Ok, I admit it; my academic experience up until this point anything but typical. But then again, I’m anything but typical as well. An American, studying in Canada, and applying to graduate studies programs in Milan obviously requires some explanation.
I remember applying to university programs when I was 17; one morning I triumphantly announced to my parents that, besides wanting desperately to live in a city, I would also be pursuing higher education opportunities outside the United States. I wanted to study in Europe. Their response was simple and concise,
NO.
Looking back I was probably overly ambitious to think that I could deal with both a change of lifestyle, as I would be moving out of my parents house for the first time, but also a complete change of country, language and culture. I’ve always been ambitious.
I’ve always wanted to do more. I’ve always wanted to blaze my own path. Luckily, after studying for four years at one of Canada’s finest universities, McGill, I believe I am prepared to again tackle my dream of studying in Europe.
I’m ready for Milan and here’s why…
My academic program at McGill has been rigorous and fulfilling, and my major specializations have provided me with a unique skill set that I believe is requisite for any urban planner to create dynamic and successful but also liveable spaces. The courses I have pursued in Urban Systems Geography have provided me with firm research skills based fundamentally on the analysis of human geographic systems through census data, statistical outputs and the synthesis of information sets in Geographic Information Systems. While having a strong scientific based rooted in quantitative analysis, I also had the opportunity within the Urban Systems Geography program to take both Architecture and Urban Planning courses. These courses, such as History of Housing and Site Usage, have fundamentally focused on visual aesthetic and the creation of comfortable and human spaces. I am proud of my work both in terms of quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as the creative skills and understandings of visual aesthetic that I have acquired during the pursuit of my Urban Systems Geography program. I strongly feel as though I am ready for the next step by pursuing a career in urban planning.
My interest in learning foreign languages has not wavered since primary school and I view my ability to openly communicate and understand different cultures through linguistic expression as one of my greatest personal strengths. Studying and majoring also in Italian Language and Literature at McGill University allowed me to grow in terms of linguistic expression in Italian, which has in turn improved my written expression in English. Through critical and creative thinking in the analysis of both ancient and modern Italian texts, I have come to appreciate and understand the complex realities of Italian life and astutely read the cultural environment and expression. Most recently I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study at the Università di Bologna on a student exchange organized through McGill. Nothing short of life changing, studying in Bologna presented me with a unique opportunity to live and learn from my surroundings daily.
Living and working in Italian, feeling and experiencing a new city, meeting and learning from amazing people; this was in all actuality an experience I shouldn’t have had, as my exchange was through the Università di Bologna in Forlì instead of actually in Bologna. Arriving in Italy I realized that, from time to time, bending the rules is a necessary fact of life. I took a risk that I ultimately grew from. Change was only natural and resiliency in the face of trials, indispensable; I have already learned from Italy once and am looking to see what more time there will bring me.
Empirical analysis. In depth research. Attention to aesthetic. Creative but critical thinking. Adapting to and understanding new environments; these are the skills and thought processes required of an urban planner.
Consequently, this is also how I think and strive to understand the world around me.
Now, I’m ready for the next step.
Snow, peanut butter and Thanksgiving
I’ve been saying to a lot of people lately that I feel pretty scatterbrained; and it’s partially true. I really have no idea where to put my thoughts at the moment.
You see, it happens that I often find myself in the predicament of being caught in somewhere between now and later (sometimes referred to as the present and future).
I’ll give you an example, any given hour I go between thinking about: the papers I have due that accrue at an inhuman rate, grad schools, how quickly the year is passing checking facebook (before the news), looking at maps on Google maps, playing around with translating all of this in French or Italian, and generally pondering about people I miss/want to see/have to write to/want to call…not to mention the assorted daily comings and goings of eating, going to class, shopping (if need be…for stuff like salt now that I think about it for our suicide steps that have become somewhat icy and convex since the first snow fall), and… if everything is going right, maybe a drink later on in the evening.
Coffee deserves an honourable mention and can be interspersed with or in between any of the above mentioned thoughts and actions. I drink it like most people drink water.
Needless to say, mentally I’m anywhere but where I am physically…sometimes I wish I could just STOP thinking.
I guess this is good place to start stopping?
Just to briefly sidetrack for a moment, I literally just received notice that my transfer credits from Bologna finally went through; it’s done. 13 credits from McGill (which is considerably more than I expected considering it was the exchange that wasn’t supposed to happen…well at least the way it did). Wow. It worked?
So anyway, I asked a friend today if it was rational to make a life decision based on my odd attachment to snow and peanut butter (yes, I am going to talk about peanut butter again). Let me explain.
Lately I have been wrestling with the idea of going to grad school in Europe; although this may not be my only opportunity to go live in Europe for awhile, studying urban planning there seems like a pretty good continuation of a dream that has now been four years in the making (since I unsuccessfully announced to my parents that I wanted to go to university in Europe…when I was 17) Yeah…you imagined pretty correctly their response.
So… now seems like the time right; graduating, finding a grad school program, picking up and going… it all seems so simple. Maybe it is just too simple.
Hold on…let’s just back up for a sec.
You see, this whole vision was all well and good until I looked at the weather forecast the other day; 15-20 cm of snow.
For some reason, I have an fond and slightly odd attachment to winter weather and specifically snow…and I still can’t quite grasp why. In short, I get giddy…really giddy. I was thinking that maybe it was because I always associate it with snow days and freedom from school back home, and up here, probably some of the greatest times of my life were spent in sub zero temperatures, but there’s something more. It’s so ephemeral, so calming. I love slapping on a audaciously heavy pair of LL Bean boots and just motoring off through the slush and everything else winter has to offer. Just. Because. I. Can. I’m convinced, on top of all of this, Montreal is a city meant to look good in the winter.
It really feels magical but like I said, I can’t really put my finger on it. One thing is for sure, I’ve been running around like a maniac these past couple days taking photos and spending significant amounts of time procrastinating while looking out the window.
And so help me God, if global warming begins to affect Montreal winters, I may have to pick up and move off to Chibougamau in northern Québec.
Bref, this is a non-negotiable. I need winter; as crazy as it sounds, I need snow.
This brings me to peanut butter…now, if you’ve been following this blog, you know while I was in Italy my parents spent about 25$ American shipping some Skippy off to their poor son who was living it up in Europe’s culinary capital, Bologna.
My friend really said it right, it’s not the peanut so much as it’s symbolic value: the comfort of being home. Peanut butter is what the being in the fetal position, for me at least, would taste like.
All the comfort of home packed into one little jar, how could you go wrong.
Being cut off from it in Europe was pretty tragic for me and let’s just say I made a habit of frequenting the first supermarket establishment I found that sold it, because this was clearly an indicator of a guy who had everything…even though his prices were a little high.
Bref, another non-negotiable.
Finally, American Thanksgiving. All my family was home over Thanksgiving, and in hein sight, I probably should’ve been there too. For all those non-Americans in the audience, Thanksgiving in the States is really so much more than carving a turkey. Leaving behind the discussion of food (which I seem to always come back to…curious, eh?) Thanksgiving is a time to be around the people you love.
Family’s important, ‘nuff said.
I find it kind of ironic that I was taking an institutional French test on the very same day that we celebrate the values of family, love and just generally enjoying time together, but whatever, c’est la vie.
I do have to say though, celebrating up here with close friends, with a box of pizza, some beer and watching a football game was really quite amazing as well. I guess it’s the spirit of the holiday that gets me more than the food that comes with it.
Special people, spending time together; that’s what counts in the end. My Thanksgiving was like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
Oh, by the way, on that note, it’s officially the start of the holiday season, you are now allowed to discuss Christmas.
My point is, I guess my pendulum has swung, or rather, I’m rediscovering why I fell in love with Montreal, why there was really no other option in my mind once I got accepted to McGill.
It really fits like a glove.
French and English. Bureaucracy in a timely manner. Tams Tams in the summer and an audaciously brutal but beautiful winter. French cheese next to peanut butter at the supermarket. Canadian AND American Thanksgiving.
Is it the compromise that I’ve been looking for all along? Is this place me?
You see, it happens that I often find myself in the predicament of being caught in somewhere between now and later (sometimes referred to as the present and future).
I’ll give you an example, any given hour I go between thinking about: the papers I have due that accrue at an inhuman rate, grad schools, how quickly the year is passing checking facebook (before the news), looking at maps on Google maps, playing around with translating all of this in French or Italian, and generally pondering about people I miss/want to see/have to write to/want to call…not to mention the assorted daily comings and goings of eating, going to class, shopping (if need be…for stuff like salt now that I think about it for our suicide steps that have become somewhat icy and convex since the first snow fall), and… if everything is going right, maybe a drink later on in the evening.
Coffee deserves an honourable mention and can be interspersed with or in between any of the above mentioned thoughts and actions. I drink it like most people drink water.
Needless to say, mentally I’m anywhere but where I am physically…sometimes I wish I could just STOP thinking.
I guess this is good place to start stopping?
Just to briefly sidetrack for a moment, I literally just received notice that my transfer credits from Bologna finally went through; it’s done. 13 credits from McGill (which is considerably more than I expected considering it was the exchange that wasn’t supposed to happen…well at least the way it did). Wow. It worked?
So anyway, I asked a friend today if it was rational to make a life decision based on my odd attachment to snow and peanut butter (yes, I am going to talk about peanut butter again). Let me explain.
Lately I have been wrestling with the idea of going to grad school in Europe; although this may not be my only opportunity to go live in Europe for awhile, studying urban planning there seems like a pretty good continuation of a dream that has now been four years in the making (since I unsuccessfully announced to my parents that I wanted to go to university in Europe…when I was 17) Yeah…you imagined pretty correctly their response.
So… now seems like the time right; graduating, finding a grad school program, picking up and going… it all seems so simple. Maybe it is just too simple.
Hold on…let’s just back up for a sec.
You see, this whole vision was all well and good until I looked at the weather forecast the other day; 15-20 cm of snow.
For some reason, I have an fond and slightly odd attachment to winter weather and specifically snow…and I still can’t quite grasp why. In short, I get giddy…really giddy. I was thinking that maybe it was because I always associate it with snow days and freedom from school back home, and up here, probably some of the greatest times of my life were spent in sub zero temperatures, but there’s something more. It’s so ephemeral, so calming. I love slapping on a audaciously heavy pair of LL Bean boots and just motoring off through the slush and everything else winter has to offer. Just. Because. I. Can. I’m convinced, on top of all of this, Montreal is a city meant to look good in the winter.
It really feels magical but like I said, I can’t really put my finger on it. One thing is for sure, I’ve been running around like a maniac these past couple days taking photos and spending significant amounts of time procrastinating while looking out the window.
And so help me God, if global warming begins to affect Montreal winters, I may have to pick up and move off to Chibougamau in northern Québec.
Bref, this is a non-negotiable. I need winter; as crazy as it sounds, I need snow.
This brings me to peanut butter…now, if you’ve been following this blog, you know while I was in Italy my parents spent about 25$ American shipping some Skippy off to their poor son who was living it up in Europe’s culinary capital, Bologna.
My friend really said it right, it’s not the peanut so much as it’s symbolic value: the comfort of being home. Peanut butter is what the being in the fetal position, for me at least, would taste like.
All the comfort of home packed into one little jar, how could you go wrong.
Being cut off from it in Europe was pretty tragic for me and let’s just say I made a habit of frequenting the first supermarket establishment I found that sold it, because this was clearly an indicator of a guy who had everything…even though his prices were a little high.
Bref, another non-negotiable.
Finally, American Thanksgiving. All my family was home over Thanksgiving, and in hein sight, I probably should’ve been there too. For all those non-Americans in the audience, Thanksgiving in the States is really so much more than carving a turkey. Leaving behind the discussion of food (which I seem to always come back to…curious, eh?) Thanksgiving is a time to be around the people you love.
Family’s important, ‘nuff said.
I find it kind of ironic that I was taking an institutional French test on the very same day that we celebrate the values of family, love and just generally enjoying time together, but whatever, c’est la vie.
I do have to say though, celebrating up here with close friends, with a box of pizza, some beer and watching a football game was really quite amazing as well. I guess it’s the spirit of the holiday that gets me more than the food that comes with it.
Special people, spending time together; that’s what counts in the end. My Thanksgiving was like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
Oh, by the way, on that note, it’s officially the start of the holiday season, you are now allowed to discuss Christmas.
My point is, I guess my pendulum has swung, or rather, I’m rediscovering why I fell in love with Montreal, why there was really no other option in my mind once I got accepted to McGill.
It really fits like a glove.
French and English. Bureaucracy in a timely manner. Tams Tams in the summer and an audaciously brutal but beautiful winter. French cheese next to peanut butter at the supermarket. Canadian AND American Thanksgiving.
Is it the compromise that I’ve been looking for all along? Is this place me?
Forlì coming back to haunt me...
Coming back from Italy, my exchange was only technically half over as I still had to deal with….::dum, dum, dum::
McGill Bureaucracy.
For those of you who haven’t been filled in on my European escapades, let’s just say that from the get go, one of the most crucial plot points was the willing suspension of all previously conceived notions of reality and a certain disposition to bend the rules…You see, from the time I stepped foot in Italy, I knew things where not going to fall easily in stride with the regimented and sometimes overly stiff North American order and pace of life.
In short, of course I was supposed to be doing an exchange in Italy, but what most people don’t know is that I shouldn’t have been at Bologna. McGill’s Italian department…technically…has an exchange program set up with the University of Bologna, of course, but at one of the satellite campuses about an hour outside the city…in a town called Forlì.
Talking to people who had already done the exchange last fall, there was an overwhelming consensus to NOT go there… and rather take courses at Bologna.
Needless to say, the only time I ever technically “made it” to Forlì was only in passing on the way to the beach at Rimini.
In my defense, I did make an effort… I shopped for courses at Forlì, chose my apartment based on proximity and accessibility to the train station for commuting purposes AND even wrote a numerous emails to my advisor there… who, of course, managed to respond only after courses at started. But, in short, hitting the ground running in Italy, nothing panned out the way it was supposed to.
That was really the first time I took measures into my own hands. I’m a real stickler for the rules, and I have plenty a tragic to story to support my strong convictions as I always seem to get caught… this wasn’t an exception…really.
Bologna’s stance on the matter was very much laissez faire… and I’m pretty sure I could’ve taken courses in astrophysics… provided that I didn’t care to get any credits coming back to McGill.
So, you read about the great times already…now fast forward, to, I’d say about a month ago, when I was hunting down professors in the Italian department to sign off on my exchange.
Coming back to McGill, I diligently and thoughtfully wrote an email to the head of the Italian department here, who, 6 months earlier, had given me the green light to take courses at Bologna (after, of course, I thoroughly investigated the matter in Italy).
This was all well and good… but she retired May of last year.
Pardon me?
Fortunately piccolo crisi number one was averted because it turns out the prof who would be signing off on my exchange would be teaching my contemporary Italian prose course….
Perrrrrfeccccccccct.
After having a brief meeting and a significant shock and awe campaign of course syllabi and materials and a hefty list of books I read in Italy, I’d say we were on the same page.
BUT, of course, he wasn’t the guy to go to, as I would have to speak to the department head.
Now, the problem with the department head is that I dropped her course like a bad habit the beginning of this semester after attending one class…let’s just say she was bound to recognize me. ON TOP of that, I needed to check and double check the documents I submitted her, as I apparently handed into the wrong sheet to be filled out.
Situational awareness is an invaluable skill, and I envy those blessed with such a keen understanding for the people and world around them...
