spring break

so i spent last week in paris and barcelona. i don't really feel like writing but i will give highlights in the format of a bulleted list:

• french food. i had the best lemon meringue pie of my entire life. also, the best croissant, but like... duh. my first night in paris i had a steak with bernaise sauce and a chocolate milkshake because i guess i wanted to be a stereotype of myself. over the course of the weekend i had 4 (count em) chocolate milkshakes for seemingly no reason. i even had a giant one instead of lunch one day. (i promised to never tell you about that mom, but cat's out of the bag.) now get this—french fries and french onion soup are actually french! this baffled me and i did not believe it until i had what is just called "onion soup" and it blew my mind. throw in some "fries" for dipping in all the extra cheese and i think i can safely say it was almost as good as michaels. downside? soup—15 euro.
• a homeless man tried to kill me. 2 minutes outside the train station immediately after arriving a homeless man grabbed me, held a wine bottle above my head and screamed at me. i pushed him away just before the bottle would have come crashing down resulting in my imminent death, and screamed, "you crazy, crazy frenchman." all the way to our hotel.
• art museums. the louvre is really beautiful and fancy but pretty much everything in it is overrated. the first thing that's overrated is the line. i was expecting a scene out of eurotrip where mimes harassed me for 7 hour while i stood in line to get into a glass pyramid. the actual line took approximately 4 minutes. (the line for the bathroom, however, was about 40.) yes, the art was beautiful, but there's just no room for any sort of creative interpretation. it was like, here is jesus. here is adam. here is lady liberty. here is jesus again. it's also crammed in there in a disorganized manner that resembles my closet. like there are three stories of paintings just layered on top of each other, so there's really no room for any peace or simplicity. the mona lisa was fun to see but she's behind bullet proof glass because apparently she is a bigger target for assassins than the president, so you can't really appreciate her fully. she's also tiny, like miniature, and alone on the biggest wall i have ever seen with barriers 20 feet around her. i had a front row seat and i still had to squint to see her. the centre pompidou was much more my style. it's pretty much exactly like MOMA except with a bunch of really famous matisse and dali thrown in. man ray and magritte are by far my favorite surrealist artists, and there was so much of them just thrown in with walls of blank canvases and sculptures made out of blow-up furniture that is was very exciting. i think i spent 20 minutes staring at magritte's painting that has a woman's face removed from her head in front of the ocean. (sorry i don't know what it's called but it's a classic.) we also went to musee d'orsay which was beautiful mostly because of the building. it's an old train station that's been converted into an art museum so the structure was just beautiful. they had i think 700 monet paintings, and while i'm not a big monet fan it was cool to see some impressionism so close up that it really does just look like a blur. there was also a giant van-gogh room, and that was the highlight. the bedroom is such an amazing painting in person even though it is very small. pretty much all the van gogh i've seen looks completely different in person which is always a pleasant surprise. 
• my first real piece of art. i made an impulse buy at a gallery in montmarte and now i have some real art that deserves a frame and everything!
• the eiffel tower. you know what this is, there's not much to say except that it is not at all black, i'm not sure why it is black in every picture ever taken, but it is beige. it's also very exciting when it has it's little seizure of a light show every hour. also, while standing at the eiffel tower a french man came up to lauren and i and said in english, (this is an unaltered quote even though it may sound beyond belief,) "is this the eiffel tower? where is my kitchen!?" 
• l'arc de triumph. climbed it. great view. ran across traffic in notoriously the worst traffic circle in the entire planet because we couldn't figure out that you have to take an underground passageway to get onto it's little island.
  

and on to barcelona...

while paris was a blast and i'm so glad i saw what i saw and ate what i ate, everything was so crowded and fast that it was not the relazing parisian vacation i was hoping for. barcelona was much more my pace. very slow days, very fast nights pretty much spells out my ideal trip.

