Cinque

So I am officially in love. Yes, it has finally happened. Ladies and gentlemen, Bruno has given us warm home-made peanut butter for the past two breakfasts. I will never eat Skippy ever again. I don't know why or how I'm so obsessed with this peanut butter. I don't even normally like chunky peanut butter. But this is just amazing. Usually breakfast consists of bread, jams, a natural (aka non-sweetened) honey, granola, true yogurt (aka sourcream like, non-sweatened), coffee and tea. Except for Sunday brunches when we get warm coffee cake and sometimes eggs. But this peanut butter has just blown me away. I thought you might like to know what truly makes my days, because yes, they now revolve around food :)

But anyway, let me tell you about my weekend at Cinque. Not Cinque Terre, we've definitely shortened it to Cinque. It's that intense. Unfortunately not cliff diving intense. They lied about the availablity of cliffs to dive off of. But all is definitely forgiven, as yesterday was one of the best days. It started out early, up at 5 to catch a 5:30 bus to Florence, to catch a 6:10 train to Spezia, to catch a train to Monterosso. We were a lively crowd on the bus.

Waiting for the train to Monterosso - Ashley2 and Tessa

We got to La Spezzia a little early, so we grabbed a cafe, then headed on to Monterosso. Technically I think you're supposed to start at Riomaggiore and go north/west, but we decided to start at Monterosso. The hikes between Monterosso and Vernazza and Conriglia are the most intense, so we figured we'd start out with the most energy.

Thank goodness we did. Those were super intense! I mean, maybe not super intense, but definitely not what I was expecting. These stairs just kept going and going, and going! Half way through I just had to stop because me knees couldn't take it any more. BUT it was 150% worth it. I mean, absolutely gorgeous. Once in a lifetime type thing. Except that I really want to come back, so more than once I guess. It was about 95 out, plus a backpack, so we kinda got sweaty and gross. But once again, totally worth it :)

At Corniglia, the third town, we decided to finally stop after the hard legs. We decided to have a siesta with some lunch. Cinque Terre is known for a few things: fresh anchovies, dry white wine, pesto and raisin wine. We couldn't find the rasin wine, but we did get some delicious white wine, along with some calzones and pizza. Now remember, these are authentic calzones and pizza, aka very good :) We then picked up another bottle of wine, and well, made good use of it. Not that I"m advertising drinking here, but somehow when we stopped to go swimming in the Mediterannean, we thought it would be a great idea to drink in the sea. It was... interesting. There's a decent swell, so you have to try to keep your footing on the smoothest, most slippery rocks. It's actually a bit comical and possibly dangerous to just get in and out of the water, much less stand out in it. But once again, such a great experience. We then laid in the sun for a bit, before finally throwing clothes back on and continuing our trek.

At Manarola and finally Riomaggiore we did Apertivi and a loooong delicious dinner. Great seafood. I got my favorite, gnocchi, with shrimp. But of course I'm growing up to be just like my mother, and tried everyone's dish. They were all fantastic :) Love you mom!

Alright. Now comes the fun part. After dinner, we went and bought our tickets back to Firenze. We saw that we had to take the train to Pisa, then transfer to get back to Firenze. So we decide to remain awake on the way to Pisa so that we dont' miss it. We get to Pisa and see that the connection won't arrive until 1:10. AM. It's 11ish. EF!!!! And that's when we saw the little symbol next to the Firenze sign that looked like a bus. Yeah. Turns out it was a bus. I mean seriously? Sucks! We decided that in these two hours in Pisa, we might as well go see the leaning tower, right? Well, we saw the tower. And it leaned. I can't say that any of us were as excited as perhaps we should have been. We were so ready to just be home! I mean we'd been up since 5, and had planned on being in bed by now. But it was still cool to go see. We also discovered that Pisa has quite a happening night life. I guess it's kind of a college town. There were people out everywhere! The piazza's were packed! So that was kinda (not) cool to wander through all dirty and disgusting in our hiking gear and backpacks. But whatever. We finally fought our way onto the bus - and I mean fought. 72 seats, +100 passengers. Yeah. This all the while looking out for several pickpockets there. Just what we wanted to deal with. But after a two hour bus ride, and a taxi ride back to the villa, we were finally home! After a quick shower I was asleep by 4. I thought of staying up the full 24 hours, but then quicky slapped myself. All in all quite the day. Sunday was spent doing a total of nothing. It was glorious :) Then yesterday was classes and soccer, and tons of reading. Today was a sight visit for Renaissance Art, so we went to the Duomo and looked at a couple of things. We just had our meeting about internships. Previous to this I had my heart set on an internship in the mayor's office, so that I could learn all about small italian town politics. However my Peace Corps recruiters have talked me in to working on my application skill set while I'm abroad. So instead of even working with little kids, I'm now signed up to tutor high school students. Yippee. Not gonna lie, I feel a little bit intimidated. But it should be good. And fun. And very, very insightful. I'm also going to sign up for a conversation partner so I can work on my Italian. And make new friends. You can always do with another friend, right? Lol. This weekend is our Venice class trip, so more stories to come!