All and all, it wasn’t looking good.
Then, the moment of the truth a few weeks later… the meeting.
I was in top form sporting the famous gold shoes with documents in hand, ready for the worst...
-So… how was Forlì?
-Hmmmm… funny enough, I didn’t spend to much time in Forlì… most of the time I was there I spent in Bologna.
-But.. you..took courses at Forlì didn’t you…?
-Well kind of… you see ONE of the courses I took was offered at Forlì as well…BUT once I arrived, I figured out that the courses that would best transfer for my major were ::gulp:: in Bologna…See, look, here, I ended up making a big mistake and taking three masters level courses.
-::Silence::…Did you speak to professor Andrea Cristiani?
-::me not knowing whether Andrea was masculine or feminine:: Eh..by email…I contacted the professor (grappling for a gender neutral word).
And so my game of aversion and trying to come off as vague as possible ensued.
-Were there other McGill students there?
-Oh yeah.. Rocco, we pretty much saw each other every day.
-And how come I haven’t heard from him yet? (Rocco, when I last left you, decided to fully enjoy his sojourn, and, let’s just say pursued other interests outside the academic realm).
-Errrr…. I think he arrived and just decided he needed some time off.
-So, let me get this straight, you went over there and took courses at Bologna instead of Forlì (with the old department heads permission, I added.) You found that to be better…?
At this point I saw the light at the end of the tunnel… this was no witch hunt really, there was going to be no punishment from the new department head. Everything looked to be in the clear.
After about an hour of tap dancing around a pretty obvious point the course credit approval sheets were signed and soon to be handed to McGill administration the day after…It was a done deal.
I’m still waiting to see the results; I'll keep you posted.
McGill Bureaucracy.
For those of you who haven’t been filled in on my European escapades, let’s just say that from the get go, one of the most crucial plot points was the willing suspension of all previously conceived notions of reality and a certain disposition to bend the rules…You see, from the time I stepped foot in Italy, I knew things where not going to fall easily in stride with the regimented and sometimes overly stiff North American order and pace of life.
In short, of course I was supposed to be doing an exchange in Italy, but what most people don’t know is that I shouldn’t have been at Bologna. McGill’s Italian department…technically…has an exchange program set up with the University of Bologna, of course, but at one of the satellite campuses about an hour outside the city…in a town called Forlì.
Talking to people who had already done the exchange last fall, there was an overwhelming consensus to NOT go there… and rather take courses at Bologna.
Needless to say, the only time I ever technically “made it” to Forlì was only in passing on the way to the beach at Rimini.
In my defense, I did make an effort… I shopped for courses at Forlì, chose my apartment based on proximity and accessibility to the train station for commuting purposes AND even wrote a numerous emails to my advisor there… who, of course, managed to respond only after courses at started. But, in short, hitting the ground running in Italy, nothing panned out the way it was supposed to.
That was really the first time I took measures into my own hands. I’m a real stickler for the rules, and I have plenty a tragic to story to support my strong convictions as I always seem to get caught… this wasn’t an exception…really.
Bologna’s stance on the matter was very much laissez faire… and I’m pretty sure I could’ve taken courses in astrophysics… provided that I didn’t care to get any credits coming back to McGill.
So, you read about the great times already…now fast forward, to, I’d say about a month ago, when I was hunting down professors in the Italian department to sign off on my exchange.
Coming back to McGill, I diligently and thoughtfully wrote an email to the head of the Italian department here, who, 6 months earlier, had given me the green light to take courses at Bologna (after, of course, I thoroughly investigated the matter in Italy).
This was all well and good… but she retired May of last year.
Pardon me?
Fortunately piccolo crisi number one was averted because it turns out the prof who would be signing off on my exchange would be teaching my contemporary Italian prose course….
Perrrrrfeccccccccct.
After having a brief meeting and a significant shock and awe campaign of course syllabi and materials and a hefty list of books I read in Italy, I’d say we were on the same page.
BUT, of course, he wasn’t the guy to go to, as I would have to speak to the department head.
Now, the problem with the department head is that I dropped her course like a bad habit the beginning of this semester after attending one class…let’s just say she was bound to recognize me. ON TOP of that, I needed to check and double check the documents I submitted her, as I apparently handed into the wrong sheet to be filled out.
Situational awareness is an invaluable skill, and I envy those blessed with such a keen understanding for the people and world around them...
All and all, it wasn’t looking good.
Then, the moment of the truth a few weeks later… the meeting.
I was in top form sporting the famous gold shoes with documents in hand, ready for the worst...
-So… how was Forlì?
-Hmmmm… funny enough, I didn’t spend to much time in Forlì… most of the time I was there I spent in Bologna.
-But.. you..took courses at Forlì didn’t you…?
-Well kind of… you see ONE of the courses I took was offered at Forlì as well…BUT once I arrived, I figured out that the courses that would best transfer for my major were ::gulp:: in Bologna…See, look, here, I ended up making a big mistake and taking three masters level courses.
-::Silence::…Did you speak to professor Andrea Cristiani?
-::me not knowing whether Andrea was masculine or feminine:: Eh..by email…I contacted the professor (grappling for a gender neutral word).
And so my game of aversion and trying to come off as vague as possible ensued.
-Were there other McGill students there?
-Oh yeah.. Rocco, we pretty much saw each other every day.
-And how come I haven’t heard from him yet? (Rocco, when I last left you, decided to fully enjoy his sojourn, and, let’s just say pursued other interests outside the academic realm).
-Errrr…. I think he arrived and just decided he needed some time off.
-So, let me get this straight, you went over there and took courses at Bologna instead of Forlì (with the old department heads permission, I added.) You found that to be better…?
At this point I saw the light at the end of the tunnel… this was no witch hunt really, there was going to be no punishment from the new department head. Everything looked to be in the clear.
After about an hour of tap dancing around a pretty obvious point the course credit approval sheets were signed and soon to be handed to McGill administration the day after…It was a done deal.
I’m still waiting to see the results; I'll keep you posted.
Sprituality (written for McGill Daily)
So in sixth grade, I was confirmed in the Catholic church. You have to understand that Confirmation is not just the beginning of new, adult religious life in the Church, but also the time when your parents can NO longer force you get out of bed for Mass.
I was free. I could finally stop forcing myself to sleep in past 9 to go to Mass (which in retrospect didn’t really matter because there were others at 10, 11, and 5… obviously I wasn’t winning this battle).
Then, of course, my mom presented me with an ultimatum, as I was obviously not going to be falling through the spiritual woodwork…
Altar boy or youth group.
Phoebs (my mom) was not having any of this spiritual slacking and to her credit did give me a certain degree of freedom within the context of her somewhat imperious gesture to keep me going to church. That’s where it all started for me…
So what?
I can say that I’ve read the Bible, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, Tao Te Ching…and although that doesn’t necessarily make me an expert in religious studies, especially when I was reading these holy books at 12 years old, I always found it fascinating the, not interchangeable, but shocking similarities in divine order across the board. This is by no means to suggest that every religion is exactly same but instead to say that I think we can learn a lot from ourselves by comparing and discussing what we believe with others.
We can learn a lot from what other people have to say, especially when we take a moment to listen with an open heart.
Here’s the thing, when asked now whether or not I believe in God, I always say that life is too short and too much of a miracle to not give way or not be ruled by some higher order…the people we meet, that natural beauty and the suffering we endure in this world all go hand in hand and must point to something more.
Believe; believe in something, and when you do, put it into action. If you don’t believe, take action, and from this you will find some deeper meaning. I find it incredibly shocking that small acts of kindness and generosity are thrown by the wayside in an effort to be bigger, better and more giving. This is not a criticism, but just to say that we forget sometimes to start small.
The little things always make the biggest difference. Smile.
It’s easy to get lost in dogma too; I was born and raised Catholic, believe me, I get it. I have at times been incredibly torn between my religious beliefs and personal convictions. I dissent at times, but also realize that dissenting does not mean giving up, rather, seeking more to truly understand. The more we learn, the less we realize we actually know. Delving deeper, old words, that some take as cliché, come to new life:
Fraternity. Peace. Compassion. Love.
That’s it, take it or leave it this is what life and God on whatever level you choose to conceive him, is all about.
Matt Arancio
U3 Urban Systems Geography, Italian and Economics
I was free. I could finally stop forcing myself to sleep in past 9 to go to Mass (which in retrospect didn’t really matter because there were others at 10, 11, and 5… obviously I wasn’t winning this battle).
Then, of course, my mom presented me with an ultimatum, as I was obviously not going to be falling through the spiritual woodwork…
Altar boy or youth group.
Phoebs (my mom) was not having any of this spiritual slacking and to her credit did give me a certain degree of freedom within the context of her somewhat imperious gesture to keep me going to church. That’s where it all started for me…
So what?
I can say that I’ve read the Bible, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, Tao Te Ching…and although that doesn’t necessarily make me an expert in religious studies, especially when I was reading these holy books at 12 years old, I always found it fascinating the, not interchangeable, but shocking similarities in divine order across the board. This is by no means to suggest that every religion is exactly same but instead to say that I think we can learn a lot from ourselves by comparing and discussing what we believe with others.
We can learn a lot from what other people have to say, especially when we take a moment to listen with an open heart.
Here’s the thing, when asked now whether or not I believe in God, I always say that life is too short and too much of a miracle to not give way or not be ruled by some higher order…the people we meet, that natural beauty and the suffering we endure in this world all go hand in hand and must point to something more.
Believe; believe in something, and when you do, put it into action. If you don’t believe, take action, and from this you will find some deeper meaning. I find it incredibly shocking that small acts of kindness and generosity are thrown by the wayside in an effort to be bigger, better and more giving. This is not a criticism, but just to say that we forget sometimes to start small.
The little things always make the biggest difference. Smile.
It’s easy to get lost in dogma too; I was born and raised Catholic, believe me, I get it. I have at times been incredibly torn between my religious beliefs and personal convictions. I dissent at times, but also realize that dissenting does not mean giving up, rather, seeking more to truly understand. The more we learn, the less we realize we actually know. Delving deeper, old words, that some take as cliché, come to new life:
Fraternity. Peace. Compassion. Love.
That’s it, take it or leave it this is what life and God on whatever level you choose to conceive him, is all about.
Matt Arancio
U3 Urban Systems Geography, Italian and Economics
Lake Ronkonkoma
I had to switch gears with what I would be writing about for awhile, moving from ridiculously random adventures of discovery and new horizons to even more ridiculous adventures of rediscovery of my own little island (and by little I mean an island that is as long as the country of Belgium is wide…200 km… check it out on Google maps.)
I think it began with little things that tipped me off to the fact that reentry would be a little more difficult than expected… namely… forgetting English words and proper sentence structure (I had to struggle to find the word for “butcher” relying on descriptions such as “meat cutting person” AND asked my dad if he “took” a beer…)
More importantly the first morning back I stumbled downstairs looking forward to educating and enlightening my parents (and consequently the rest of this continent) in the wonders that is Italian coffee… Now, my stove in Italy was a gas stove, like the one back home, that instead had to be lit manually, usually with a lighter or flint… depending on what I could find first around the important. After 6 months of grappling with this way to produce the perfect cup of coffee, like countless numbers of our European ancestors, I sought to replicate the Old World in the New…one…with much of the same, let’s just say, unexpected, results of our ancestors.
Standing downstairs, back home, in the kitchen, I asked my mom for a match and proceeded to turn on the gas, waiting for the smell which would tell me to hang up and redial….So the gas was on, and I took the match to it… the only problem was that I forgot we have a pilot light for this stove meaning that…in the end I came very close to lighting most of my downstairs on fire…
Funny how subtle life can be…huh?
Amongst other things I started working again, after 6 months of, well…let’s just say a very Italian paced life. Now, I work for the Town of Islip as a lifeguard; a seemingly benign position…right? Please?
Wrong.
Let me just lay the ground work and paint a picture for you of the beautiful bureaucratic machine that is the Town Islip…First things first… the Republican party has been in power here since the dawn of time meaning that in order to get any job, anything…. You have to be a Republican. I dealt with this moral dilemma last summer, but please, don’t ask me what party I’m registered with…even I won’t like the answer that comes out of my mouth. I have, probably at least 10 bosses depending on who tries to stop by the pool to exercise their authority by making us poor, underpaid lifeguards (at 12 dollars an hour) perform such menial tasks as enforcing rules and shaving in an effort to uphold town policy. My favorite was the most recent case of all the lifeguards being up in arms about the new Town shaving policy…that’s right… now, not only do we have to save you, but we have to look pretty damn good and well kempt doing it. So no facial hair…
Except for mustaches?
Delightful, huh?
Although the Town isn’t particularly good at doing anything of value other than make rules that are never enforced, they seem to have a really good handle on showing everyone who’s in charge, namely operating under the “we say jump, you say how high” paradigm…whilst employing people almost entirely under the age of 25. Imagine that dog who just can’t seem to get a handle on its hormones and humps anything in sight. See where the conflict arises?
They also make us wear realllllly short shorts.
Most recently, and I have to say my favorite endeavor thus far was one of the recertification courses we had to do…at 6 AM…at the town’s lakefront facility…in Ronkonkoma, about 20 minutes from my house all the way on the other (and obviously for that reason, wrong, side of the town.)
Lakes. Skeeve. Me. Out. I grew up 10 minutes from the ocean and take comfort in my large waves, unreasonably salty water and rip currents that could take me out to sea in 2.2. At least I’m prepared for all that. I am never prepared for dealing with the murky and squishy bottoms of lakes and can never seem to get out of my head that scene in Friday the 13th when that little freaking creature takes one last stand and tries to pull his last unsuspecting victim thinking she had survived the night’s terror by escaping in a boat out to the center of the lake, down to the murky depths.
So, I don’t like lakes.
On top of that Lake Ronkonkoma has a number of special reputations, most of which luckily I found out afterwards, otherwise I might have woken up at 5 AM for absolutely nothing.
Lake Ronkonkoma is a kettle lake, meaning that it is OBSCENELY deep…upwards of 70 feet in some spots. It was believed for awhile not to have a bottom, but rather to be connected to a series of under ground aquifers that would eventually lead you to either the Long Island Sound or Ocean…stuff sinks in and can almost assuredly never be found.
Super. That was what I knew besides the fact that it is incredibly gross.
What I didn’t know, however, is that the water level in the lake can’t be explained by seasonal trends…namely meaning that the water level my or may not rise during a drought and fall during times of massive rain… meaning that simply that it’s fucked up. On top of the creepy fluctuations in the water is the ghost of a Native American princess who likes to lure unsuspecting male swimmers to their deaths... She feel through the lake ice while mourning the loss of her husband and apparently has never gotten over it. Apparently people have seen strange glowing in the lake at night and have heard voices luring them out further.
WTF.
This is of course where the town decides to put their facility? Figures.
We watched interesting videos with model lifeguards impressing upon us the values of using safety gloves when putting on a Band Aid during the training then proceeded outside to practice our Baywatch jump and run off the lifeguard stand and out into the water. I made sure to keep my feet off the bottom of the lake at all times.
I’m not kidding around, lakes freak me out.
Then they threw us a curveball…much to the tune of mustaches but not goatees. In the swimming area were two cones that had to be retrieved before we could leave. We had to practice sweeping the swimming area as if we were looking for a body.
Ok… ready for this.
We had to stand in a line and slowly walk across the swimming area feeling for the bottom and anything that would be lurking and ready to pull us under in the seaweed. Once the water got too deep we would have to dive.. swim a meter or two in a line… then surface… feeling for more bodies through the seaweed…then BACK up to the person most behind and repeat the process.
