Frustrations and Togas

So I've decided that it's time to start listing my aggravations with European society.  The first, and most important, is having to pay to use the restroom.  What the hell.  There's nothing worse than getting off a train after six hours and then having to fish through your purse to find enough change to get into the bathroom.  When you really have to pee, this little charade is super annoying.  Especially because European bathrooms in train stations are always located a million miles away from anywhere.  I guess that's to ensure that the people who actually navigate the maze to get to them are serious enough about using them to pay.  Okay, that's enough rambling.

So this week I turned in one paper, wrote another one, took a history midterm and will be leaving for Greece tomorrow morning. On a more cultural note, I saw the Colosseum and Roman Forum, and will be dressing up in a toga for the "G(r)eek Olympics" that school is hosting this afternoon.  Problem: It's forty degrees outside. So everyone will look like idiots wearing coats and sweatpants and brightly colored togas.  Hopefully we don't freeze to death, but we'll be roughing it like spartans or whatever (evidently I didn't learn enough for that midterm...).

What else happend this week? Well, On Tuesday, I went running in the morning and somehow pulled a muscle in my foot and now walking is excruciatingly painful.  Which is really great when you have to spend the whole next day trekking about Rome looks at ruins and whatnot.  But I'll live.  And I'm in Rome, so everything is good.  Also, my digital camera's screen decided to break sometime between Saturday night and Wednesday morning, without me even touching it.  More annoyingly, my US cell phone, a touch screen, recently decided it doesn't like getting touched.  So theres no way of me turning off my alarm, so I'll be getting up every Monday-Thursday at 6:33 whether I want to or not.

If you're keeping score: thats Electronics: 2, Claire: 0.

I just hope the laptop doesn't decide to join in the rebellion.


So for the next ten days, I'll be in Greece (without a computer). We're going to Athens, Olympia, Napflion, Delphi, Corinth, and whatnot.  I'm really excited! It should be beautiful, but cold and rainy.  I can't complain though because it's been sunny almost every day here.

Also on the agenda for today: planning our 10-day.  Looks like we'll be visiting Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Prague, and Munich.  Fingers crossed we get all those trains reserved!

 Renee, Me, and Elise before Saints and Sinners on Saturday.  (Two of the girls I'll be traveling with for 10 day)

The COLOSSEUM. It was really cold.  Like, really cold.

Switzerland: Cute Boys, Delicious Chocolate.

So I’m sitting here in my hostel in Switzerland, wondering why the hell we seem to be the only ones here in the 18-25 age range.  Seriously, there are small children downstairs screaming “we will we will rock you”, and the two women who shared our hostel room were around fifty. I guess they average the ages of the inhabitants so that they can actually call it the Bern Youth Hostel, because it is full of geriatrics and infants. 

On to my trip!  It all started on Wednesday when we realized we needed to actually reserve our train tickets and get our Eurails validated. So after the class trip to the Ari Pacis we headed to the Rome train station (Termini). We stood in line for about an hour, and Elise and Renee successfully got theirs validated.  But the lady wouldn’t do mine because the Eurail listed my country of residence as America, but I had a British passport.  I had a copy of my Greencard but apparently that wasn’t convincing enough, nor was my prominently southern accent.  She told me to come back the next day (Thursday, which was when we were scheduled to leave).

The problem was that the train we had reserved was for 3:00, we don’t normally get out of class until 1, and it takes about an hour to get into the city.  Anyway, good news happened in the form of my Theology teacher getting ill and cancelling class.  The poor woman is really ill (in the hospital) but it allowed me to get into Rome with enough time to wait out the line and validate my Eurail.  And when I finally got to the front of the line, the lady working the desk told me she didn’t even need to see my Greencard. AURGHHHHHHHHHHH.

So we made the train.

And six hours later arrived in Bern, Switzerland.  It was cold, and it was dark.  But we managed to find our way to the hostel without any major incidences (except discovering that we were rooming with a fifty year old woman who snores).  We went to bed almost immediately upon arrival, after wandering around to find something to eat. 

Friday morning we had breakfast at the hostel, and then headed out to look at the Parliament building.  We scored a free tour of the Swiss parliament, which wasn’t as impressive as the English parliament, but was so much more modern and accessible.  After that we went and booked our return train, and then we went exploring along the main street.  There were a ton of chocolate shops and stores.  So Renee and I decided to spend a slightly absurd amount of money on a little bag of chocolates from one of the places, with twelve different types.  And it was possibly the best thing I’ve ever tasted.  So good. Better than a new pair of shoes.  And speaking of shoes: Claire has bought her first pair of Italian heels.  They’re super adorable.  Just a side note, because I’m really excited about it.

