. This is all probably a very bad form of entertainment because I’m going to try to speak French when I’m really trying to speak Italian upon my arrival in Florence, but I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.

Leaving the US was very anticlimactic, but I suppose that’s a good thing. To all folks in Portland or Walla Walla I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to, I apologize. I am a bad friend, but you most likely knew that already. We’re about to land in Paris, so I’ll make this brief, but the people I’ve met so far have all been very nice. From a purely superficial standpoint, it would appear that a good 90% of the students here fall into the afore mentioned category of obnoxious preps, but that’s cool. They’re nice. Of the 34 students on my flight to Paris, I believe there are four boys. Nearly all of the girls cake on the makeup and love text messaging. It’s okay, I was expecting this. It’s like a culture shock within a culture shock. I met a theatre major girl from Santa Clara! She emailed a professor in Florence and he told her that they will be putting on a production this semester! I’m not sure if it will be in English or not, but I would hope to at least be able to do some building for it. Maybe some stage management. We’ll see how things go. There are 50 students from Santa Clara University and most of the 34 students on my flight are Santa Clara students. I also met a guy from Pomona who seemed pretty cool.

I guess this isn’t really very exciting for most people to read, but it is exciting for me, so if you love me, you’ll humor me and feign interest. This flight is almost over! I slept through most of it.I also ordered a little airplane bottle of the house wine as a night cap. Not so good, believe it or not. The two Ukrainian boys (maybe 16 years old) next to me each drank a bottle of wine and two beers before they fell asleep. Exciting. More details to come upon my arrival to Florence, I’m sure. Until then, ciao from somewhere above the Atlantic ocean!

-AJC

OK, just kidding. I’m now killing time in the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. Our group of 34 split in half and some already left for Florence. We are stuck here for another hour and a half. I already get the feeling that everything here is gonna be way expensive. Bottled water is 2 euros. (sigh). I met the Reed girl! She’s pretty cool but kind of characteristic of Reed. Quiet. Wears sweaters. Seems sad. But she talked to me for a while. I also met a very nice girl from Corvallis who is very talkative. Maybe too much. Not sure yet. I managed to find five boys including myself. Most are pretty quiet and they’re all from Santa Clara. Everyone is from Santa Clara. I also met a very interesting girl who is probably the closest thing I’ve ever encountered to the perfect stereotype of a Valley Girl. She needs to take a shower and brush her teeth and be clean and wear nice clothes all the time. Very vocal about it. Right now she’s reading a book about some princess in a big city. Ironic. I love it.

In other news, I find it interesting to note that I am not the only one here who doesn’t speak any Italian. Most people I’ve met have been studying Italian for about a year, so they have a little bit of a head start on me, but no one is coming anywhere close to bragging about their Italian skills. It’s 2:30 pm here and I am very tired. But I’ll push through and play some minesweeper now. Peace and love until I find internet access.

AJC

Long crazy night. It is now 11:05 pm here. We got in and had dinner and went on a brief walking tour along the Eastern part of the Arno river. Our tour guides were TAs and they bought us Gelato. It was delicious. Everyone here is getting completely wasted and appear to be a walking mockery of the United States. A cluster of 30 kids in Nautica and Ralph Lauren polos drinking Coronas and Budweisers. I almost threw up on them. I was told to expect this out of the So. Cal and East Coast students on this trip. Meeting people is becoming increasingly difficult when my desire to be their friend diminishes and cliques begin to form. Oh well. I’m here to explore and as long as I have a few half acquaintances, that’s good enough for me. I sort of already have that though. No girls worth noting yet. We meet our host families day after tomorrow. I should have my phone set up by tomorrow as well. I’m going to try to pass out now. I may wake up in a few hours when I am unable to sleep. Goodnight!

AJC