I'm home! Yaaaaaay!

Almost home

I have only a day and a half here in Ferrara, which is currently feeling very unreal. I'm quite eager to get home again, see my family in my comfort zone, and have a bit of time to relax before returning to Middlebury in just over a week for a very busy-looking spring term. Hopefully I'll be able to fit in the time to relax next week, since there are sooooo many things that I will have to accomplish before going back to Midd. I'll figure something out. Right now I have to finish all that I have left to do here and to say goodbye to Ferrara before departing Sunday morning, so I'll think about next week once I get there. It hasn't really set into my mind that this is almost over and that I have finished, but at the same time I can't imagine being here next week. The imaginary timeline in my head marked "Abroad in Italy" just cuts off completely, in addition to the fact that my bags are almost completely packed; so from those things I know it's real, but it still feels strange... I'm going to miss Italy, but I am simultaneously So Excited and Relieved to be getting home soon!

This last month has been kind of nuts. There were visits (family over christmas, Alex halfway through, MK last week and Gina earlier this week), planned but cancelled visits (Sicily and Ireland, cancelled due to snow and sickness respectively), an unnerving few days spent in the hospital across the street (they sent me to surgery after a misdiagnose of appendicitis, when all I really had was probably a bad flu...), another week of being sick, lots of tutorials and lots of reading and lots of studying, several applications for museum internships for the summer, four oral exams and one exam that has been changed to an essay for me to write from home. Oh yeah, and my computer broke! I've had occasional access to my landlady's computer (like right now) and had most everything saved on my external drive, but have had much less time and opportunity to use the computer as a result of everything listed in this paragraph, and therefore have been more out of touch with everyone than I would like.

I will definitely need to do a lot of reflecting on this experience and on life in general as it stands (or at least write down some reflections I have already begun to think about) and would like to flashback to various things that I never got to write about in here in order to record the memories, but that will all have to come at another time unfortunately. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm still alive and well, and almost ready to come home! See (most of) you sometime soon!

Hello hello! : A brief update

Pictures are up on flickr from skiing in the Alps (Dolomite region - Cortina d'Ampezzo) with my family! Spending a week and a half with my family over Christmas break was the happiest period of time for me here in Italy, and the day we went skiing was hands down one one of the best experiences here (besides getting to be with my family in general), point blank period. The only drawback of the day was that my mom, who doesn't ski, wasn't with us for much of the day, as we were on the mountain and she was back in Sacile, albeit quite enjoying herself there. What a beautiful day in the beautifully snowy, surreal world of the Alps.

Sorry for being so out of touch for a long while now, I've been trying to actually be productive and do my reading and prepare applications for internships for next summer. Not productive enough, but I'm trying. "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...!"

As you can likely infer from the first paragraph, I had an absolutely fantastic and relaxing week and a half with my family, as they visited me here in Italy from the 22nd to the 31st. I love my family; they are awesome and make me happy. We spent some time here in Ferrara, visited Ravenna, Venice and Florence, and went north to Sacile to visit Gina and go skiing in the Alps (so, so, so gorgeous!). I already miss them, but their presence was a great comfort and a lot of fun, and gave me a boost to try and make it through this last month with a bit of new-found calm and resolve. Hopefully it will last long enough. Did I mention that I had a great time with my family? Because I did and I'm so grateful they came.*

Next week, I'll be heading south to Sicily for a very short visit to Palermo - given time and money restrictions, I decided to cut out all the other pieces of my intended visit to Sicily in favor of practicality and research, and in the hopes that I'll get to come back to Italy sometime in the next few years and climb the volcano, visit relatives, see ruins, etc. then. After that comes 2 exams, my brother Alex's return from Germany to here for a few days before heading home to the States, then another two exams, then a possible long weekend trip to visit Hannah R. in Ireland (since otherwise I wouldn't get to see her for about a year and a half in total and that would be sad), then my last exam, then a bit under a week left in Italy before going home! *takes a deep breath after such a run-on sentence...* I'll be going home February 1st, and will have a week of anticipated relaxing vacation at home before heading north to Middlebury again! In other words, I don't have much time left here, but what I do have is extremely busy between (grr 5) exams, applications and visits. I'm going to try to just focus on one step at a time, because otherwise this all would get overwhelming. There have of course been good things about this abroad experience, but I will be relieved to be home again. Multiplied by a very large number.

Well, back to work with me! Or maybe sleep. PS: Happiness and health to all for the New Year! Cheers!