I thought of Friday the 13th immediately.
After our tedious back and forth dives across the swimming area, opening my eyes in and feeling through murky lake water and some sort of plant life I care not to encounter ever again I spotted the second cone… and almost drowned (being sacrificed to that bitch Native American princess) when I tried to scream that I found it.
We were victorious…everybody out of the water!!!!
Except.. oh wait… the idiot running the clinic forgot one part… dry and up on the beach, we dropped our towels and warily waded our way back into the murky abyss.
Bummerrrrrrrrrr.
After this whole endeavor I was very happy to take a shower and get a bagel, trying to comfort myself after a close encounter with toxic, haunted water. Never again!
KBYE.
I think it began with little things that tipped me off to the fact that reentry would be a little more difficult than expected… namely… forgetting English words and proper sentence structure (I had to struggle to find the word for “butcher” relying on descriptions such as “meat cutting person” AND asked my dad if he “took” a beer…)
More importantly the first morning back I stumbled downstairs looking forward to educating and enlightening my parents (and consequently the rest of this continent) in the wonders that is Italian coffee… Now, my stove in Italy was a gas stove, like the one back home, that instead had to be lit manually, usually with a lighter or flint… depending on what I could find first around the important. After 6 months of grappling with this way to produce the perfect cup of coffee, like countless numbers of our European ancestors, I sought to replicate the Old World in the New…one…with much of the same, let’s just say, unexpected, results of our ancestors.
Standing downstairs, back home, in the kitchen, I asked my mom for a match and proceeded to turn on the gas, waiting for the smell which would tell me to hang up and redial….So the gas was on, and I took the match to it… the only problem was that I forgot we have a pilot light for this stove meaning that…in the end I came very close to lighting most of my downstairs on fire…
Funny how subtle life can be…huh?
Amongst other things I started working again, after 6 months of, well…let’s just say a very Italian paced life. Now, I work for the Town of Islip as a lifeguard; a seemingly benign position…right? Please?
Wrong.
Let me just lay the ground work and paint a picture for you of the beautiful bureaucratic machine that is the Town Islip…First things first… the Republican party has been in power here since the dawn of time meaning that in order to get any job, anything…. You have to be a Republican. I dealt with this moral dilemma last summer, but please, don’t ask me what party I’m registered with…even I won’t like the answer that comes out of my mouth. I have, probably at least 10 bosses depending on who tries to stop by the pool to exercise their authority by making us poor, underpaid lifeguards (at 12 dollars an hour) perform such menial tasks as enforcing rules and shaving in an effort to uphold town policy. My favorite was the most recent case of all the lifeguards being up in arms about the new Town shaving policy…that’s right… now, not only do we have to save you, but we have to look pretty damn good and well kempt doing it. So no facial hair…
Except for mustaches?
Delightful, huh?
Although the Town isn’t particularly good at doing anything of value other than make rules that are never enforced, they seem to have a really good handle on showing everyone who’s in charge, namely operating under the “we say jump, you say how high” paradigm…whilst employing people almost entirely under the age of 25. Imagine that dog who just can’t seem to get a handle on its hormones and humps anything in sight. See where the conflict arises?
They also make us wear realllllly short shorts.
Most recently, and I have to say my favorite endeavor thus far was one of the recertification courses we had to do…at 6 AM…at the town’s lakefront facility…in Ronkonkoma, about 20 minutes from my house all the way on the other (and obviously for that reason, wrong, side of the town.)
Lakes. Skeeve. Me. Out. I grew up 10 minutes from the ocean and take comfort in my large waves, unreasonably salty water and rip currents that could take me out to sea in 2.2. At least I’m prepared for all that. I am never prepared for dealing with the murky and squishy bottoms of lakes and can never seem to get out of my head that scene in Friday the 13th when that little freaking creature takes one last stand and tries to pull his last unsuspecting victim thinking she had survived the night’s terror by escaping in a boat out to the center of the lake, down to the murky depths.
So, I don’t like lakes.
On top of that Lake Ronkonkoma has a number of special reputations, most of which luckily I found out afterwards, otherwise I might have woken up at 5 AM for absolutely nothing.
Lake Ronkonkoma is a kettle lake, meaning that it is OBSCENELY deep…upwards of 70 feet in some spots. It was believed for awhile not to have a bottom, but rather to be connected to a series of under ground aquifers that would eventually lead you to either the Long Island Sound or Ocean…stuff sinks in and can almost assuredly never be found.
Super. That was what I knew besides the fact that it is incredibly gross.
What I didn’t know, however, is that the water level in the lake can’t be explained by seasonal trends…namely meaning that the water level my or may not rise during a drought and fall during times of massive rain… meaning that simply that it’s fucked up. On top of the creepy fluctuations in the water is the ghost of a Native American princess who likes to lure unsuspecting male swimmers to their deaths... She feel through the lake ice while mourning the loss of her husband and apparently has never gotten over it. Apparently people have seen strange glowing in the lake at night and have heard voices luring them out further.
WTF.
This is of course where the town decides to put their facility? Figures.
We watched interesting videos with model lifeguards impressing upon us the values of using safety gloves when putting on a Band Aid during the training then proceeded outside to practice our Baywatch jump and run off the lifeguard stand and out into the water. I made sure to keep my feet off the bottom of the lake at all times.
I’m not kidding around, lakes freak me out.
Then they threw us a curveball…much to the tune of mustaches but not goatees. In the swimming area were two cones that had to be retrieved before we could leave. We had to practice sweeping the swimming area as if we were looking for a body.
Ok… ready for this.
We had to stand in a line and slowly walk across the swimming area feeling for the bottom and anything that would be lurking and ready to pull us under in the seaweed. Once the water got too deep we would have to dive.. swim a meter or two in a line… then surface… feeling for more bodies through the seaweed…then BACK up to the person most behind and repeat the process.
I thought of Friday the 13th immediately.
After our tedious back and forth dives across the swimming area, opening my eyes in and feeling through murky lake water and some sort of plant life I care not to encounter ever again I spotted the second cone… and almost drowned (being sacrificed to that bitch Native American princess) when I tried to scream that I found it.
We were victorious…everybody out of the water!!!!
Except.. oh wait… the idiot running the clinic forgot one part… dry and up on the beach, we dropped our towels and warily waded our way back into the murky abyss.
Bummerrrrrrrrrr.
After this whole endeavor I was very happy to take a shower and get a bagel, trying to comfort myself after a close encounter with toxic, haunted water. Never again!
KBYE.
Back by popular demand....
Ok. So after staying silent for over two months I think it’s time I pick up, not so much where I left off, but at least enough that I can CPR my writing out of cardiac arrest (forgive the first aid reference, I’m constantly surrounded by it at work…more to come later.)
Ummm… to start off can I just mildly assert my frustration that in all the movies, nobody shows what happens AFTER the great adventure…. I mean, what the hell did Frodo do after throwing the ring back in Mount Doom; he couldn’t have been content going back to Hobbiton to finish out his freaking days (oh wait…. He did move on, bad example).. Ok Julia Roberts in Pretty Women; do they get up and go back to NY, do they live happily ever after. Movies seem to happily gloss over the day to day comings and goings and how people deal with life after a great adventure.
Now how do I deal (or not for that matter).
I guess we are going to have to step back in time a moment to almost a month and a half ago when I was getting ready to leave Italy… My last week there to be more precise. Needless to say, I wasn’t quite sitting still… In three days I had accomplished the seemingly impossible… an overnight in Roma with my friend Maria Paola, who’s family was gracious enough to host me for whatever brief period of time I was down there, then to Bologna for a quick overnight and to send off Rocco, then off to Milano that very same day after to meet my fathers’ cousins and show them around the city for a bit.
All this with the understanding that my landlord would be coming that Friday not only to inspect the apartment but also hand me my delicious 500 Euro security deposit check for which I had labored countless hours cleaning my idiot roommates dirty dishes and shit around the apartment trying to keep it in a presentable state…
Very much a Sisyphean task by the end, but I did make a valiant effort.
(I know it seems ridiculous that I’m glossing over the juicy details of an amazing overnight trip to Rome and whirlwind day to Bologna and Milan, but the nerve wracking stories are so much more interesting and fun to spell out; if you want to see/here about nice things, come stop by and I’ll bore you with photos…forever.)
I wasn’t in the best of moods coming to the end of my stay in Italy and hadn’t slept very well towards the end of the week, so as you will soon see, this added to the debacle.
So…. I walk into my landlords office neither bright eyed nor busy tailed that fateful Friday morning hoping that my weeks notice of departure and up and at’em attitude would see me with check in hand by later that morning.
Italy struck again.
Not only did the landlord forget about the inspection but he also forgot to even get authorization to issue the check….a painstaking procedure which would have taken all of two phone calls.
I was livid.
You see, we had been screwed over many times before with this guy, including but not limited to surprise pop ins to show the apartment, threats to use our deposits to hire a cleaning service to clean the apartment, and, my favorite, trying to blame the guys living upstairs for structural damage to the apartment during a torrential down pour.
Yeah, this guy was a piece. of. work.
After careful negotiation and a considerable amount of ripping into this poor guy like it was my job (armed not only with a command of the Italian language that even surprised me but also a New York sense of “don’t fuck me over”) I convinced him that stopping by would probably be the best idea seeing as I was to leave the city the day after. He miraculously was able to pencil me in between an appointment and overwhelmingly stressful two hour lunch break…and threatened that the apartment better be in order.
Oh it was. Not only was I equipped with Italian words and my rediscovered New York attitude, but also the ability to clean objects simply by staring at the in ire…. Needless to say it got done….sucka.
I returned to the apartment fuming, anyway. I guess the best image you can have is in your head at this point is one of those really pissed off sharks that keeps on swimming around the shark cage of two poor travel channel hosts wondering why they hadn’t been assigned the show Passport to Europe.
He arrives.
Much to his chagrin the parts of the apartment I was responsible for were impeccable. You see, this guy operates under the attitude not only of guilty until proven innocent, but also has the uncanny habit to spot tiny things out of place, which in an apartment where there nearly a constant turnover of students, happens to be just about everything. After foraying a series of ridiculous questions concerning the abysmal state of our 20 year old kitchen chairs and a mysterious shelf that appeared on my armoir, it was time for my rebuttal.
What about the check? The bank isn’t open later on, well let’s just go check out the hours together when you leave. What do you mean you don’t have the check? THIS IS RIDICULOUS; I upheld my end of the bargain cleaning an inordinate amount of disgusting dirty dishing and bleaching things that were coming to life in my bathroom and you can’t uphold your end of the deal… are you kidding?!
This went on for awhile… I was having fun with it and was letting all my anger and frustration out on this poor soul who can’t have a very nice job dealing with students like me on a daily basis, periodically being interrupted with “I’m sorries” and “I’m embarassed”.
Then I went for the jugular… Sorry is not going to cut it, this needs to be resolved…my way. You provide a service to us here which has not been upheld….the litany continued.
The walk to the bank (after a long discussion with my idiot roommates about the water damage which basically had both sides resolving nothing very quickly) was…quiet, to say the least… I think I had made my point.
Sure enough it was open late enough.
I threatened to and returned to his office at four on the dot… This was the moment of truth best equated to one of the desert showdowns on a lonely main street in a one street town somewhere in Texas with blowing tumbleweed.
I sat down…what’s it gonna be….
Then…much to my delight…I saw it… the check…with my name on it… 500 Euro.
After a brief and very frigid goodbye I was out of his office like Charlie when he found the golden ticket in that little candy store. I kid you not, I ran to that freaking bank.
Cashing the check wasn’t even the most glorious part.
When I arrived in Italy, and I think I probably wrote to many of you, I was appalled by the new going fashion trend… shiny, metallic sneakers. However, after 6 months of a significant amount of peer pressure (namely the whole country) the tides had changed I had fallen in love with them…I made a point of saying they would be my “Custer’s last stand” purchase in Italy before going back to the US…. Namely to convince myself that I would actually do it.
Now you see, this rent check was a crucial part of my master scheme not only to by souvenirs for my family, but those. gold. shoes.
I had my eye on a specific pair for about three months but unfortunately my grossly large American sized foot couldn’t cram into the remaining size 9s they had.
Major. Bummer.
Fortunately, while meandering around, doing one of my final passeggiatas, I wandered into a sporting good store with a fair amount of shoes to choose from.
My eyes caught the gaudiest pair…Metallic gold with an Italian flag on the back, four stars on the front representing the four times they won the World Cup AND the dates of the world cup victory in the shoe.
They were supped up, they were incredibly Italian, and for 80 Euro they were so mine.
Thus the exchange experience was complete, I had fully immersed myself in the local culture not only by taking part in the time honored Italian sport of tearing a person to shreds verbally to get what you want…and enjoying it as you go, but also becoming well versed and even a practitioner in local dress customs.
You can now see me around town or in New York City sporting these fine sneakers and being incredibly proud of the incredulous stares and comments I get…. One girl who was 14 told me she had the same pair… another at the mall around here gave me props….For the most part they are a success and are a hit, especially when I tell this story but not matter… I find there is not more of a fitting way to leave Italy then sporting a pair of incredibly gaudy shoes. I love them (and as my father found out when he held them hostage as a retaliation for throwing him in the pool… they were more than just a pair of shoes…) they’ve really become the perfect summary of my exchange experience in Italy.
Check that one off on the list, it was time to go/come back to New York…
Here we go…
Ummm… to start off can I just mildly assert my frustration that in all the movies, nobody shows what happens AFTER the great adventure…. I mean, what the hell did Frodo do after throwing the ring back in Mount Doom; he couldn’t have been content going back to Hobbiton to finish out his freaking days (oh wait…. He did move on, bad example).. Ok Julia Roberts in Pretty Women; do they get up and go back to NY, do they live happily ever after. Movies seem to happily gloss over the day to day comings and goings and how people deal with life after a great adventure.
Now how do I deal (or not for that matter).
I guess we are going to have to step back in time a moment to almost a month and a half ago when I was getting ready to leave Italy… My last week there to be more precise. Needless to say, I wasn’t quite sitting still… In three days I had accomplished the seemingly impossible… an overnight in Roma with my friend Maria Paola, who’s family was gracious enough to host me for whatever brief period of time I was down there, then to Bologna for a quick overnight and to send off Rocco, then off to Milano that very same day after to meet my fathers’ cousins and show them around the city for a bit.
All this with the understanding that my landlord would be coming that Friday not only to inspect the apartment but also hand me my delicious 500 Euro security deposit check for which I had labored countless hours cleaning my idiot roommates dirty dishes and shit around the apartment trying to keep it in a presentable state…
Very much a Sisyphean task by the end, but I did make a valiant effort.
(I know it seems ridiculous that I’m glossing over the juicy details of an amazing overnight trip to Rome and whirlwind day to Bologna and Milan, but the nerve wracking stories are so much more interesting and fun to spell out; if you want to see/here about nice things, come stop by and I’ll bore you with photos…forever.)
I wasn’t in the best of moods coming to the end of my stay in Italy and hadn’t slept very well towards the end of the week, so as you will soon see, this added to the debacle.
So…. I walk into my landlords office neither bright eyed nor busy tailed that fateful Friday morning hoping that my weeks notice of departure and up and at’em attitude would see me with check in hand by later that morning.
Italy struck again.
Not only did the landlord forget about the inspection but he also forgot to even get authorization to issue the check….a painstaking procedure which would have taken all of two phone calls.
I was livid.