• the nightlife. i know it's tacky to love giant, obnoxious nightclubs with thousands of boozed-up twenty year olds grinding on each other, but i do, and i will not deny it. we also went to a shot bar which was more like a dessert/magic trick bar where every shot was either on fire, covered in whipped cream, or both. some of the highlights were: a "boyscout" where they lit the bar on fire, you roasted a marshmallow, and then dipped it in your shot. a "harry potter" where your shot has a cinnamon sugar covered orange on top of it and then they just light everything on fire again. and throw more cinnamon at it to make it spark. a "monica lewinsky" which i will not describe because my parents read this blog. and something that i don't remember where they do a chemical reaction and then you drink alcohol infused air out of a straw. since everything is either on fire or crammed with candy it is hard to get drunk at this place, so we got to try about 10 of these fun shots each without any signs of stumbling. 
• the gaudi. pretty much everything worth seeing in barcelona is built by the architect gaudi, and there's really no way to describe it. it's innovative and surreal, and he uses a method called organic architecture (tom could have made this up) to make things look natural and beautiful and sandcastle-like.
• the american chain restaurants. overt your eyes if you think it is despicable to even look at american food while in europe, but i treated myself to starbucks and pizza hut because they are luxuries that do not exist in rome.
• the spanish boys. i met a beautiful guy named antonio who will make me his wife when i learn enough spanish and he learns enough english to be able to hold a conversation about anything besides soccer. 
• the beach. yes, perhaps it was only about 50 degrees last week in barcelona. but that didn't stop tom, jess, ethan and i from diving into the freezing mediterranean sea and watching the sunset soaking wet and shivering in bathing suits on the beach. we looked like idiots and people were screaming egging us on and probably saying "morons" in spanish, but it was a damned good time. 

in the trademark of how i tend to end my blogs, i will just stop abruptly. 

3/13

Today without asking a guy walked by and kissed me while I was studying on a bench. Welcome to Roma.

3/7-3/9

This weekend Lauren and I decided to go to Florence and chill with Rachel, Becca, and David (, The) Lauren and I both slept through our alarms because we were very tired from the late night before, and after awaking around 9:30 we rushed to Termini to catch the earliest train out. Here's how it worked: Left at 10. Got to Termini at 10:20. Hit the "A Firenze" button on the kiosk. Got on the train at 10:25. Pulled out of the station at 10:30. We both looked at each other and said, "Too easy." We were anticipating that because of the ease with which we arrived in Florence, something would go horribly wrong at another point in our travels, but it didn't! Woo.
It was so nice to see Rachel and Adam's smiling faces right after getting off the hour and a half train ride-I missed that smush! We went back to Rachel's to drop off our bags and she lives in the most amazing apartment ever! It's all painted a seafoam green kinda color with murals on all of the ceilings and it's just very gorgeous and Italian. All 5 of her roommates were out of town so Lauren and I stayed in a giant bedroom that was reminiscent of the bedroom that Mary-Kate and Ashley stay in in Passport to Paris. (Rachel said it, not me).
We did a lot of sight seeing throughout the weekend including seeing The David, climbing the steps of the Duomo, and going to the Ponti Vecchio. Seeing David was by far my favorite. On the way down the corridor where he lives there are all of these other Michaelangelo statues that are unfinished so they look like people trying to escape from blocks of marble. They are really rouch looking but beautiful and very haunting. The juxtaposition (i hate that word) of these statues with the pristine and majestic David was just breathtaking, and I got chills up my spine from the moment I stepped into the hallway. David was enormous, and he has one giant hand. Like, huge. Apparently he was originally intended to live on top of a building so the perspective would make his hand look regular size, but he lives on the ground so it's really weird and giant and cool.
The Duomo was quite a hike, but worth it. It's about 45 flights of stars through a tiny spiral staircase and narrow passageways that I had to duck to get through. (Not Lauren though). The view from the top was just spectacular. Florence was beautiful and glowing from above even though the sky was cloudy.
We did a lot of shopping, and among a few little things I got a great purple leather purse. I walked into a store, went straight to it, saw the price (240 euro) started to walk out, and then the woman said "It's on sale for 35." Soo...It's mine now.
I will now list the things I ate while in Florence. It was the best food I have ever had in my entire life (no exaggeration).
Lunch day 1: Turkey, artichoke, tomato, pesto panini
Dinner: Vodka macheroni, pumpkin orchiette, artichoke risotto, eggplant penne, sweet pepper rigatoni, black peppercorn steak, blueberry steak, Tiramisu, pinapple cake, flouless chocolate cake, cheesecake with strawberry sauce. (It was a sampler, don't worry.)
Lunch day 2: Cinnamon raisin bagel and pizza tornado.
Dinner: Macheroni with creamy bolognaise sauce. (This was a full portion)
Brunch was the only unremarkable meal so I won't bore you. Actually, this menu is probably all pretty boring because you can't taste these things. So, sorry.
I can't think of what else we did besides go to a pub and a few Italian thrift stores which were very cool. Oh, and markets. Ok bye.