So after stopping for chocolate, we visited the Einstein House.  That’s right, Claire got to see where Einstein lived.  It wasn’t all that impressive, but it was interesting to see, and to read all the history behind his life.  Apparently he cheated on his wife with his cousin.  Who knew geniuses committed incest (Oh wait, I’m pretty sure that’s the story of half my family).  And then we went to the bear pits!!  BEARS BEARS BEARS BEARS!!  J .  They were pretty much the cutest things ever.  Although it might have been better to see them in the summer when they would have gone swimming in their pool.  After that we went and bought something to eat for dinner.  And went back to the hostel to do homework for a few hours before going back out to see the University of Bern.

And today is Saturday.  We leave at 1:30, and get back to Rome around 9.  Since it’s going to be an early arrival, we thought it would be fun to take Renee to Saints and  Sinners because she hasn’t been before.  Visiting a sketchy Italian bar—check.

And now it’s Saturday night! Our train ride home was super eventful.  A really fun 25 year old Italian guy gave us a 2 hour lecture on “enjoying life” and then gave us a lot of fun bars and clubs to go to in downtown Rome. Apparently, Wednesday nights are “American nights” where they let in American students for free.  So looks like that’ll be on the agenda when I don’t have a test the next day.  But nothing here starts until 1 AM and the metro stops at… 9 PM. All nighter in the city? Yes please.  But not tonight.

PS. Everything in Switzerland is ridiculously expensive.  So no one is getting any souvenirs, except maybe Nicki can have a wrapper from the chocolate bar that I bought her but then ate instead.  It was delicious, thanks for wondering.

 There were giant chess boards all over Bern.  I totally whipped Elise's butt... (not.)

 Hanging out in the Einstein house.  We're best friends after Quantum Physics... NOT.

It´s a party in Portugal

So after a week of classes with assignments picking up full speed, we headed off to Lisbon early on Friday morning.  And by early, I mean I got up at four again to take the complex network of Roman public transportation to get to the airport on time to catch a 9 oclock flight.  Good news: we made it.  Bad news: the train ticket to get to the airport was 14 euro, and no one even checked our tickets.  That´s called being responsible and paying for things when you don´t need to, because maybe one day they´ll actually check tickets and we´d end up in some kind of Italian jail.  That sentence was poorly structured, but I only got two hours of sleep last night, and about five the night before.  As a matter of fact, I haven´t gotten a solid eight hours of sleep since I arrived in Rome, and anyone that knows me, knows that this is a HUGE ISSUE.  But what the hell, I´m only going to be nineteen in Europe once and I´d hate to sleep through it.  Although right now, a nice nap sounds wonderful.

So back to Portugal. We arrived in Lisbon around noon and checked into the hostel.  It´s super nice! And the people staying here are really great (more on that later...).  The area we´re in is kind of sketchy.  As in every time we go outside, someone offers us drugs.  One of the members of the group I´m travelling in (I won´t mention names...) was stupid enough to ask one of them "how much", which resulted in us getting followed by said drug dealer four about five minutes while he tried to negotiated prices with us.  NOT COOL.  So once we got rid of druggie, we walked up to the local castle, and it started to POUR with rain.  The first rainstorm I´ve been in while in Europe.  So we all got soaked walking back.  Then we had dinner at the hostel (traditional Portuguese food. Fish pie done right.  Sorry mom, but you´re noble attempts at it are a failure in comparison).  AND then we went out on the town with four Slovenian boys we met at the hostel.  They´re all around 19 and are studying mechanical engineering in Lisbon for four months (and superrrrrrrrrr cute, so of course me and Elise were thrilled because our goal for the semester is to meet lots of foreign boys).  We went out to a bar, again in a sketchy neighborhood, and taught them the finer points of the art of beer pong.  They told us their normal drinking games are seeing who can drink the most the fastest, but we weren´t really game to play.  Any way, After that they wanted to go clubbing and so we went with them to an apparently really happening spot.  We got there at midnight, but there was no one there, and when we left at two there was a really long line outside to get in.  But it was really fun, except techno music gets really obnoxious after about an hour.  And so we made our way back to the hostel and I didn´t get to sleep until about 3, and then I got up at 6:30, but it was really 5:30, damn time changes, and got ready to head out for the day.  Except now Elise and I are an hour early to breakfast, so we´re burning time.  Hence the super long blog entry!