You see, we had been screwed over many times before with this guy, including but not limited to surprise pop ins to show the apartment, threats to use our deposits to hire a cleaning service to clean the apartment, and, my favorite, trying to blame the guys living upstairs for structural damage to the apartment during a torrential down pour.
Yeah, this guy was a piece. of. work.
After careful negotiation and a considerable amount of ripping into this poor guy like it was my job (armed not only with a command of the Italian language that even surprised me but also a New York sense of “don’t fuck me over”) I convinced him that stopping by would probably be the best idea seeing as I was to leave the city the day after. He miraculously was able to pencil me in between an appointment and overwhelmingly stressful two hour lunch break…and threatened that the apartment better be in order.
Oh it was. Not only was I equipped with Italian words and my rediscovered New York attitude, but also the ability to clean objects simply by staring at the in ire…. Needless to say it got done….sucka.
I returned to the apartment fuming, anyway. I guess the best image you can have is in your head at this point is one of those really pissed off sharks that keeps on swimming around the shark cage of two poor travel channel hosts wondering why they hadn’t been assigned the show Passport to Europe.
He arrives.
Much to his chagrin the parts of the apartment I was responsible for were impeccable. You see, this guy operates under the attitude not only of guilty until proven innocent, but also has the uncanny habit to spot tiny things out of place, which in an apartment where there nearly a constant turnover of students, happens to be just about everything. After foraying a series of ridiculous questions concerning the abysmal state of our 20 year old kitchen chairs and a mysterious shelf that appeared on my armoir, it was time for my rebuttal.
What about the check? The bank isn’t open later on, well let’s just go check out the hours together when you leave. What do you mean you don’t have the check? THIS IS RIDICULOUS; I upheld my end of the bargain cleaning an inordinate amount of disgusting dirty dishing and bleaching things that were coming to life in my bathroom and you can’t uphold your end of the deal… are you kidding?!
This went on for awhile… I was having fun with it and was letting all my anger and frustration out on this poor soul who can’t have a very nice job dealing with students like me on a daily basis, periodically being interrupted with “I’m sorries” and “I’m embarassed”.
Then I went for the jugular… Sorry is not going to cut it, this needs to be resolved…my way. You provide a service to us here which has not been upheld….the litany continued.
The walk to the bank (after a long discussion with my idiot roommates about the water damage which basically had both sides resolving nothing very quickly) was…quiet, to say the least… I think I had made my point.
Sure enough it was open late enough.
I threatened to and returned to his office at four on the dot… This was the moment of truth best equated to one of the desert showdowns on a lonely main street in a one street town somewhere in Texas with blowing tumbleweed.
I sat down…what’s it gonna be….
Then…much to my delight…I saw it… the check…with my name on it… 500 Euro.
After a brief and very frigid goodbye I was out of his office like Charlie when he found the golden ticket in that little candy store. I kid you not, I ran to that freaking bank.
Cashing the check wasn’t even the most glorious part.
When I arrived in Italy, and I think I probably wrote to many of you, I was appalled by the new going fashion trend… shiny, metallic sneakers. However, after 6 months of a significant amount of peer pressure (namely the whole country) the tides had changed I had fallen in love with them…I made a point of saying they would be my “Custer’s last stand” purchase in Italy before going back to the US…. Namely to convince myself that I would actually do it.
Now you see, this rent check was a crucial part of my master scheme not only to by souvenirs for my family, but those. gold. shoes.
I had my eye on a specific pair for about three months but unfortunately my grossly large American sized foot couldn’t cram into the remaining size 9s they had.
Major. Bummer.
Fortunately, while meandering around, doing one of my final passeggiatas, I wandered into a sporting good store with a fair amount of shoes to choose from.
My eyes caught the gaudiest pair…Metallic gold with an Italian flag on the back, four stars on the front representing the four times they won the World Cup AND the dates of the world cup victory in the shoe.
They were supped up, they were incredibly Italian, and for 80 Euro they were so mine.
Thus the exchange experience was complete, I had fully immersed myself in the local culture not only by taking part in the time honored Italian sport of tearing a person to shreds verbally to get what you want…and enjoying it as you go, but also becoming well versed and even a practitioner in local dress customs.
You can now see me around town or in New York City sporting these fine sneakers and being incredibly proud of the incredulous stares and comments I get…. One girl who was 14 told me she had the same pair… another at the mall around here gave me props….For the most part they are a success and are a hit, especially when I tell this story but not matter… I find there is not more of a fitting way to leave Italy then sporting a pair of incredibly gaudy shoes. I love them (and as my father found out when he held them hostage as a retaliation for throwing him in the pool… they were more than just a pair of shoes…) they’ve really become the perfect summary of my exchange experience in Italy.
Check that one off on the list, it was time to go/come back to New York…
Here we go…
Where is Brian? Part II
Ok, so when you last left me I was catching my breath on the train after a panicked sprint through the Barcelona metro….that probably ended in me knocking some little old Spanish woman over in my wake of sheer and utter confusion and exhaustion.
Luckily, I made it.
The train left at 8:25 and would arrive in Toulouse at around 5….giving me pretty much all day to reflect, listen to music, be quiet and alone (for the first time really in like 3 weeks) annnnnnd gaze out the window.
Passing through the Pyrenees and into the south of France almost seemed like the real start of this trip…. It was funny to realize that I was accomplishing the very same trip that, state side, was almost a year in the making after I met Olivier.
It’s funny how everything just clicks into place when it’s so right.
So outside the train window, I can tell you that I was speechless… the country side crossing the Spanish border and going into the south of France is unbelievable. Mediterranean. Rugged. Everything that people expect from southern Europe around the Mediterranean. There were vineyards hugging steep cliffs, yellow flowers growing in between the rocks, mountains and always to my right… the ocean.
My train ticket looked a little something like this: Barcelona-Cerbere, Cerbere-Narbonne, Narbonne-Toulouse… you can check it out on a map; it’s a pretty hefty hike…. But like I said earlier… considering Toulouse was…. Just... around… the…corner? I had to go.
Ok. So now we just passed Carcassonne in the train… it’s beautiful; guarded by medieval walls and surrounded by vineyards. All the other people except for one guy get off the train, leaving us by ourselves in the little… I guess, cabin.
This is what I love about traveling; people are generally sociable and will more often than not enjoy talking rather than remain completely and utterly awkward and silent.
So, we just talked, for the hour train ride from Carcassonne to Toulouse about France, the United States, politics, traveling….very light heartedly and politely, keen to hear the other person’s point of view.
In the end he suggested that we should “tutoyer” instead of “vousvoyer”…that for me, in French at least, with a perfect stranger, is a big compliment.
Arriving in Toulouse was hectic and Olivier had an appointment to set up for a theatre show he was organizing that would show case all the clubs on campus (of which there were cheerleaders….really bizarre considering there was no sports team… definitely made me smile when they got up for their show.)
The tour went something like this: Ok… so tonight I have a role for you to play in the show (ummmm, shit?) we have to get some food, and ps… these postcards are the most important sights in Toulouse, but whatever, and oh by the way, we have to catch THAT bus (500 meters away that we had to run to, trampling little French ladies instead of little Spanish ones in the process…. It was all very exciting for me…I’m sure Olivier was just freaking out about being late ☺
It’s nice when you’re some comfortable with someone that you can rush…and make them rush too.
So fast forward to later that evening; the show. Ok, so I have never preformed on stage before in my life… and my public speaking courses in high school were a far cry from being in front of about 100 or so French students at a university I had only arrived at 3 hours prior.
Hmmmmm…. Luckily the skit I was in was an English one… It was meant to showcase the English Debate club and some sort of foreign language Translation Club. Imbedded in it was this discourse about “where is Brian?” which apparently all French speakers learn when they are learning for the English the first time that “Brian is in the kitchen.” To play off of this I was supposed to bullshit about some nonsense about “Brian not being in the kitchen.” Reverting to logic…. Even though… in FRENCH grammatical rules “Brian is ALWAYS in the kitchen.”
I reread my lines about 5 million times because I was so nervous… did I mention I had leeway… to…improvise… if I wanted…?
So we get up there… and then…
“Wait… let me ask my colleague… WHERE IS BRIAN?”
Here we go.
“This is an eternal question that has been plaguing French students for centuries… Where is Brian… (I’m proud of this part) To understand the profound nature of such mysteries we must revert to the very essence our being… the very questions of our universe… What came first.. the chicken or the egg….to be or not to be… (and ready) How much would WOULD a would chuck chuck, if a wood chuck… could chuck… wood (I thank you.)
It was a hit… I… was… funny?
Ok so really it was a short, not that big of a deal of a skit BUT for me this was pretty cool, I always said I wanted to try something in theatre, I just never had the guts or courage. It was nice to hang out feeling seemingly useless as everyone prepared and deconstructed the show through the course of the weekend and even nicer to be part of the action.
Thanks, Olivier, for giving me that opportunity.
Halfway through I caught up with the other people from the trip to Tréminis…the most amazing thing happened… we just picked up where we left off. There were no questions asked; just “hey!!! You came! Great to see you again”…the day after, Anaïs, one of Olivier’s friends, gave me a lovely tour in Toulouse that consisted of a series of gastronomic activities, precise scheduling…chance encounters with random people who were keen to practice their English (“how do you say…il va pleuvoir…” “I know three phrases…Madison Square Garden, Wall Street… and pretty boy”), a walk along the Canal du Midi as it started to rain ANNNNDDDDDDD watching Les Poupées Russes (the sequel to L’auberge espagnole…needless to say I think that now I have a future, considering that, as I have mentioned before, a lot of what I have done here has been influenced by that film…)
It was very lovely to hang out, have some tea and enjoy the company of someone else. I mean, isn’t that what this is all about?
I hate being stuck making lists; how the hell am I going to describe ALL of this…especially since everything is so engrained in my memory.
Somehow, we (meaning me with Olivier being a really gracious host) that it would be cool to take a bike ride in the country; Olivier has a grandmother that lives in a small town outside the city of Albi which is another outside Toulouse.
We were young, motivated, ready to take on a little rain, BUT freaking exhausted.
The morning we spent literally lounging around the town and taking a little siesta on the banks of the river.
And then it began… the tour in bikes.
Keep in mind two things: a) I can’t remember the last time I rode a bike more than 5 minutes and b) we hade a VAGUE idea where we were going, the roads we were going to take and, like in Tréminis….not well armed with a decent map of the region.
All the makings of a good adventure if you ask me… right? I forgot to mention that the sky was getting miserably gray, of course, as soon as we left.
So we rode. The city quickly melted away into rolling hills and beautiful countryside (ps… rolling hills are beautiful… BUT they kill your legs..fyi. And all those nice descents downhill most of the time only mean that you’ll have a bigger one to climb.) I’m not complaining at all, it’s just to say that your perspective changes from the view outside a train window to real life actually traveling through what you’re looking at. No bother…it was amazing. We passed cows…. And open fields… and.. and…
I don’t even know how much we rode, Olivier’s grandmother said that probably by the end, trips to and from the train station along the Canal du Midi included… about 30 km. We ended up getting lost and having back trek over a heart attack hill…
Pulling into his grandmothers village made it all worth while. I can’t tell you how amazing and how thankful I am to have a friend who I can do random adventures with like that…. I think I said that already when talking about Tréminis… but it’s WELL worth mentioning again.
We were definitely rewarded at his grandmothers with some amazing food, warm hospitality and EVEN a ride back to the train station because it was raining too much by his grandmothers friend who informed us as we were passing the police station that she didn’t have a license.
Fun ride for sure. But seriously, for her to go out of her way…even if, it was kind of a illegal… totally adorable.
The last day, despite crummy weather, we headed to Carcassonne; that perfectly preserved walled medieval city that I had passed on the way in. One again, coming full circle; funny how so many trips end where they seem to begin.
Olivie’rs aunt picked us up at the station to take us back to his grandmothers for our first of two huge meals; one before our trip to the city and one after… complete with first and second plates, salads, bread, cheese, and locally produced wine. Oh… about the wine, it gets batter….just wait.
We pulled into a small French village about 20 minutes outside Carcassonne that was of course flanked by vineyards and more beautiful rolling hills. Now, Olivier’s family here owns and number of vineyards and produces wine. This. Was. The. Real. Deal.
After lunch and having our ears delightfully chatted off by Olivier’s aunt… we headed to Carcassonne… first however, I got a small tour of the vineyards. We took his grandmothers little old car up into the hills outside the village (messing up the catalytic convertor… the only part of a car I actually know because I got fucked up on mine back on Long Island two summers ago.. it’s not horrible, just makes an unpleasant noise) to do a little prospecting.
We didn’t say much, but I was and still am really touched; I don’t know if it was the symbolism of sharing part of his family like that or if I was just overwhelmed by the beauty of everything; but it’s something, like pretty much every minute of this trip starting in Barcelona, that I will never forget.
Carcassonne, we took a tour of the old ramparts and saw a number of the important sights…I’m sure Olivier has seen them a million times, but it was still very cool. My favorite part was after though when we just strolled around the city walls; the skys, after clearning, then raining, then clearing, then…winding…finally cleared up for good. We just talked… climbed up on some older ramparts that we probably shouldn’t have climbed on, and just took it all in.
Dinner was as exciting and full of chatter as lunch and I have to say that I really admire Olivier’s grandmother; a pretty tough woman that had to leave her family to work in the north and now, although hard of hearing, is still super sharp; when you’re young such people are really impressionable and help you to really revaluate your outlook on life.
I was just really trying to take it all in at this point.
It’s always so difficult to leave, say goodbye. Not knowing when you will be back and if you will ever see the people you encounter during such a trip is so hard, especially when you’re like me and get so attached. It’s hard to not look ahead to the future AND not be ruled by the past…it’s something I’m really working on as this Erasmus experience winds down. Train stations are so weird like that; the place where you are both so excited when you meet someone again after a long time but at the same time are sad when your paths part. In this case it was much easier to part on path than for Olivier because…well… his train was 2 hours late.
My overnight trip took me back to the very beginning of these two blog entries; I came full circle again, covering old ground (passing Nice again in the process) and tramping on some new…It’s called to think that I have no pretty much traveled throughout the south of France in a region that stretches all the way along the Mediterranean from the north of Italy all the way to Barcelona.
It doesn’t seem like a lot on the map, but you try it.
So there I was, exhausted in my apartment, just getting life back together and work my way through all my thoughts when… someone rang the doorbell.
Luckily, I made it.
The train left at 8:25 and would arrive in Toulouse at around 5….giving me pretty much all day to reflect, listen to music, be quiet and alone (for the first time really in like 3 weeks) annnnnnd gaze out the window.
Passing through the Pyrenees and into the south of France almost seemed like the real start of this trip…. It was funny to realize that I was accomplishing the very same trip that, state side, was almost a year in the making after I met Olivier.
It’s funny how everything just clicks into place when it’s so right.
So outside the train window, I can tell you that I was speechless… the country side crossing the Spanish border and going into the south of France is unbelievable. Mediterranean. Rugged. Everything that people expect from southern Europe around the Mediterranean. There were vineyards hugging steep cliffs, yellow flowers growing in between the rocks, mountains and always to my right… the ocean.
My train ticket looked a little something like this: Barcelona-Cerbere, Cerbere-Narbonne, Narbonne-Toulouse… you can check it out on a map; it’s a pretty hefty hike…. But like I said earlier… considering Toulouse was…. Just... around… the…corner? I had to go.
Ok. So now we just passed Carcassonne in the train… it’s beautiful; guarded by medieval walls and surrounded by vineyards. All the other people except for one guy get off the train, leaving us by ourselves in the little… I guess, cabin.