* reminds me of the finale to a Yeasayer song, "Red Cave":
im so bless'ed to
have spent the time
with my family and the friends
i love in my short life i have met
so many people i deeply care for

Photos and First Few Days in Scotland in Brief

Most pictures from Scotland are up on flickr, fyi, in several sets accessible on the right side, split up by days. And almost all of my photos on there are now mapped, using a "geotagging" feature which I think is just dandy for people like me who... like both maps and photography a lot. So, if anybody cares, you can actually see where things took place by looking at my map on flickr, too!

And now, my first few days in Scotland in brief (by my normal standards, at least), as a break from studying.

Day 0: Spending all day traveling, with a successful arrival. Only hiccups were when the customs man in London yelled at me for being American and for messing up the entry form a little bit, and when I thought the airplane being late in Italy made me miss my connecting flight to Edinburgh because I forgot about the time difference and freaked out for a little while as I ran through the airport. However, all went well in the end. Eleanor was nice and picked me up at the airport, and for dinner I had a wonderfully home-tasting meal of a BLT and a milkshake with Eleanor and her Irish flatmate Gareth, before chilling out with the amusing movie "American Splendor."

Day 1: Food shopping! Oh man, I am so jealous of the amount of diversity in Scottish markets - lots of variety of food types, for considerably less money that it is here, even with the pound-euro-dollar differences. One of many things that would occur over the week to make me feel more at home. Then came the German Christmas Market near the Prince's Street Gardens, where they have lots of Christmas-season goings-on. Apparently in Europe, the Germans are the only ones who really know how to do a Christmas Market, or so they say, so a whole bunch of Germans come to Edinburgh with their stalls and food and jewelry and neat little things and set up for a month and a half! Got some decent german food and some traditional mulled wine, talked for a long time, and spent a while looking at the pretty jewelry. Yay.

Then came going to a Buddhism class with Eleanor and seeing the really-old-manuscripts section of the New College (religion/philosophy/etc.) library; wandering around the city; visiting a small vintage store called the Rusty Zip, playing dress-up back at the flat with Eleanor's lots of fun/cute clothes (aka being girly), meeting Eleanor's flatmates and her friends Zoe and Mark; getting a chance to webcam for a little with my brother Alex; making dinner and hanging out talking for a long time. We intended to go dancing at Caberet Voltaire... and had too much fun talking until late. Fortunately or unfortunately, this became a trend for the week, and I was regularly too tired to go out past midnight. Not an easy schedule for me, probably to my brother's disappointment (he wanted me to see Cab Volt while there). O well. At least hanging out with new, lively, friendly and interesting people was a relief from my quiet life here in Italy.

Day 2: Heading up to St. Andrews to see Zoe, a friend and suitemate of mine from Arabic School, who is a Vermonter but goes to undergrad at St. Andrews all year round. It's a cute, little, medieval fishing/pilgrimage town, with lots of fantastic ruins just above the shore of the North Sea. There are only three main streets (whose shops oddly enough reminded me of Denville, near home in NJ, or of Middlebury), plus the university, the fishing neighborhoods and the ruins of the medieval cathedral, chapel, castle and some other things, which have whole walls missing and then a single wall or tower just rising up from the earth. They were as though ghost buildings, beautiful skeletons. A storm was brewing up and it rained on and off all afternoon, which unfortunately precluded some intended destinations, but the rain, wind and clouds just made the whole place more surreal and the ruins on the crashing sea the more wild and intriguing. So awesome, in several senses of the word. It was also great to see Zoe and get to catch up for the whole afternoon, talking over tea and Indian food and as we wandered through the very-much-ruins of the epic cathedral. I'm really glad I got to see her while in Scotland, even if it was just for one day. Feeling welcomed by friends was a constant and very key highlight to the trip, and was very comforting.

Day 3: A very full day. Started out with a trip to the Farmer's Market, which was down below the Grassmarket and near the foot of the cliff on which the Castle sits. Much of the food was quite tempting-looking, but we went for some porridge for breakfast. Wow was it good. Raspberries and oats and cream and I don't remember what all, but a good way to start the day. Next was Armstrongs, this enoooormous vintage store in the Grassmarket. Old clothes and accessories from the 1800s through to the 70s, although mainly, from what it appeared, from the early 20th century. More fragile or really unusual and not for sale items were hanging from the ceiling, so the store feels a whirlwind den of weird, colorful old things. SO MUCH COOL STUFF. We had fun playing dress up and digging up cool things from the racks for quite some time. This place would be a LARPers dream-store, I expect. I need to get the pictures of this morning from Eleanor at some point, since my camera was out of batteries, but that's the only point that I don't have, I think.

