so, i went to italy...

My mom pointed out the other day that I really needed to update this...so I am. I've been writing a lot more on paper these days, but I know that there might be other people out there curious as to what I am doing too, so...here we go.


I went to Italy. I went with Jack. First we went to Rome. Our hostel was decent, we had a dorm style room which we shared with a crazy but fun couple from Argentina. The hostel provided a meager breakfast (breakfast is kind of ignored in Italy...just coffee and cake usually.) and a free dinner, which was nice. The dinner was small--pasta and wine, but it helped keep our food costs down.
Rome itself was overwhelming. I think that's the best way to put it. The history, the art, the culture--that was incredible. There was soooo much to see, and Jack and I tried to see all of it. The Vatican City was very impressive, and it was surreal seeing these famous works of art in person. The Ancient City and Collosseum were also incredibly impressive--though I took a lot of pictures of ruins, and I know that somewhere in those ruins are many famous things, but I cannot tell you which column belonged to which temple and what not. So...I mean, in theory I saw the Roman Forum, but I don't know which pile of marble it was. One thing that impressed me a lot about Rome too was that, even though it's this huge bustling (and polluted and dirty) city, there were PRISTINE and BEAUTIFUL orange trees lining the streets, filled with perfect looking oranges. Oranges just everywhere! You don't expect to see such fruit on trees while walking in the middle of a big dirty city, I guess.
There were things I didn't like about Rome though--and I probably won't ever choose to go back there. It's hard to explain, but the city felt kinda scammy. Like, everyone was either a tourist, or someone trying to rip a tourist off. You couldn't escape the tourism, the street vendors hawking crap you didn't need. As soon as it started raining, you were chased by men trying to sell you umbrellas. I didn't like that. There was also...an unfriendly vibe that we encountered many times....like, I felt a lot that because people knew we were tourists and americans, they expected us to spend TONS of money. And when we didn't do that, they were rude to us. This happened to an extent in Florence too, but it wasn't as bad. Rome was the worst when it came to that. The sights were impressive though, and I am very happy I had the chance to go.

Florence was where we ate well. Our hostel, sadly, wasn't so great. Our room was very, very tiny...it appeared to be a converted laundry room or bathroom, complete with water hookups in the walls, a water heater for the hostel, and tiled walls. It was bad. My bed was broken. It was between the two bathrooms, and whenever someone flushed a toilet, it was VERY loud in our room. We complained, but that's the room you get there, I guess, when you want the cheapest price. I can see why it was so "cheap." Sigh.

But yes, as I said, we ate well in Florence. Great, great Italian food--fresh pastas, riboletta soup (a thick bread soup, sooooo good), bruschettas, and great wine. We found some decently priced places too (everything in Rome had been much more expensive). But the best food in Florence was the GELATO. We went to the famous Vivoli Gelateria, and it was the most amazing ice cream I've eaten in my life--we went twice. First I tried a nougat flavored concoction with candied nuts and chocolate and all sorts of stuff mixed in, and then the next time i had half rice (yes, rice--like a frozen rice pudding but better!) and half chocolate orange--which was maybe the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. The sites were great in Florence too--seeing David, the Uffizi with all of their famous works--like Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" etc. By the end though, we were a little burned out on the church and artwork overload. Thankfully, Cinque Terre was next.

Cinque Terre is probably the only thing that could get me to go back to Italy. It was that beautiful. The Cinque Terre are five small villiages on the rocky riviera coast, near Genoa. The sites were amazing, the people were friendly, and the wine was unbelievable--I'm not even a wine fan most of the time, but this stuff was good. Our hostel was in a villiage further inland, called Biassa. It was a bit out of the way, but a nice hostel. However, we were visiting this area in the off-season--like the beyond Off-Season. There weren't any other guests in the hostel. So, we had our dorm room to ourselves...we had the whole place to ourselves. It was kind of crazy.
In the morning we took the terrifying winding mountain bus ride to the first of the Cinque Terre--Riogammore. It was very pretty, and from there we hiked on a trail to the second of the 5 Terre, Manarola. In both of these two towns, we mostly just poked around a bit. They were sleepy and peaceful, and while there were a few other visitors, it wasn't too lively. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the atmosphere was just right. From Manarola, we took a very short train ride to Corniglia. We'd wanted to hike, but the trail was closed due to a rock slide. So...train it was. From the trainstation in Corniglia, we had to climb up 382 stairs to get to the villiage. The views from the villiage were amazing--on one side you had cliffs and turquoise sea, the otherside, wine hills and lemon groves. From Corniglia, we went to Vernazza, which ended up being our favorite of the villiages, and where we spent the most time. In Vernazza, we ate an aaaaaamazing lunch--Jack had a pesto pasta dish (the region is famous for being the birthplace of pesto and having the best basil in italy) and the fresh fried catch of the day--he'd never had to debone a fish or peel the legs off of a shrimp, so I had to do these things for him at first. Haha. I had another regional specialty--cheese and basil stuffed ravioli, with a walnut cream sauce. SOOOO good. And of course, we washed it down with the local wine--which was white (yay!). After eating, we hiked into the hills for a while, then went back to the marina to have a glass of wine and watch the waves crash against the rocks. We went to the local Enoteche to buy some wine and pesto to take home--which ended up being more trouble than it was worth, since we'd forgotten that you can't carry liquids onto planes anymore. It all got home okay, but caused a slight panic for us at the airport.
Anyhow, the last of the Terre was Monterosso--we couldn't spend much time there, because we had to catch a bus back to our hostel, but Monterosso was, for me, the least impressive of the Terre--all the others, for instance, didn't allow cars inside the villages, whereas there were little cars buzzing all over Monterosso. It had more of a beach resort feel to it than the others did, and was a lot bigger. Some of the charm was lost, I guess.

Anyhow, that is, in a nutshell, what we did on our Italian vacation. Since then it's just been back to the grind with teaching. Things have been somewhat frustrating for me at my school--things feel a bit stagnant, and it seems like more and more often, no matter how hard I try and how eager and willing I am to be involved in classes, the teachers are losing interest in working with me. I oftentimes get the feeling that they can't be bothered with me. And when they do want me to come to their classes, they only want me to do very small and basic things--like sit there and be a human dictionary. It's discouraging and frustrating for me. For instance, I almost don't want to go to school at all tomorrow, because one of the teachers has already told me she needs to give an exam on wednesday and so tomorrow they will be doing test prep and she doesn't want me there for that, and the other teacher I work with hasn't talked to me about anything and probably won't want me to come either--meaning...I will be going in to work tomorrow with absolutely nothing to do. What is the point in that? And when I have these teachers cancel like this, I always offer to the other teachers that I can come to their classes, maybe work with students I don't get to see so often, but they never want that. It makes me feel kind of worthless sometimes. Like, why am I even here then? To take up space in the teachers lounge? To pump money into the coffee vending machine? I'm just a bit fed up I guess. Fortunately my Fulbright conference is in 2 weeks, and hopefully I will get some fresh ideas on how to deal with this, how to spice things up, how to breathe some fresh air into my situation. I hope.

So...yes. That's about all. Exciting, eh?