This is what I love about traveling; people are generally sociable and will more often than not enjoy talking rather than remain completely and utterly awkward and silent.
So, we just talked, for the hour train ride from Carcassonne to Toulouse about France, the United States, politics, traveling….very light heartedly and politely, keen to hear the other person’s point of view.
In the end he suggested that we should “tutoyer” instead of “vousvoyer”…that for me, in French at least, with a perfect stranger, is a big compliment.
Arriving in Toulouse was hectic and Olivier had an appointment to set up for a theatre show he was organizing that would show case all the clubs on campus (of which there were cheerleaders….really bizarre considering there was no sports team… definitely made me smile when they got up for their show.)
The tour went something like this: Ok… so tonight I have a role for you to play in the show (ummmm, shit?) we have to get some food, and ps… these postcards are the most important sights in Toulouse, but whatever, and oh by the way, we have to catch THAT bus (500 meters away that we had to run to, trampling little French ladies instead of little Spanish ones in the process…. It was all very exciting for me…I’m sure Olivier was just freaking out about being late ☺
It’s nice when you’re some comfortable with someone that you can rush…and make them rush too.
So fast forward to later that evening; the show. Ok, so I have never preformed on stage before in my life… and my public speaking courses in high school were a far cry from being in front of about 100 or so French students at a university I had only arrived at 3 hours prior.
Hmmmmm…. Luckily the skit I was in was an English one… It was meant to showcase the English Debate club and some sort of foreign language Translation Club. Imbedded in it was this discourse about “where is Brian?” which apparently all French speakers learn when they are learning for the English the first time that “Brian is in the kitchen.” To play off of this I was supposed to bullshit about some nonsense about “Brian not being in the kitchen.” Reverting to logic…. Even though… in FRENCH grammatical rules “Brian is ALWAYS in the kitchen.”
I reread my lines about 5 million times because I was so nervous… did I mention I had leeway… to…improvise… if I wanted…?
So we get up there… and then…
“Wait… let me ask my colleague… WHERE IS BRIAN?”
Here we go.
“This is an eternal question that has been plaguing French students for centuries… Where is Brian… (I’m proud of this part) To understand the profound nature of such mysteries we must revert to the very essence our being… the very questions of our universe… What came first.. the chicken or the egg….to be or not to be… (and ready) How much would WOULD a would chuck chuck, if a wood chuck… could chuck… wood (I thank you.)
It was a hit… I… was… funny?
Ok so really it was a short, not that big of a deal of a skit BUT for me this was pretty cool, I always said I wanted to try something in theatre, I just never had the guts or courage. It was nice to hang out feeling seemingly useless as everyone prepared and deconstructed the show through the course of the weekend and even nicer to be part of the action.
Thanks, Olivier, for giving me that opportunity.
Halfway through I caught up with the other people from the trip to Tréminis…the most amazing thing happened… we just picked up where we left off. There were no questions asked; just “hey!!! You came! Great to see you again”…the day after, Anaïs, one of Olivier’s friends, gave me a lovely tour in Toulouse that consisted of a series of gastronomic activities, precise scheduling…chance encounters with random people who were keen to practice their English (“how do you say…il va pleuvoir…” “I know three phrases…Madison Square Garden, Wall Street… and pretty boy”), a walk along the Canal du Midi as it started to rain ANNNNDDDDDDD watching Les Poupées Russes (the sequel to L’auberge espagnole…needless to say I think that now I have a future, considering that, as I have mentioned before, a lot of what I have done here has been influenced by that film…)
It was very lovely to hang out, have some tea and enjoy the company of someone else. I mean, isn’t that what this is all about?
I hate being stuck making lists; how the hell am I going to describe ALL of this…especially since everything is so engrained in my memory.
Somehow, we (meaning me with Olivier being a really gracious host) that it would be cool to take a bike ride in the country; Olivier has a grandmother that lives in a small town outside the city of Albi which is another outside Toulouse.
We were young, motivated, ready to take on a little rain, BUT freaking exhausted.
The morning we spent literally lounging around the town and taking a little siesta on the banks of the river.
And then it began… the tour in bikes.
Keep in mind two things: a) I can’t remember the last time I rode a bike more than 5 minutes and b) we hade a VAGUE idea where we were going, the roads we were going to take and, like in Tréminis….not well armed with a decent map of the region.
All the makings of a good adventure if you ask me… right? I forgot to mention that the sky was getting miserably gray, of course, as soon as we left.
So we rode. The city quickly melted away into rolling hills and beautiful countryside (ps… rolling hills are beautiful… BUT they kill your legs..fyi. And all those nice descents downhill most of the time only mean that you’ll have a bigger one to climb.) I’m not complaining at all, it’s just to say that your perspective changes from the view outside a train window to real life actually traveling through what you’re looking at. No bother…it was amazing. We passed cows…. And open fields… and.. and…
I don’t even know how much we rode, Olivier’s grandmother said that probably by the end, trips to and from the train station along the Canal du Midi included… about 30 km. We ended up getting lost and having back trek over a heart attack hill…
Pulling into his grandmothers village made it all worth while. I can’t tell you how amazing and how thankful I am to have a friend who I can do random adventures with like that…. I think I said that already when talking about Tréminis… but it’s WELL worth mentioning again.
We were definitely rewarded at his grandmothers with some amazing food, warm hospitality and EVEN a ride back to the train station because it was raining too much by his grandmothers friend who informed us as we were passing the police station that she didn’t have a license.
Fun ride for sure. But seriously, for her to go out of her way…even if, it was kind of a illegal… totally adorable.
The last day, despite crummy weather, we headed to Carcassonne; that perfectly preserved walled medieval city that I had passed on the way in. One again, coming full circle; funny how so many trips end where they seem to begin.
Olivie’rs aunt picked us up at the station to take us back to his grandmothers for our first of two huge meals; one before our trip to the city and one after… complete with first and second plates, salads, bread, cheese, and locally produced wine. Oh… about the wine, it gets batter….just wait.
We pulled into a small French village about 20 minutes outside Carcassonne that was of course flanked by vineyards and more beautiful rolling hills. Now, Olivier’s family here owns and number of vineyards and produces wine. This. Was. The. Real. Deal.
After lunch and having our ears delightfully chatted off by Olivier’s aunt… we headed to Carcassonne… first however, I got a small tour of the vineyards. We took his grandmothers little old car up into the hills outside the village (messing up the catalytic convertor… the only part of a car I actually know because I got fucked up on mine back on Long Island two summers ago.. it’s not horrible, just makes an unpleasant noise) to do a little prospecting.
We didn’t say much, but I was and still am really touched; I don’t know if it was the symbolism of sharing part of his family like that or if I was just overwhelmed by the beauty of everything; but it’s something, like pretty much every minute of this trip starting in Barcelona, that I will never forget.
Carcassonne, we took a tour of the old ramparts and saw a number of the important sights…I’m sure Olivier has seen them a million times, but it was still very cool. My favorite part was after though when we just strolled around the city walls; the skys, after clearning, then raining, then clearing, then…winding…finally cleared up for good. We just talked… climbed up on some older ramparts that we probably shouldn’t have climbed on, and just took it all in.
Dinner was as exciting and full of chatter as lunch and I have to say that I really admire Olivier’s grandmother; a pretty tough woman that had to leave her family to work in the north and now, although hard of hearing, is still super sharp; when you’re young such people are really impressionable and help you to really revaluate your outlook on life.
I was just really trying to take it all in at this point.
It’s always so difficult to leave, say goodbye. Not knowing when you will be back and if you will ever see the people you encounter during such a trip is so hard, especially when you’re like me and get so attached. It’s hard to not look ahead to the future AND not be ruled by the past…it’s something I’m really working on as this Erasmus experience winds down. Train stations are so weird like that; the place where you are both so excited when you meet someone again after a long time but at the same time are sad when your paths part. In this case it was much easier to part on path than for Olivier because…well… his train was 2 hours late.
My overnight trip took me back to the very beginning of these two blog entries; I came full circle again, covering old ground (passing Nice again in the process) and tramping on some new…It’s called to think that I have no pretty much traveled throughout the south of France in a region that stretches all the way along the Mediterranean from the north of Italy all the way to Barcelona.
It doesn’t seem like a lot on the map, but you try it.
So there I was, exhausted in my apartment, just getting life back together and work my way through all my thoughts when… someone rang the doorbell.
Where is Brian? Part I
Are you ready for a whirlwind summary that will ultimately lead me back to the question posed above? Buckle your sealtbelts, kids, this is my life the past three weeks.
So last night I just got back from a whirlwind ten day trip to Barcelona and Toulouse to the south of France. That’s to say, after trekking back via train from Carcassonne to Montpellier, overnight bus from Montpellier to Milan, and train again from Milan to Bologna the next morning, I was pretty much, you guessed it, a zombie.
You may think it’s crazy, but you just have to do it. You gotta move when your in Europe.
The trip, I’ll get back to, just be patient.
So anyway, getting back to Bologna, I was kind of a zombie. Life was getting back to normal, the apartment was a little messy, but whatever, it was nice to be settling in again after the seemingly endless chaos that was the month of May for me here. Now, earlier that week, or prior to leaving rather I had said goodbye to a really good friend of mine exchange; he said he was going to leave some Belgium beer that his family was bringing on their trip down to pick him up.
First thing, there was A LOT of beer in the fridge.
My roommate was there; after asking about the trip he proceeded to inquire about a party that was supposed to go on that evening….with my friends?
What? Curious, right?
Sure enough someone rings the doorbell.
Martin? Ok, just another friend of one of the guys in the apartment.
Turns out…..it was MARTIN! He had decided to stay until I got back to have this one last going away party complete with Belgian beer and chocolate and lots of general merrymaking. Apparently he had been waiting at the train station to surprise me; way to fuck that one up and be in your own little world… Matt.
Needless to say the party last night was unbelievable. One last, bittersweet goodbye to Martin with everyone there.
What an end to a great adventure. I mean, I know it doesn’t seem like a bid deal or a huge surprise, but when you get close to someone after a few months, saying goodbye is always terrible (something else I’m gonna have to deal with here pretty soon….lets not talk about it.. k?)
K. Back to present time. Now I’m sitting here in a Laundromat; life is finally getting back to normal (despite the utterly broken washing machine in our apartment) and I have to say I couldn’t be happier. May. Was. Crazy. and experiences ranged from the sweetest things ever like going to Ferrara to see a flag throwing competition (for little kids) for the Palio or horse racing contest that has been going on in the city for centuries and a cooking course with an Italian grandmother toooooo being caught in the middle of a fight between a Siclian friend of mine and a random Napolitan guy who called in the cavalry (about 10 of his friends), writing or rather bullshiting my way through two ORAL exams (one of which was pushed back to a day later than scheduled… well… because it’s Italy and for which I had read about 450 pages in one day), and having little to no personal space or quiet time because I had to share my room with two friends of my roommate who visited…. for two weeks
Begin to get what I’m saying about all this craziness. All this being said, I assure you that right now, I couldn’t be happier. My life is a little bit messy, but for the first time, I’m ok with it.
Amongst little trips, I swam in the Adriatic, when to Milan for the day… twice… once for a friends birthday which ended up with her (Paola) running back and forth between showing Claire (visiting) and I around and planning at the last minute her OWN birthday party, the other for a graduation from university (Gabriele), pick nicked in the hills outside Bologna, ate gelato, went out, enjoyed the warmth of the Italia sun….everything right now just seems to melt together… lets see if I can make any sense of this mess that is my memory at the moment.
OH! Another good point to intervene. Milan. What a marker for how much I have changed these past four months. I don’t know why, but after leaving Milan in January, even though I have very close friends there, I never seemed to make it that far up the peninsula again. The craziness of life here and other day trips kind of got in the way.
If there is something I most regret, its not getting back there sooner.
Going back to Milan for me was like going back to where I start; my journeys came full circle. That being said, the city I left in January, kind of cold in gray, and the Matt that I left in January, self conscious and just trying to make sense of Italy…and life for that matter, had lifted. The streets were green. The sun was shining. I had come back. That’s when I realized two things.
-How much I had taken for granted living there.
-How amazing my experiences on this trip have been so far.
It’s so dangerous as soon as place gets normal or familiar; taking Milan for granted; the fact that I had friends that would be there if I needed them and the fact that I knew my way around pretty well after a month of exploring without letting myself be impressed for not even a second….that was just stupid. Even now, as I am typing this, somebody came up to me to ask where I learned to type…and proceeded to tell me he couldn’t even write… see what I mean about taking stuff for granted. Be. Careful.
Sorry, Milan and everyone I know there.
Ummmm…ok. So where was I going. As yes, continuing with the month of May. Next stop. BARCELONA.
Ok, so Barcelona is by far one of the most interesting in paradoxical places I’ve ever been… let me give you some windows onto what we observed (JiaJia, Rosanna and I) and felt while we were there.
First things first… I have to admit that this was without a type a twisted type of pilgrimage for me as L’auberge espagnole, one of my alllllll time favorite movies was set in Barcelona. Every time I turned a street corner I could’ve sworn I recognized something from the movie…. All this angst and excitement culminated with us all going to the bar where some of the crucial scenes of the movie went down.
Dorky, right?
One of my favorite things that we did that I think best sums up this whole experience of being there is the night that we went to the Ovella Negra (black sheep)… a Catalan kind of bar that served ridiculous amounts of food…
First things first… the menu was in Catalan… Barcelona is a lot like Montreal in that it’s caught between two languages; Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan dislike being lumped in with Spanish and it’s definitely felt everywhere. Most of the signs are in Catalan and, even though you can get by with Spanish, I feel like it’s like Montreal where you miss out on more than half of the city if you don’t speak French.
So us, being the cheap students on a horribly low budget that we were, immediately went for the longest thing that we could find for the menu… our noses brought us to something Embotit… which I guess means “Most bang for your buck”.
Being the cultured Europeans that we were, we of course had to take some cheese with our meat… and about 1.75 litres of nastily and delightfully cheap Sangria.
Embotit really means, I guess, slaughtered animal on plate…because what came out was about 60-70 slices of various types of meats; we are talking Chorizo, Salame, Sausage…lots and lots of animal flesh.
We made it three quarters of the way through. Spain 1… Cheap students… 0.
The whole night culminated in us sadly and slowly walking around the city, clutching our poor overwhelmed stomachs.
The day after we repented for our food sins on a strict diet of fruits and vegetarian tapas in the evening. I think my stomach has still yet to recover.
That’s the other thing about Barcelona….. it’s great, it’s abundant, it’s full of life.. but it Kicks. Your. Ass.
Other things that I loved. The dancing. There is this special Catalan dance that, when there is a little music in some square, all the old time hardcore Barcelonans break out their special white dancing shoes and proceed to dance.
Imagine the Whos in the Grinch.. remember when they sing in a circle…. It’s like that, only dancing. People slowly join hands, through their stuff into the center of the circle and just… enjoy life.
Everyone else who is watching gets the strength of ten Grinches… plus two..
Our random accommodations made me laugh. Rosanna had found a place that was 19 Euro a night…in some random guys apartment. It was basically as if you were to rent out a room in your house… kind of like a B and B, but not really. He had a pet dog and I think he hated us because we would come in at all hours. That being said… he was always very courteous and was quick to provide us with maps and point us in the right direction.
But… if he was busy waiting to let us in…did he ever leave the apartment?