3/7-3

3/4/08

Soo...I haven't written in a while, but there's nothing much to report. I'm just settling into a routine here so day to day life is pretty much the same, but all wonderful none the less. Today I went on my first big shopping trip and got some fabulous italian goods, because I guess I thought I needed to spend even more money than I already have been... 

Last Friday I went with a class field trip to the catacombs which was pretty cool. 

This Friday Lauren and I are going to stay with Rachel in Florence!

That's all.

2/24/08

Today was our last day in Switzerland, so we tried to ski for as long as possible. Midway through the day we got to sit and watch Jess run off a mountain to paraglide, and she swooped right over our heads. Lauren and I fell off a ski lift because John fell off and they had to stop it which jerked us off, and we got stuck in a place where there were no easy slopes down! John let the lift drag him up further, while me and Lauren opted to try out the red slope. It was scary but really fun and I finally remembered how to ski! A few runs later, however, I forgot again and got my skis stuck in a mountain and had to lie there for 20 minutes waiting to be rescued. No one came to rescue me, so I had to pick all the snow out of every little crevice of my skis in order to put them back on, and then go straight back down the mountain. At the bottom, I was expecting everyone to be waiting, but we'd all accidentally split up! Alone on Murren in the Alps, I proceeded to take a lift in order to try to see Ethan's orange jacket, Lauren's pink pants, Tom's awkward pole movements, Sam's indistinctive black ski suit, or John upside down somewhere with his snowboard in the air. Jess was in the air still, so that was hopeless. I took a gondola down and after wandering around for a while ran into Ethan. I ran towards him and jumped on him and hugged him and almost cried, and he informed me that he had no idea that we were all split up. We waited at the bottom of the mountain and luckily everyone came down in the next gondola ride! It was getting late and it was time to go back and shower, eat, and get on another train. 

On the second of the three trains we needed to take, we were informed that the guy at Termini who booked our tickets made a mistake and put them for the wrong day. The Swiss man on the train was very nice and we just had to pay 8 franc to change it over, but when we got to our connection, we found out that the train we were planning on taking didn't run on Sundays. This was a big uh oh, but we got on a train to Rome an hour later. The only problem was that the 11pm-7am train ride was not in a sleeper car. It was probably the most uncomfortable night of my life, but kind of cute to see us all snuggled up trying to sleep. As Sam noted, "People always say that they are packed in like sardines, but....that's really what this is." John and Ethan saved us from a robber by giving him angry looks, and I buckled everyone's backpacks to a pole. It was a team effort, but we didn't get mugged! We arrived in Rome and had to go to class. Let's just say it was the worst day yet. Maybe even ever. For the unbelievable weekend we had though, it was so worth it.

2/23/08

Today we woke up bright and early, (but an hour darker and later than we wanted to), got breakfast at the hostel, and schlepped up the mountain for an hour and a half just to schlepp further up the mountain to the slopes. Our first stop was the bunny hill, where our Ethan (who is actually a ski instructor) gave us all the same lesson he gives "4 year old kids and fat men from Texas who have never seen snow." After his entire day of hiking up unmarked trails and skiing straight down black diamonds without so much as a stumble, Ethan fell down the bunny hill. Yikes. 

Now, I was under the impression that I could ski, but apparently I was very, very wrong. I was so nervous that I would fall and break my leg and not be able to get on the busses in Rome that I was all shaky and horrible and could barely stay on my feet. I took a couple of bad falls and got a giant bruise that is really awesome/disgusting. After a full day of skiing, we schlepped back and did the shower race before going downstairs to the club. Now apparently, this was the hottest club in Switzerland, but frankly, we found it lame and sucky. We all stuck together and had a nice time though, and John and I got to enjoy our free beer vouchers that we got for skydiving. The Swiss men were pretty creepy. They kept saying "Yaaaaahhh" and sounded like Fat Bastard.