Afterwards, Eleanor had to study for an exam she had on the coming Monday, so I went off on my own to climb Arthur's Seat, the massive volcanic rock and heath-covered mound rising up in the middle of the city, on the side near the Firth of Forth (the bay-ish stretch of the North Sea reaching into the island near Edinburgh). There are several paths of various difficulties that wind back and forth up the rocky hill, and which lead to the grassy hillocks of the plateau at the top. The sun was starting to go down as I went up (not long after 3 pm...), which meant that I got some fantastic views of Edinburgh and this gorgeous sunset from the rocky volcanic highest point, where I hung out for a while with some other hikers and ravens braving the wind for the sake of the sunset.

The downside of seeing the sunset from the top, that I didn't think of until too late, was having to make my way down (the much smoother backside through a valley and past a ruined chapel!) in the near-dark, but luckily there were other people around and no problems. But I'm really glad I got to make it back up there (my dad, brother Alex and I climbed it last spring, too). I've discovered this fall something of a love for climbing iconic tall points in cities - it's exhilirating and brings great views! I think I want to hike more often once back in the States again, although nothing too intense for little me. I do go to school in Vermont, after all; why not take better advantage of the landscape?

But the busy day wasn't over yet! Eleanor, her friend Natasha (who I'd met for a while sometime earlier in the trip) and I went ice skating in the Prince's Street Gardens Christmas ice rink. They hadn't cleaned up the skater-shavings for several hours, so there was an odd layer of "snow" over the whole rink, and it was kind of crowded, but besides that it was quite fun! Last winter, I tried ice skating for the first time, and am glad that I did so, because I'm kind of awkward still but can do it without falling at all and definitely enjoy myself. We met up with Leah and Mary Katherine briefly afterwards, but they had had a long day of walking (with seeing an exciting penguin march at the zoo!) and were ready for an early night, and so I ended up back at Eleanor's flat to watch the strange but very funny movie "Wet, Hot American Summer" with her and Natasha, at the recommendation of the movie-store guy. (We hadn't intended to watch two "typical American (fill-in-the-blank) experience" movies, but ended up doing so somehow, I just realized). A relaxing way to end the day.

Days 4, 5 and 6: Coming Soon.

Immediate plans:

Well, I should get back to trying to be productive soon. This is going to be a very very busy week (after the last month of being quite busy but feeling unproductive and a lack of posting, sorry about that!), but I will do my best at writing about the other few days in Scotland and how life has been in general. My family (parents and Alex) are coming next Monday to Italy for over a week for Christmas, and I am sooooo looking forward to it.

I had been thinking of going to Rome next weekend for a short visit, since I haven't made it there at all yet, but cousin Gina has proposed, if things work out for her, staying with her and going for a short ski trip - over the border into Austria! Which would also be exciting. So, either way, once I make it through this busy week (and hopefully get some important things worked on), I will get to have a much-looked-forward-to vacation for a bit of time before the crazy exam month of January. That last bit I'm not eager about, as I don't feel at all prepared. I've learned a ton this term about emotionally taking care of and living by myself in a new environment, and some more Italian, of course, but very little academically, less than I need to know for exams (which is partly my fault, partly my language skills, partly the confusing set up here and how difficult it is to get books). I know that learning to take care of myself and learning about myself is the more important thing by far and what I care about more, but I'd like to do ok on exams, as the grades do actually count for Middlebury... I'll just have to keep plugging along with this frustrating university. Almost there! Almost there! Just keep swimming...

This has been a good experience over all, this fall, but I will be quite glad to get home. And in the meantime, I will be sooo happy to see my family next week. Ok. Back to work.

We're back in Ferrara. The trip over this last week was great; the way back here last night was super long and kind of sketchy, but it all worked out in the end. There will be more later when I have the time and energy. Just wanted to make it known that all is ok.

Arthur's Seat at sunset= awesome. So do friends. And tea. And backrubs. And Christmas trees. And stone buildings. And quirky massive vintage stores. And good (non-Italian!) food. And friends. And dancing. And ice skating. And English (especially with awesome English/Scottish/Irish accents). And conversations. And friends. And Scotland, in general.

In truth, I don't want to leave tomorrow.

Second Day Back in Scotland

I am tired and don't have the energy for a real post right now, so instead I will let you all know that I made it safely to Scotland, having been staying with Eleanor, and been having a good time. I will leave you with three good things from today:

1) Eleanor is a fantastic human being, and I can feel both chill and have much fun when hanging out with her and her friends.
2) Gorgeous Scottish landscapes and architecture. Man, this place feels so comforting to me, even if I can't quite say why. I'm glad to be here.
3) Going up to St. Andrews to see Zoe; ruuuuuuuiiiins on the shore of the North Sea, and the hints of a wicked wild storm brewing up from the ocean as we walked through said medieval ruins, with the waves crashing beautifully in the growing dark and wind - as I, most importantly, got to catch up with a friend.