THAT was the question that plagued us during our whole trip…
All the urban studies crap and analysis of Barcelona I’ll save you from… ask me later. Let’s just say that there is a pretty bitter triangle between Natives, Tourists and the Cops that is really felt everywhere.
It was a trip full of late nights, me being enthralled with “ocean breezes” and “urban corners”, EATING (we all…LOVE to eat), sunshine. I just wish I was better at remembering all the random things that made me crack up that we talked about.
Oh…. We rented a rowboat for a half an hour in one of the city’s largest parks…. There was a small, man made water…area…thing… where you pay 2 Euro a person for thirty minutes. Not bad.
Problem. We all forgot how to row. That meant that for the first few minutes we ended up spinning in circles while JiaJia took photos of Rosanna and I screwing up in our tailspin. On TOP of that, we of course wanted to challenge ourselves by going for the hardest obstacle…. in the lake: a really, extremely, low bridge. So low I had to row from the floor of the boat. Not the seat.
So hilarious… the whole time we were singing ridiculous Disney songs… mostly Under the Sea because it seemed to be the most appropriate AND the one that we knew the best… There’s video evidence; I’m sorry in advance.
It’s always nice to smile….even nicer in some warm Spanish sun, in good company with a full stomach. ☺
So the second leg of this adventure was to Toulouse, where my friend Olivier lives… because, you know, France is right around the corner… right?
(Europeans are always flabbergasted by North American sense of space… meaning that I, like the other North Americans here, am often met with looks of bewilderment when I describe where I’ve been).
So we were out until five in the morning; my train was supposed to leave at eight. That left just enough time to nap, shower and head off (while waking up the guy who was renting out our room in his apartment in the process).
Ok, so I get out of the shower… get dressed.. it’s around eight.. that leaves just enough to slowly make my way up to the train station before the train departs at 8:50… but you know… being the careful and savy traveler that I am… I check the ticket just to make sure….
8:25.
You can imagine the panic that ensued. Needless to say I made it, probably crushing some little Spanish women dressed in black in the process….
So last night I just got back from a whirlwind ten day trip to Barcelona and Toulouse to the south of France. That’s to say, after trekking back via train from Carcassonne to Montpellier, overnight bus from Montpellier to Milan, and train again from Milan to Bologna the next morning, I was pretty much, you guessed it, a zombie.
You may think it’s crazy, but you just have to do it. You gotta move when your in Europe.
The trip, I’ll get back to, just be patient.
So anyway, getting back to Bologna, I was kind of a zombie. Life was getting back to normal, the apartment was a little messy, but whatever, it was nice to be settling in again after the seemingly endless chaos that was the month of May for me here. Now, earlier that week, or prior to leaving rather I had said goodbye to a really good friend of mine exchange; he said he was going to leave some Belgium beer that his family was bringing on their trip down to pick him up.
First thing, there was A LOT of beer in the fridge.
My roommate was there; after asking about the trip he proceeded to inquire about a party that was supposed to go on that evening….with my friends?
What? Curious, right?
Sure enough someone rings the doorbell.
Martin? Ok, just another friend of one of the guys in the apartment.
Turns out…..it was MARTIN! He had decided to stay until I got back to have this one last going away party complete with Belgian beer and chocolate and lots of general merrymaking. Apparently he had been waiting at the train station to surprise me; way to fuck that one up and be in your own little world… Matt.
Needless to say the party last night was unbelievable. One last, bittersweet goodbye to Martin with everyone there.
What an end to a great adventure. I mean, I know it doesn’t seem like a bid deal or a huge surprise, but when you get close to someone after a few months, saying goodbye is always terrible (something else I’m gonna have to deal with here pretty soon….lets not talk about it.. k?)
K. Back to present time. Now I’m sitting here in a Laundromat; life is finally getting back to normal (despite the utterly broken washing machine in our apartment) and I have to say I couldn’t be happier. May. Was. Crazy. and experiences ranged from the sweetest things ever like going to Ferrara to see a flag throwing competition (for little kids) for the Palio or horse racing contest that has been going on in the city for centuries and a cooking course with an Italian grandmother toooooo being caught in the middle of a fight between a Siclian friend of mine and a random Napolitan guy who called in the cavalry (about 10 of his friends), writing or rather bullshiting my way through two ORAL exams (one of which was pushed back to a day later than scheduled… well… because it’s Italy and for which I had read about 450 pages in one day), and having little to no personal space or quiet time because I had to share my room with two friends of my roommate who visited…. for two weeks
Begin to get what I’m saying about all this craziness. All this being said, I assure you that right now, I couldn’t be happier. My life is a little bit messy, but for the first time, I’m ok with it.
Amongst little trips, I swam in the Adriatic, when to Milan for the day… twice… once for a friends birthday which ended up with her (Paola) running back and forth between showing Claire (visiting) and I around and planning at the last minute her OWN birthday party, the other for a graduation from university (Gabriele), pick nicked in the hills outside Bologna, ate gelato, went out, enjoyed the warmth of the Italia sun….everything right now just seems to melt together… lets see if I can make any sense of this mess that is my memory at the moment.
OH! Another good point to intervene. Milan. What a marker for how much I have changed these past four months. I don’t know why, but after leaving Milan in January, even though I have very close friends there, I never seemed to make it that far up the peninsula again. The craziness of life here and other day trips kind of got in the way.
If there is something I most regret, its not getting back there sooner.
Going back to Milan for me was like going back to where I start; my journeys came full circle. That being said, the city I left in January, kind of cold in gray, and the Matt that I left in January, self conscious and just trying to make sense of Italy…and life for that matter, had lifted. The streets were green. The sun was shining. I had come back. That’s when I realized two things.
-How much I had taken for granted living there.
-How amazing my experiences on this trip have been so far.
It’s so dangerous as soon as place gets normal or familiar; taking Milan for granted; the fact that I had friends that would be there if I needed them and the fact that I knew my way around pretty well after a month of exploring without letting myself be impressed for not even a second….that was just stupid. Even now, as I am typing this, somebody came up to me to ask where I learned to type…and proceeded to tell me he couldn’t even write… see what I mean about taking stuff for granted. Be. Careful.
Sorry, Milan and everyone I know there.
Ummmm…ok. So where was I going. As yes, continuing with the month of May. Next stop. BARCELONA.
Ok, so Barcelona is by far one of the most interesting in paradoxical places I’ve ever been… let me give you some windows onto what we observed (JiaJia, Rosanna and I) and felt while we were there.
First things first… I have to admit that this was without a type a twisted type of pilgrimage for me as L’auberge espagnole, one of my alllllll time favorite movies was set in Barcelona. Every time I turned a street corner I could’ve sworn I recognized something from the movie…. All this angst and excitement culminated with us all going to the bar where some of the crucial scenes of the movie went down.
Dorky, right?
One of my favorite things that we did that I think best sums up this whole experience of being there is the night that we went to the Ovella Negra (black sheep)… a Catalan kind of bar that served ridiculous amounts of food…
First things first… the menu was in Catalan… Barcelona is a lot like Montreal in that it’s caught between two languages; Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan dislike being lumped in with Spanish and it’s definitely felt everywhere. Most of the signs are in Catalan and, even though you can get by with Spanish, I feel like it’s like Montreal where you miss out on more than half of the city if you don’t speak French.
So us, being the cheap students on a horribly low budget that we were, immediately went for the longest thing that we could find for the menu… our noses brought us to something Embotit… which I guess means “Most bang for your buck”.
Being the cultured Europeans that we were, we of course had to take some cheese with our meat… and about 1.75 litres of nastily and delightfully cheap Sangria.
Embotit really means, I guess, slaughtered animal on plate…because what came out was about 60-70 slices of various types of meats; we are talking Chorizo, Salame, Sausage…lots and lots of animal flesh.
We made it three quarters of the way through. Spain 1… Cheap students… 0.
The whole night culminated in us sadly and slowly walking around the city, clutching our poor overwhelmed stomachs.
The day after we repented for our food sins on a strict diet of fruits and vegetarian tapas in the evening. I think my stomach has still yet to recover.
That’s the other thing about Barcelona….. it’s great, it’s abundant, it’s full of life.. but it Kicks. Your. Ass.
Other things that I loved. The dancing. There is this special Catalan dance that, when there is a little music in some square, all the old time hardcore Barcelonans break out their special white dancing shoes and proceed to dance.
Imagine the Whos in the Grinch.. remember when they sing in a circle…. It’s like that, only dancing. People slowly join hands, through their stuff into the center of the circle and just… enjoy life.
Everyone else who is watching gets the strength of ten Grinches… plus two..
Our random accommodations made me laugh. Rosanna had found a place that was 19 Euro a night…in some random guys apartment. It was basically as if you were to rent out a room in your house… kind of like a B and B, but not really. He had a pet dog and I think he hated us because we would come in at all hours. That being said… he was always very courteous and was quick to provide us with maps and point us in the right direction.
But… if he was busy waiting to let us in…did he ever leave the apartment?
THAT was the question that plagued us during our whole trip…
All the urban studies crap and analysis of Barcelona I’ll save you from… ask me later. Let’s just say that there is a pretty bitter triangle between Natives, Tourists and the Cops that is really felt everywhere.
It was a trip full of late nights, me being enthralled with “ocean breezes” and “urban corners”, EATING (we all…LOVE to eat), sunshine. I just wish I was better at remembering all the random things that made me crack up that we talked about.
Oh…. We rented a rowboat for a half an hour in one of the city’s largest parks…. There was a small, man made water…area…thing… where you pay 2 Euro a person for thirty minutes. Not bad.
Problem. We all forgot how to row. That meant that for the first few minutes we ended up spinning in circles while JiaJia took photos of Rosanna and I screwing up in our tailspin. On TOP of that, we of course wanted to challenge ourselves by going for the hardest obstacle…. in the lake: a really, extremely, low bridge. So low I had to row from the floor of the boat. Not the seat.
So hilarious… the whole time we were singing ridiculous Disney songs… mostly Under the Sea because it seemed to be the most appropriate AND the one that we knew the best… There’s video evidence; I’m sorry in advance.
It’s always nice to smile….even nicer in some warm Spanish sun, in good company with a full stomach. ☺
So the second leg of this adventure was to Toulouse, where my friend Olivier lives… because, you know, France is right around the corner… right?
(Europeans are always flabbergasted by North American sense of space… meaning that I, like the other North Americans here, am often met with looks of bewilderment when I describe where I’ve been).
So we were out until five in the morning; my train was supposed to leave at eight. That left just enough time to nap, shower and head off (while waking up the guy who was renting out our room in his apartment in the process).
Ok, so I get out of the shower… get dressed.. it’s around eight.. that leaves just enough to slowly make my way up to the train station before the train departs at 8:50… but you know… being the careful and savy traveler that I am… I check the ticket just to make sure….
8:25.
You can imagine the panic that ensued. Needless to say I made it, probably crushing some little Spanish women dressed in black in the process….
Treminis! :)
Hey world I fell out of touch with for the past two weeks that is now kicking my ass with a huge wake up, get back to “reality”, slap in the face… I guess you want to know where the hell I fell off the face of the earth to.
In all seriousness now, the trip I did two weeks ago to the French Alps was probably one of the most amazing experiences of my life and it’s been so hard to write about because I find myself fighting between talking about little things that I loved and doing an intense daily summary in an effort to fully remember EVERYTHING that we did….which was a lot.
Here we go. Maybe I’ll try to a little mix of both.
Everything about this trip to Tréminis was incredibly random, exciting and heart warming. Just getting there and the planning leading up to getting there was enough to make it seem that much more special. It all started about a year ago when I met my friend Olivier from Toulouse…I remember him talking about how his friends were in the French alps while we were both stuck in one of McGill’s gorgeous libraries studying for finals (which, come on, are so ridiculously early when put into perspective!) Knowing that I was going on exchange to Italy at that point, we kind of did one of those “wouldn’t it be cool ifs” which inevitably in the end almost a year later had me traveling on an overnight bus from Florence (not Bologna) to Aix-en-Provence, where Olivier and his friends would be picking me up on the way to the Alps.
What?
So there I was, standing in Aix-en-Provence, in the cold and rain with my ridiculously heavy bag filled with stuff which would render me hopelessly under-prepared and with feet that would still be wet upon my return in Bologna, already pretty impressed with myself that I was actually doing this trip, that I had bought some fresh lavendar from Provence at the market AND (most importantly) thankful for such incredible people who would invite me along when…
Completely by chance I ran into someone I know from Inter Residence Council at McGill who happened to be doing an exchange in Scotland and was visiting his grandpa during Easter break who happened to live in Aix…
What? Had we been walking around different streets or had I left the café I was sitting at an hour earlier five minutes later than I really did, we would’ve never run into each other.
That. Was. Crazy. We talked and promised each other a “talk about how crazy and random exchange was” night when we got back to Montréal.
Olivier and his friends arrived soon after that…I can’t tell you.
-How nice it is to see a familiar face in a completely unfamiliar place
-Pick up with a friend right where I left off (we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year before that (and everyone knows that MSN just doesn’t cut it)
I’m pretty freaking lucky (keep in mind this is only the first half of a day…see what I mean?)
Now, let me break down the logistics of what I was doing there, where it was and who I was with.
Ok, so Tréminis is a very, incredibly small town nestled in the French Alps about an hour south of Grenoble by train and about 20 minutes from the nearest patisserie…it’s actually three little medieval towns in this valley flanked by snow capped and amazingly tall peaks, each with about 5 people. Apparently one year the neighbors goats came up to the house where we stayed every morning to graze on the lawn…the only way Olivier and his friends knew they were coming was because the bells around their necks that rang would ring closer and closer. Unfortunately there were no goats this time around, but I love the ironically ominous image, so if you would please allow me the digression that’d be great. On a historical note, Tréminis comes from a Latin phrase which means three castles, so each of the small towns is the remnants of a small castle… pretty cool. Since there were mountains on all side (I guess the valley is kind of shaped like a big pocket) you really feel like your comfortably nestled in a small corner of the world, comfortably isolated from…everything.
The house we stayed in belongs to the family of Olivier’s friend Benji who was without our fearless leader… I never really learned how to say that in French, but after saying it for a million times, I think they got what I was trying to say. He not only organized who was coming, but how they were getting there (with detailed maps and directions that had estimations on gas mileage) what we would be eating (he had to buy in advance enough food to last 11 people… for a week) and some of the hiking trips we would be doing…
I can barely think ahead until tomorrow…so needless to say, I was WAY impressed.
So anyway, the house…one word. Cozy. There was a wood burning stove where, after hiking, I would pow wow almost to the point of overheating because it was so warm, a small kitchen, complete with special knives for cutting baguettes and a HUGE coffee pot that I think I overwhelmed everyone with when I made Italian coffee, a sitting area adjacent to the kitchen where we spent our time after hiking sitting, talking and playing games (umm… I played Taboo in French… I thank you) and of course a pantry packed with food for 11 people and a few small bedrooms. Everything was wood and you could tell it was hand made.
Now that you have that image, imagine the chaos that was 11 university students unpacking cars filled with food and luggage and trying to get all that STUFF organized on the inside. What impressed me most by far was the teamwork…everyone fell into place and contributed...it was nice to be with a group of people who were generally interested in everyone else’s company and just having fun together.
Keep in mind that I’ve never done a real outdoorsy trip like this before and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a suburban boy from Long Island turned Montreal city slicker who is generally a little uneasy in rural areas… so everything about this was big for me (I had a lot of those moments… just you wait). Needless to say, I think all the hiking and playing games by a warm fire was just what I needed (and was consequently SO sad to leave…it sucks how time flies when you are having fun.)