Today we´re catching a bus to Fatima.  We´re all really excited about this leg of the trip, and hopefully I can get some cool stuff up there to bring back.  We´re going to try and get back to Lisbon in time for 5 o´clock mass, and then hopefully we´ll hang out with the boys again tonight.  We´ll see!  I leave tomorrow morning, and then I actually need to do some homework (two papers and a test coming up... eeeeek! goodbye sleeping).

Switzerland next weekend!  If anything super exciting happens in Fatima, I´ll be sure to write about it here first.

WE CAN ACTUALLY DRINK THE WATER! (Assisi and Subiaco)

This weekend I found myself on a class trip to Subiaco and Assisi (more importantly the monasteries of St. Benedict and St. Francis).  We left Friday morning bright and early and arrived in Subiaco around ten.  We got a tour of the monastery founded by St. Benedict.  It was really gorgeous-- about halfway up a mountain.  The bus ride getting up there was exceedingly scary. I don't like big vehicles on small winding roads, but we made it safely.  More annoyingly, everyone applauded every time the bus managed to get around a corner.  We have a very enthusiastic class that likes to applaud anything and everything: when the plane successfully takes off, when the plane successfully lands, when someone enters the classroom a few minutes late.. etc.  Back to the story: so after the guided tour of the monastery, we went to lunch at a little place where we got three types of pasta. We eat pasta twice daily here, and we're all starting to look a little pregnant (this is evidently called "pasta belly" and will subside when we get back to America and stop eating so many carbs).

Friday afternoon we again hit the road and made it into Assisi after dark.  Nothing super eventful happened that night. Then on Saturday we went to St. Francis Basilica, and had a guided tour of that, and got to see the crypt of St. Francis (awesome).  In the afternoon we took an hour long hike up to St. Francis' hermitage.  We had mass up there with Msgr. Fucinaro, which was really nice.  The hike down got a little interesting.  We definitely took a little path instead of the main road, and we got a little lost but ended up at a sketchy hotel to ask for directions.  So while someone else went to go get a map, I took a cue from St. Francis and befriended the local wildlife (I'll post a picture of that later... :) ).  Saturday night we had dinner and ANOTHER wine tasting.  The glasses were freaking enormous, so i dumped about 70% of my glasses into someone's who had a higher tolerance.



We just got back from Assisi, and classes resume as usual tomorrow morning. Which means its homework time!! [To explain the title... the campus water is really gross.  There's a sign up in a neighboring town that warns against drinking the water because of its high arsenic content. But it's probably okay, it just has a really gross taste.  And it leaves a nasty buildup in your hair.  So the water in Assisi was especially delicious]

I need to learn Italian.

CIAO! So continuing from where I left off.  On Saturday we had a scavenger hunt around Rome, which consisted of us taking 25 pictures of random churches, gelato shops, fountains, etc.  We had to have four team members in each picture and hold up a sign that said "we were here" in Italian.  That was all fine and dandy, except for the picture we had to take of two people kissing, which we creepily took on the Spanish Steps standing behind some random italian couple.  Our team didn't end up winning, but we managed to get enough photos for free metro tickets (which is great because those things disappear so quickly).  Saturday night was the wine tasting.  We all put on our super spiffy gear and were treated to 4 nice wines. Definitely an improvement over 2 euro bottles we've been drinking. I didn't make it all the way through the entire four glasses, because I'd definitely fall over, but it was still a fun experience.  On Sunday I had an endlessly exciting day of reading.

This week has been the first of our "normal" classes, which means the class sizes have dropped from 100 to about 50 as we split into smaller groups.  The reading has picked up, and I have my first quiz tomorrow!  I'm still kind of in a vacation mood, and have adopted an "I'm in Rome, screw my 4.0" attitude.

Today Elise and I went into Rome to study and look for the Rome item of the week.  (Essentially, the RA's give us a cool place to go in Rome, and whoever gets there and takes a picture first wins free Cap Bar stuff).  We did a little reading on the Piazza Venezia, and then hurried to the Turtle Fountain.  I'm proud to announce that WE WON, beating out the other group of UD students we saw in the city.  WHAT UP!.  On the way back to the city, I had my first actual creepy old Italian man experience.  On the metro platform he came up to me and creepily said "Ciao bella" and a lot of other stuff I didn't understand because I don't speak Italian, and then he gave me a very suggestive wink.  I told him I dont speak Italian and ran off with Elise further down the platform. We leave for Assisi and Subiacco on Friday, and it should be a great trip!  I'll update after that!

Nearish the Colosseum and Roman Forum.


HAPPY GROUNDHOG DAY!