Getting to know you, Getting to know all about you

Alright. Well. I am on my way to becoming a Florentine. I am now officially a student of Florence :). It feels like I just got here, but at the same time I feel as if I've been here forever. Perhaps that's just because we've all bonded in the Villa. In such close quarters, spending so much time together, most people here feel like old friends. Everyone usually has at least one class with everyone else, and if not, there's always breakfast, lunch, dinner, soccer, bocce, library, well, you get my point.

Now here's a note for my dad especially. Ready for this? Classes are great! I've got European Societies, which acts as my Political Science class. This is taught by a professor from the University of Florence, Professor Recchi, who I kid you not, is the italian double of Mr. Bean. It's almost creepy. I keep expecting him to just smile at us akwardly and mumble Hello from the back of his throat or something. But he's turning out to be a really great professor. A little intense; as soon as he took a poll to see what languages we all knew, he assigned us newspapers to start reading on a daily basis. I've got the Athens Times (which I've found in English) and Le Monde (which I haven't found in English). But at least we're keeping up on global events. My European Encounters class is taught by Professor O'Barr from Duke. This will be looking at all of the traveler's that have come to Italy and how they've portrayed it. I've never taken an anthropology class before, so this should be interesting, and fun. Study of Renassaince Art is with Professor Mariotti, who I've already described to you. We already did our weekly sight visit on Tuesday, and I don't beleive she'll ever fail to impress me. We've got our class portion today, which is actually my only class today. Hopefully I'll fill this time volunteering at a local school soon. Then my last class is Italian. There are only two other students in there with me, Kristine and Julian, so we usually just end up sitting around the table talking. Our professor is actually an Armenian who was born in Italy, but she's quite fascinating. We've decided that for our conversation days we'll go to the local caffe and sit and have Apertivos, since class is at 6 anyway. (Apertivos are taken pretty seriously here. It's sort of like a Happy Hour, but everyone does it. It is mostly a drink or two, with perhaps some olives or fruit or something. It's meant to open (aprire) your stomach an hour or two before dinner)

Let's see, so that's classes. Monday night was fun: All of Tuscany, but especially its capital Florence has the Festa della Rficolona, or roughly translated the festival of funny dressed women. It's totally not what it sounds like. Historically, September 8th was the Nativita' della Madonna, or the birth of Mary, which was celebrated in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. The peasants and mountainfolk would sell their goods there. However in order to get a good spot for their carts, they would leave the night before, and use burning rags and paper on the end of sticks to light their way. The young Florentine children then would make fun of them, especially the women, because of their poor appearances and unstylish clothes (Italy is a fashion captial after all). And so currently on September 7th, there is a big 'parade' type walk to the Basilica, where everyone meets and watches speeches, is blessed, and listens to children sing. It's also a traditional part for kids to hunt these lanterns. Historically they threw watermellon rinds at the lanterns, and if they hit one, it would light on fire and burn in the center of the street. Now kids have these cool spitball typedart guns, I guess you would call them. And people still light them on fire in the middle of the street, in the middle of hundreds of people. Could you ever imagine darts and fires being allowed in the US? No way jose. But it was so fun. That night we ended with a trip to the English Pub downtown, which may or may not have been worth it; good atmosphere, but overpriced and touristy.

In the square - you can see the amazing ceilings of the basilica, and also the speakers. I'm pretty sure at least the mayor and the Cardinal spoke. It was cool for me because I pretty much understood it. I tried to translate for everyone else, but I think I need to work on those skills

The past few nights we've been good about not going out during the week and have just walked down to get gelato from my good friend Fabio. One € my friends, it's the way to go. I've also been spending more time in the library than ever before. For one, it's kind of hard not to when I literally live in the library. Like, you have to go through at least one room of the library to get to our door. It's hard to complain of going to the library when it's less than five steps away. And I've also surmised that I'll actually HAVE to stay on top of my work here, because there is no falling behind. With an average of less than ten people in each class, I'm pretty sure everyone would know if you hadn't done your reading. So Ashley is going to be a good girl this semester. Darn it.