What I love most are the group dynamics. The first day everyone is still kind of falling into place…and by everyone I mean me. Everyone else who was there either knew each other through friends or had been there before. I was the foreigner in a group of 10 other French people and although at times I was frustrated that I couldn’t communicate as much as I would’ve, but I was still so happy. It’s funny looking back on the first day of such a trip now because you realize both how awkward you probably were and how needless this awkwardness was….although at first I was really (and quite uncharacteristically quiet) to have people reach out and talk to me really warmed my heart…I mean, the first night I said to Benji that I could make something Italian for them because I had brought some Parmigiano Reggiano from Bologna and some cookies… So at first, I began cutting by myself just falling into my normal “cook by myself but for a lot of people” routine when people came over and asked if they could help, like cut anything, stir, and just make themselves useful.
That was when I realized that we were all in it together; the culturally complicated and confusing guy from the States who’s doing an exchange in Italy and speaks French with a kind of Québecois accent...and everyone else.
I wonder what everyone else was thinking (and consequently crack up when I think about it).
The trails we took and the views we experienced (I say “experience” for the views because seeing in my mind implies some sort of separation and observation, we were seeing for sure, but we were also feeling, living and breathing in and with these mountains) are far too majestic to begin to sum up with words…
Our hiking trips were day trips with trails that started at the most a 20 minute ride by car from the house. Before I continue, I have to make another somewhat ridiculous interjection and observation…French picnic food is far superior to what we have…ok, I admit peanut butter and jelly will forever hold a special place in my heart, BUT let’s just say that we had a special bag just for baguettes and special baguettes just for cheese (that’s right… some for ham, but extra for cheese). One day we had a salad made of beets, avocado, tuna, and corn (tuna which before I had never eaten in my life and beets which consequently remind me of the cartoon show Doug which I believed should only remain in that context in my life) with a mustard, vinegar and garlic dressing. And that’s just on the trail, don’t even get me started on the cookies and snack food we had when we would get back each day…
Let’s just say we were by no means starving on the trail and now in Italy I’m still buying baguettes to make sandwiches and eat what appears to be the kilograms of cheese I also seem to mistakenly buy here.
The first day on the trail it had rained in the valley that night before but snowed in the mountains… as we were hiking, it started raining then, as we got to a different side of the mountain, it started snowing. Now, as you all know, I have what appears to be an unreasonable and ridiculous love of winter weather, so to see some snow after months in sunny and beautiful (suckers) Italy made me unbelievably happy…even though the snow clouds meant that all the views of the valley would be blocked AND that we would be unbelievably cold and wet by the time we got back to the house. No bother.
Amongst other things, one of my favorite topics of conversation was the cheat codes for Age of Empires; there is definitely a lot more that we all have in common than what we don’t.
Enough said.
The second day, we ended up taking a trail that turned out…not to be a trail (which followed suit with the beginning of the trip when we messed up the exit out of Aix meaning that we traveled an hour northwest when we should’ve traveled an hour northeast… fun times for sure; it was funny that although Benji had this trip planned to a T, you can never plan for human error… we did however pass some unbelievable scenary in Provence back tracking and cutting across the…province… to the other highway we should’ve been at). The trail wasn’t well marked and the map wasn’t clear, and we soon found ourselves in what appeared to be a kind of dry, almost river bed…as we got higher up the vegetation got denser… and denser… and we soon realized that we had messed up… big (not only that but the trail was so steep that the effort we put into it made the mistake that much more…frustrating). Somehow, Olivier, Benji and I decided after carefully studying the map that the three of us should get off the “trail” and cut across the mountain a bit to see if we ran into something…
What the hell do I know about hiking off the trail…especially when all I have to hike in is running shoes. Normally that would be ok…BUT since the soil was still moist from the run off made the earth all a little lose and the leaves a little wet. I can’t tell you how many times my life flashed before my eyes as I went sliding down the…probably 70 degree pitch mountain. Being educated, however, in surviving thanks to a Discovery channel show with this crazy British guy who gets left in the middle of nowhere be it in the desert or mountains and has to survive, I knew that I had to keep three points of contact with the mountain at all times… man was I freaking genius…Somehow we survived our little adventure and made it back to the group, ate, and went down the “trail”.
I can’t tell you how many times I had “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” going through my head…Enough said.
The day wasn’t a total loss because once again, doing something completely out of character, I tried mountain biking….after not riding a bike for almost four years. I had trouble changing gears at the beginning and 2 seconds into the ride I had to reset my chain…
I was pretty proud of myself but pretty freaking scared as I went careening down an unreasonably narrow trail covered with huge rocks and flanked by trees, but made it back alive in the end.
So what have we got so far… snow, hiking, hiking way off the trail, mountain biking…already freaking amazing.
Another thing I was thankful for without a doubt was how inclusive and encouraging was…I imagine for Benji and Olivier, who have both mountain biked before, to take a break to wait for me on the trail was probably not that fun, but I mean, like I said, we were all in it together to have fun. It’s so nice and refreshing when people let their hair down and are genuinely friendly and real, especially months of
“oh hey, I’m from…, where are you from? Oh cool… is that near… no?.... Ok bye”. Let’s just say that deep conversations are few and far between in Erasmus exchange parties, so to be with a group of really genuine people made me so happy.
The third day of hiking was by far the most fantastic, death defying and ultimately for me, life changing of the three days we spent hiking (the fourth day, it snowed in the morning, so Benji gave us a snow day….it was really just supposed to be the day when the girls “revolted” and stayed at home to drink tons of hot cocoa, cook and most importantly not be cold and wet from hiking all day…needless to say the fourth day morphed very quickly from the girls day to a snow day for everyone). So anyway, the third day of hiking we took a trail that headed up into a plateau that was consequently during World War II the center of the French Resistance…it made perfect sense… the only way up was by very steep and very narrow trails that were for the most part in the higher altitudes covered in snow (that rendered my running shoes completely useless… I may as well have been wearing sandals by the end of the day) and was, I guess, walled, for lack of a better word, by high cliffs. What we did was follow the trail up the cliffs and into the plateau. It was very cool that this place also had a symbolic meaning; in the end it made the trip that much more meaningful.
This was a place to be experienced, admired and respected.
After a steep hike up into the plateau we were met by rolling hills covered with snow and, oddly enough, silence. Because we were so high up and because we were surrounded by hills, there was literally no breeze. It wasn’t’ cold, but it looked like we were in the middle of the Arctic. There weren’t that many trees and the trail markers were few and far between, so needless to say, it was all of us, not blindly feeling our way through, but lets just say wandering through the plateau with a vague sense of where we were going. The best part was that, in the snow, we always walked in a straight line, following in eachothers’ footsteps. There was of course the impromptu snowball fight and snow angel (snow angels, ps, are something completely out of “American films”…what? Apparently they don’t do them this side of the Atlantic). Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes we broke the windless silence with laughter and talking. The sun was shining, there was snow on the ground.
I at least I felt like I was in a completely different world….and was so happy to be there.
After lots of sliding, walking, running and talking we made it first to a monument to the French Resistance and then back down the cliffs towards home. In the distance there was a huge mountain called Mont Aiguille that looked like one of those geographic oddities you find out west in the States.
I really had never seen anything like what I was seeing on that trip before in my life.
We made it home just as it started to rain, content with the hike that we had done. Snacks and games (Wanted, a card game kind of like a mix of Clue and Mafia, Jungle where you throw down cards with shapes and colors and try to grab a baton in the middle when you find a pair…and others like Taboo) were on the agenda for the rest of the evening. We must’ve listened to La Grande Messe, a CD by Les Cowboys Fringants five million times.
My last day, our “snow day” when it snowed in the morning was so wonderful. A few of us went out for a little walk in the countryside around Tréminis…the walk of course turned into a snowball fight of epic scale. We all had code names based on the food where we were from… I was Hamburger…Alliances were made and broken, everyone got snowballs in the face and we were just having so much fun running around, almost being kids again. We passed by some horses that were running around their pen and some medieval churches with a trail that took us in a huge circle through some of the fields and ultimately back into town (where we passed the Mairie with a list of the Presidential candidates in what was the upcoming French election… talk about little cruel doses of reality).
We quickly changed after the hike and piled back into the two cars that we had for now at that time nine people and headed over to Benji’s grandparents’ house who had invited us over for a little snack. We had some water with cassisse syrup and a cake that Benji’s grandmother had baked… totally adorable. His grandfather was a small town repair man who could fix just about anything and who’s pride and joy was a huge clock taken from a church that was about to be destroyed that he consequently put back together (adding and making gears as needed) in his garage and repair shop. Beret and all, his was definitely proud of his work as he explained to Olivier…an engineering student…the complexities of the clockwork.
After our quick visit my trip ended as quickly and chaotically as it had started…Olivier and a few of his friends rushed me from Benji’s grandparents house back to the train station… we stopped by the house in Tréminis on the way to take a very organized and structured bathroom and “pick up Matt’s shit” stop and were soon back on the road.
So there we were, back at the train station…everyone had prepared me a little snack with an “American size” sandwhich which fed me not only that night but the next morning on the freaking bus that was half an hour late from Grenoble to Bologna, a water bottle with “Tréminis 2007” written on the cap, an orange and a little piece of paper with notes from everyone saying goodbye, stay in touch and…thank YOU.
It was such a bummer to be leaning on the other side of the class of the train window, pulling away as everyone else stayed in the same spot on the platform (except for Olivier who had a white handkerchief that he was waving while he was chasing the train for a bit).
These people, everyone, are friends for life. It was a bummer to leave, but all good things most certainly come to an end. Exhausted on the train, reading my little note, eating some of my really American size sandwhich (they weren’t kidding) with my feet unbelievably wet and smelly from the snowball fight earlier in the day…I was so happy.
In all seriousness now, the trip I did two weeks ago to the French Alps was probably one of the most amazing experiences of my life and it’s been so hard to write about because I find myself fighting between talking about little things that I loved and doing an intense daily summary in an effort to fully remember EVERYTHING that we did….which was a lot.
Here we go. Maybe I’ll try to a little mix of both.
Everything about this trip to Tréminis was incredibly random, exciting and heart warming. Just getting there and the planning leading up to getting there was enough to make it seem that much more special. It all started about a year ago when I met my friend Olivier from Toulouse…I remember him talking about how his friends were in the French alps while we were both stuck in one of McGill’s gorgeous libraries studying for finals (which, come on, are so ridiculously early when put into perspective!) Knowing that I was going on exchange to Italy at that point, we kind of did one of those “wouldn’t it be cool ifs” which inevitably in the end almost a year later had me traveling on an overnight bus from Florence (not Bologna) to Aix-en-Provence, where Olivier and his friends would be picking me up on the way to the Alps.
What?
So there I was, standing in Aix-en-Provence, in the cold and rain with my ridiculously heavy bag filled with stuff which would render me hopelessly under-prepared and with feet that would still be wet upon my return in Bologna, already pretty impressed with myself that I was actually doing this trip, that I had bought some fresh lavendar from Provence at the market AND (most importantly) thankful for such incredible people who would invite me along when…
Completely by chance I ran into someone I know from Inter Residence Council at McGill who happened to be doing an exchange in Scotland and was visiting his grandpa during Easter break who happened to live in Aix…
What? Had we been walking around different streets or had I left the café I was sitting at an hour earlier five minutes later than I really did, we would’ve never run into each other.
That. Was. Crazy. We talked and promised each other a “talk about how crazy and random exchange was” night when we got back to Montréal.
Olivier and his friends arrived soon after that…I can’t tell you.
-How nice it is to see a familiar face in a completely unfamiliar place
-Pick up with a friend right where I left off (we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year before that (and everyone knows that MSN just doesn’t cut it)
I’m pretty freaking lucky (keep in mind this is only the first half of a day…see what I mean?)
Now, let me break down the logistics of what I was doing there, where it was and who I was with.
Ok, so Tréminis is a very, incredibly small town nestled in the French Alps about an hour south of Grenoble by train and about 20 minutes from the nearest patisserie…it’s actually three little medieval towns in this valley flanked by snow capped and amazingly tall peaks, each with about 5 people. Apparently one year the neighbors goats came up to the house where we stayed every morning to graze on the lawn…the only way Olivier and his friends knew they were coming was because the bells around their necks that rang would ring closer and closer. Unfortunately there were no goats this time around, but I love the ironically ominous image, so if you would please allow me the digression that’d be great. On a historical note, Tréminis comes from a Latin phrase which means three castles, so each of the small towns is the remnants of a small castle… pretty cool. Since there were mountains on all side (I guess the valley is kind of shaped like a big pocket) you really feel like your comfortably nestled in a small corner of the world, comfortably isolated from…everything.
The house we stayed in belongs to the family of Olivier’s friend Benji who was without our fearless leader… I never really learned how to say that in French, but after saying it for a million times, I think they got what I was trying to say. He not only organized who was coming, but how they were getting there (with detailed maps and directions that had estimations on gas mileage) what we would be eating (he had to buy in advance enough food to last 11 people… for a week) and some of the hiking trips we would be doing…
I can barely think ahead until tomorrow…so needless to say, I was WAY impressed.
So anyway, the house…one word. Cozy. There was a wood burning stove where, after hiking, I would pow wow almost to the point of overheating because it was so warm, a small kitchen, complete with special knives for cutting baguettes and a HUGE coffee pot that I think I overwhelmed everyone with when I made Italian coffee, a sitting area adjacent to the kitchen where we spent our time after hiking sitting, talking and playing games (umm… I played Taboo in French… I thank you) and of course a pantry packed with food for 11 people and a few small bedrooms. Everything was wood and you could tell it was hand made.
Now that you have that image, imagine the chaos that was 11 university students unpacking cars filled with food and luggage and trying to get all that STUFF organized on the inside. What impressed me most by far was the teamwork…everyone fell into place and contributed...it was nice to be with a group of people who were generally interested in everyone else’s company and just having fun together.
Keep in mind that I’ve never done a real outdoorsy trip like this before and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a suburban boy from Long Island turned Montreal city slicker who is generally a little uneasy in rural areas… so everything about this was big for me (I had a lot of those moments… just you wait). Needless to say, I think all the hiking and playing games by a warm fire was just what I needed (and was consequently SO sad to leave…it sucks how time flies when you are having fun.)
What I love most are the group dynamics. The first day everyone is still kind of falling into place…and by everyone I mean me. Everyone else who was there either knew each other through friends or had been there before. I was the foreigner in a group of 10 other French people and although at times I was frustrated that I couldn’t communicate as much as I would’ve, but I was still so happy. It’s funny looking back on the first day of such a trip now because you realize both how awkward you probably were and how needless this awkwardness was….although at first I was really (and quite uncharacteristically quiet) to have people reach out and talk to me really warmed my heart…I mean, the first night I said to Benji that I could make something Italian for them because I had brought some Parmigiano Reggiano from Bologna and some cookies… So at first, I began cutting by myself just falling into my normal “cook by myself but for a lot of people” routine when people came over and asked if they could help, like cut anything, stir, and just make themselves useful.
That was when I realized that we were all in it together; the culturally complicated and confusing guy from the States who’s doing an exchange in Italy and speaks French with a kind of Québecois accent...and everyone else.
I wonder what everyone else was thinking (and consequently crack up when I think about it).