We're off to hike Cinque Terre this weekend, which should be GORGEOUS!!!! And hopefully warm, because I am SO cliff diving into the Mediterranean. Ciao!

Re-Do

Alright, well I've decided to move my blog. Actually that's a lie; I have to keep up my university blog because I agreed to do it, but I probably won't be posting there half as much as here, and it will be repeated content. I don't mind blogging for the university at all, but it's just a bit frustrating. All of my posts and pictures have to be sent to my study abroad advisor and then she's the person who actually posts them. Also I can't approve who comments on my blog, they do. So while it's not a huge deal, I figure it will just be easier to keep this one. I can also use this more as a diary and a better description of my time here if I know that our chancellor probably isn't reading it:)

So on Friday we went to the amazingly gorgeous town of Siena. I'm in love. It's just classic Europe. The tall buildings, the yellow and pink building colors, the colorful light posts, just everything. The entire atmosphere. We started the day with a beautiful bus ride through the Tuscan countryside, with lots of villas, vineyards, and olive groves. We got to Siena and walked along this huge wall that the Medici family had built. After passing several stall vendors, we interrupted service at the Church of San Domenico, but it was very gorgeous, and probably worth it.
We wound around some streets, ending up at the Crypto and Baptismo of the Duomo.
It was neat to see the 13^th century paintings and the crypts below. The fact that they painted these so long ago and they still exist – and that they painted over these pictures to create new ones. We then went around to the front, saw one of the oldest hospitals in all of Europe, and of course the Duomo itself.
Absolutely amazing. I never thought that it would have so much color.
We got really lucky because normally the floors are all covered with a cardboard type thing, but because the month of September is dedicated to the Virgin (the cities patron saint), they were mostly all uncovered and we got to walk on and view the amazing masonry work of these marble stones.

However even after all of this history art and architecture, my favorite part of the day was just wandering the streets of Siena purposely getting lost in order to find great niches. Up and down hills, around winding roads, it was just great.

I can't believe that people actually live here and have real lives. We sat in an Osteria on the outskirts of the bell-shaped Piazza del Campo to people watch. We also ad some great cafe freddo (iced espresso), insalata caprese (Caprese Salad, aka tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil), and pizza margherita (tomato pizza, kinda). Molto delicioso. After a bit more wandering and some great gelato (gelato store owners seem to love me, perhaps because I always try to speak Italian – this is the second time I've gotten a bigger dish for the price of a smaller one) we toured the Palazzo Publicco. I should perhaps mention that the woman touring us around is Professor Mariotti, our Art History professor. She's a host of information, and fascinating to listen to. I swear she knows everything about every painting in Europe. Dead serious. I want to take her on all of our trips with us - I can only imagine what she has to say about the Louvre. Our final stop on the way home was a rather large vineyard, La Fattoria delle Corti.
We toured the vineyard and learned how they made the olive oil and wine that they do. The entire cellars smelled amazing :) Of course that was followed by a tasting. I ended up really liking their mid-range wine, called Corte Vecchia. We went home, played some cards, and just crashed.


Yesterday Professor Mariotti took us on a tour of Florence in the morning. We didn't actually go in to the buildings, but she gave us some history, and most importantly our bearings. We happened to see about five brides/wedding parties throughout the day. I guess it must be that time of year in Florence.

Our best find of the day was this hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served the most amazing lunch. We got two courses (I had a tuna rigatonni and a chicken balsamic salad type thing) for 11€.

Not bad. Then we of course got espresso, and they seemed to like us so much that they gave us free dessert! They said that they were trying to decide whether or not to put this on the menu or not, and wanted our advice. It's going on. A custard type pie with fresh figs on top. Yum! We wandered around for a bit more, but by this time we were tired and our feet hurt, so we found the bus stop and came back to Sesto.

After a bit of a rest we headed out to try and find the local pub, but didn't have much luck. Sesto's not that big. We wandered around the square, and somehow Tessa and I ended up in this really great Pizzeria. We had another margherita with some wine, met up with everyone else, and just ended up with some more wine outside a cafe. Today's our first day off, and I think that after breakfast I want to take a book and sit outside a cafe in Florence, or perhaps at the park and just read and have a coffee. We'll see. I still can't seem to get it through my head that I'll be here for the next four months!