The trails we took and the views we experienced (I say “experience” for the views because seeing in my mind implies some sort of separation and observation, we were seeing for sure, but we were also feeling, living and breathing in and with these mountains) are far too majestic to begin to sum up with words…
Our hiking trips were day trips with trails that started at the most a 20 minute ride by car from the house. Before I continue, I have to make another somewhat ridiculous interjection and observation…French picnic food is far superior to what we have…ok, I admit peanut butter and jelly will forever hold a special place in my heart, BUT let’s just say that we had a special bag just for baguettes and special baguettes just for cheese (that’s right… some for ham, but extra for cheese). One day we had a salad made of beets, avocado, tuna, and corn (tuna which before I had never eaten in my life and beets which consequently remind me of the cartoon show Doug which I believed should only remain in that context in my life) with a mustard, vinegar and garlic dressing. And that’s just on the trail, don’t even get me started on the cookies and snack food we had when we would get back each day…
Let’s just say we were by no means starving on the trail and now in Italy I’m still buying baguettes to make sandwiches and eat what appears to be the kilograms of cheese I also seem to mistakenly buy here.
The first day on the trail it had rained in the valley that night before but snowed in the mountains… as we were hiking, it started raining then, as we got to a different side of the mountain, it started snowing. Now, as you all know, I have what appears to be an unreasonable and ridiculous love of winter weather, so to see some snow after months in sunny and beautiful (suckers) Italy made me unbelievably happy…even though the snow clouds meant that all the views of the valley would be blocked AND that we would be unbelievably cold and wet by the time we got back to the house. No bother.
Amongst other things, one of my favorite topics of conversation was the cheat codes for Age of Empires; there is definitely a lot more that we all have in common than what we don’t.
Enough said.
The second day, we ended up taking a trail that turned out…not to be a trail (which followed suit with the beginning of the trip when we messed up the exit out of Aix meaning that we traveled an hour northwest when we should’ve traveled an hour northeast… fun times for sure; it was funny that although Benji had this trip planned to a T, you can never plan for human error… we did however pass some unbelievable scenary in Provence back tracking and cutting across the…province… to the other highway we should’ve been at). The trail wasn’t well marked and the map wasn’t clear, and we soon found ourselves in what appeared to be a kind of dry, almost river bed…as we got higher up the vegetation got denser… and denser… and we soon realized that we had messed up… big (not only that but the trail was so steep that the effort we put into it made the mistake that much more…frustrating). Somehow, Olivier, Benji and I decided after carefully studying the map that the three of us should get off the “trail” and cut across the mountain a bit to see if we ran into something…
What the hell do I know about hiking off the trail…especially when all I have to hike in is running shoes. Normally that would be ok…BUT since the soil was still moist from the run off made the earth all a little lose and the leaves a little wet. I can’t tell you how many times my life flashed before my eyes as I went sliding down the…probably 70 degree pitch mountain. Being educated, however, in surviving thanks to a Discovery channel show with this crazy British guy who gets left in the middle of nowhere be it in the desert or mountains and has to survive, I knew that I had to keep three points of contact with the mountain at all times… man was I freaking genius…Somehow we survived our little adventure and made it back to the group, ate, and went down the “trail”.
I can’t tell you how many times I had “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” going through my head…Enough said.
The day wasn’t a total loss because once again, doing something completely out of character, I tried mountain biking….after not riding a bike for almost four years. I had trouble changing gears at the beginning and 2 seconds into the ride I had to reset my chain…
I was pretty proud of myself but pretty freaking scared as I went careening down an unreasonably narrow trail covered with huge rocks and flanked by trees, but made it back alive in the end.
So what have we got so far… snow, hiking, hiking way off the trail, mountain biking…already freaking amazing.
Another thing I was thankful for without a doubt was how inclusive and encouraging was…I imagine for Benji and Olivier, who have both mountain biked before, to take a break to wait for me on the trail was probably not that fun, but I mean, like I said, we were all in it together to have fun. It’s so nice and refreshing when people let their hair down and are genuinely friendly and real, especially months of
“oh hey, I’m from…, where are you from? Oh cool… is that near… no?.... Ok bye”. Let’s just say that deep conversations are few and far between in Erasmus exchange parties, so to be with a group of really genuine people made me so happy.
The third day of hiking was by far the most fantastic, death defying and ultimately for me, life changing of the three days we spent hiking (the fourth day, it snowed in the morning, so Benji gave us a snow day….it was really just supposed to be the day when the girls “revolted” and stayed at home to drink tons of hot cocoa, cook and most importantly not be cold and wet from hiking all day…needless to say the fourth day morphed very quickly from the girls day to a snow day for everyone). So anyway, the third day of hiking we took a trail that headed up into a plateau that was consequently during World War II the center of the French Resistance…it made perfect sense… the only way up was by very steep and very narrow trails that were for the most part in the higher altitudes covered in snow (that rendered my running shoes completely useless… I may as well have been wearing sandals by the end of the day) and was, I guess, walled, for lack of a better word, by high cliffs. What we did was follow the trail up the cliffs and into the plateau. It was very cool that this place also had a symbolic meaning; in the end it made the trip that much more meaningful.
This was a place to be experienced, admired and respected.
After a steep hike up into the plateau we were met by rolling hills covered with snow and, oddly enough, silence. Because we were so high up and because we were surrounded by hills, there was literally no breeze. It wasn’t’ cold, but it looked like we were in the middle of the Arctic. There weren’t that many trees and the trail markers were few and far between, so needless to say, it was all of us, not blindly feeling our way through, but lets just say wandering through the plateau with a vague sense of where we were going. The best part was that, in the snow, we always walked in a straight line, following in eachothers’ footsteps. There was of course the impromptu snowball fight and snow angel (snow angels, ps, are something completely out of “American films”…what? Apparently they don’t do them this side of the Atlantic). Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes we broke the windless silence with laughter and talking. The sun was shining, there was snow on the ground.
I at least I felt like I was in a completely different world….and was so happy to be there.
After lots of sliding, walking, running and talking we made it first to a monument to the French Resistance and then back down the cliffs towards home. In the distance there was a huge mountain called Mont Aiguille that looked like one of those geographic oddities you find out west in the States.
I really had never seen anything like what I was seeing on that trip before in my life.
We made it home just as it started to rain, content with the hike that we had done. Snacks and games (Wanted, a card game kind of like a mix of Clue and Mafia, Jungle where you throw down cards with shapes and colors and try to grab a baton in the middle when you find a pair…and others like Taboo) were on the agenda for the rest of the evening. We must’ve listened to La Grande Messe, a CD by Les Cowboys Fringants five million times.
My last day, our “snow day” when it snowed in the morning was so wonderful. A few of us went out for a little walk in the countryside around Tréminis…the walk of course turned into a snowball fight of epic scale. We all had code names based on the food where we were from… I was Hamburger…Alliances were made and broken, everyone got snowballs in the face and we were just having so much fun running around, almost being kids again. We passed by some horses that were running around their pen and some medieval churches with a trail that took us in a huge circle through some of the fields and ultimately back into town (where we passed the Mairie with a list of the Presidential candidates in what was the upcoming French election… talk about little cruel doses of reality).
We quickly changed after the hike and piled back into the two cars that we had for now at that time nine people and headed over to Benji’s grandparents’ house who had invited us over for a little snack. We had some water with cassisse syrup and a cake that Benji’s grandmother had baked… totally adorable. His grandfather was a small town repair man who could fix just about anything and who’s pride and joy was a huge clock taken from a church that was about to be destroyed that he consequently put back together (adding and making gears as needed) in his garage and repair shop. Beret and all, his was definitely proud of his work as he explained to Olivier…an engineering student…the complexities of the clockwork.
After our quick visit my trip ended as quickly and chaotically as it had started…Olivier and a few of his friends rushed me from Benji’s grandparents house back to the train station… we stopped by the house in Tréminis on the way to take a very organized and structured bathroom and “pick up Matt’s shit” stop and were soon back on the road.
So there we were, back at the train station…everyone had prepared me a little snack with an “American size” sandwhich which fed me not only that night but the next morning on the freaking bus that was half an hour late from Grenoble to Bologna, a water bottle with “Tréminis 2007” written on the cap, an orange and a little piece of paper with notes from everyone saying goodbye, stay in touch and…thank YOU.
It was such a bummer to be leaning on the other side of the class of the train window, pulling away as everyone else stayed in the same spot on the platform (except for Olivier who had a white handkerchief that he was waving while he was chasing the train for a bit).
These people, everyone, are friends for life. It was a bummer to leave, but all good things most certainly come to an end. Exhausted on the train, reading my little note, eating some of my really American size sandwhich (they weren’t kidding) with my feet unbelievably wet and smelly from the snowball fight earlier in the day…I was so happy.
Smile, you're in Italy!
Let me explain to you the context in which I heard this phrase, first off, and secondly why it hit home for me.
First I have to lay the groundwork; bare with me if this is slow, but it’s all very important.
Picture this, you’re sitting around with your friends, having a few beers, generally enjoying life and most importantly, doing nothing when someone (in my case my roommate, Gustav) comes up to you and starts talking about plans for a trip to Florence.
“Oh, maybe I’ll come, I don’t have anything better to do”.
Stop. Let me just point out how spoiled I am here. How is it possible that I can make a decision to go to Florence and Tuscany while getting drunk with my friends the night before we are supposed to go. What?! Is this happening?
Needless to say, I was up and at em’ at eight in the morning after a night out at a bar and a delicious slice of pizza at two in the morning and heading to Florence.
Rule of thumb, the more spontaneous the trip, the better it is.
Gustav wanted to meet a friend of his for lunch and while we were on the train we decided that maybe it would be cool to check out Siena….SIENA! You know, that beautiful Tuscan town tucked in the sun kissed and rolling Tuscan hills… yeah that one.
Lunch was wonderful (after a train, ps, that was 45 minutes late) and incredibly simple. We picked up some food in a small market and ate on the side of the river close to the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Now, I realize it’s not everyday that you decide to eat lunch in Florence… This. Was. Fucking. Cool. We sat there, talking for a good hour two; the conversation somehow drifting between Swedish (Gustav’s friend from Sweden) English and Italian, sitting in the sun, talking about life, exchange, studies…
Then Gustav’s friend says it…
“Just smile, you’re in Italy…” All the stress, preoccupation, worrying, isn’t worth it…especially when the sun is shining.
Living a charmed life? I am for sure. Um, hi, I went to Florence? To eat lunch?
After lunch we took a stroll through the historic part of Florence and climbed the Duomo. I needn’t discuss the views… just think of how you feel when confronted with overwhelming beauty and majesty…Done.
After, we were off to Siena (I had been to Florence twice before, but never Siena, so this was a real treat). I don’t think we really knew where we were going and if we were even on the right train...but we were there.
The ride between Siena and Florence was breathtaking… even if our views were from a regional train window. All those sun kissed and rolling hills, dotted with small walled towns and vineyards that everyone talks about… is incredibly accurate and more beautiful than you could imagine. Enough said.
Siena was unbelievable and after a small detour (one of those “rights when you should’ve gone left) we managed to make it to the main square (famous for the fact that twice a year there is a horse race that goes on right in the center of the city between it’s different quarters). Sparing you the urban geography lingo (again) I will just say that it is a marvel how they built the square and how the city itself fits in unbelievably with the hills.
More food. We were starving. Luckily there was this small bar with an outdoor terrace that afforded us a view (from a few stories up) of the whole square. We (Gustav and I) sat, enjoyed the scenery, sipped chianti, and had the best damn panini I, at least, have ever tasted before in my life. One of those “really good ends to a really good day” kind of things. For dessert we were recommended at bar/bakery where they serve a regional specialty called “Ricciarelli”… Italian for fucking delicious… well maybe not that, but it was good.
Good food. Check. Café an dessert at a nice bar. Check. Beautiful views. Check.
We got back to Bologna at around midnight…all of this traveling… about 200 KM in each direction, cost less than 26 Euro. How? I don’t know.
Most importantly, and the point that I was trying to make from the beginning… Smile, you’re in Italy. So much of this exchange experience goes beyond studying. It’s really about life. To horribly quote two songs which some up my situation right now.
-It’s time like these you learn to live again…
-I’m no superman…(I love Scrubs way too much)
The “not being superman” probably is the most important for me specifically because, I don’t know if its an only child thing or not, I am soooooo independent (sometimes to my own detriment). Realizing that a) its ok to depend on people and b) that you absolutely CAN’T do everything has been so important. I think my biggest problem is realizing that I can’t have/do it all and that I will NEVER be the best at everything I do…this meaning of course that I have to make choices, be it parties on a Friday night, places to go in Europe, or even majors in university. I can't tell you how many times I've overextended myself and tried to be too many places at once, which of course in the end that I missed out on a lot...just in the time I spent to get from point A to point Z.
No more making myself miserable.
The moral of the story, for me at least, is pick wisely, enjoy the choice you made and don't set the bar too high for yourself.
So here I am, learning to live again, learning what makes me “me” in the context of being constantly confronted with things that are new and different (I never thought I would say that about Italy) and learning to just smile and go with the flow.
THAT is what is most important.
First I have to lay the groundwork; bare with me if this is slow, but it’s all very important.
Picture this, you’re sitting around with your friends, having a few beers, generally enjoying life and most importantly, doing nothing when someone (in my case my roommate, Gustav) comes up to you and starts talking about plans for a trip to Florence.
“Oh, maybe I’ll come, I don’t have anything better to do”.
Stop. Let me just point out how spoiled I am here. How is it possible that I can make a decision to go to Florence and Tuscany while getting drunk with my friends the night before we are supposed to go. What?! Is this happening?
Needless to say, I was up and at em’ at eight in the morning after a night out at a bar and a delicious slice of pizza at two in the morning and heading to Florence.
Rule of thumb, the more spontaneous the trip, the better it is.
Gustav wanted to meet a friend of his for lunch and while we were on the train we decided that maybe it would be cool to check out Siena….SIENA! You know, that beautiful Tuscan town tucked in the sun kissed and rolling Tuscan hills… yeah that one.
Lunch was wonderful (after a train, ps, that was 45 minutes late) and incredibly simple. We picked up some food in a small market and ate on the side of the river close to the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Now, I realize it’s not everyday that you decide to eat lunch in Florence… This. Was. Fucking. Cool. We sat there, talking for a good hour two; the conversation somehow drifting between Swedish (Gustav’s friend from Sweden) English and Italian, sitting in the sun, talking about life, exchange, studies…
Then Gustav’s friend says it…
“Just smile, you’re in Italy…” All the stress, preoccupation, worrying, isn’t worth it…especially when the sun is shining.
Living a charmed life? I am for sure. Um, hi, I went to Florence? To eat lunch?
After lunch we took a stroll through the historic part of Florence and climbed the Duomo. I needn’t discuss the views… just think of how you feel when confronted with overwhelming beauty and majesty…Done.
After, we were off to Siena (I had been to Florence twice before, but never Siena, so this was a real treat). I don’t think we really knew where we were going and if we were even on the right train...but we were there.
The ride between Siena and Florence was breathtaking… even if our views were from a regional train window. All those sun kissed and rolling hills, dotted with small walled towns and vineyards that everyone talks about… is incredibly accurate and more beautiful than you could imagine. Enough said.
Siena was unbelievable and after a small detour (one of those “rights when you should’ve gone left) we managed to make it to the main square (famous for the fact that twice a year there is a horse race that goes on right in the center of the city between it’s different quarters). Sparing you the urban geography lingo (again) I will just say that it is a marvel how they built the square and how the city itself fits in unbelievably with the hills.
More food. We were starving. Luckily there was this small bar with an outdoor terrace that afforded us a view (from a few stories up) of the whole square. We (Gustav and I) sat, enjoyed the scenery, sipped chianti, and had the best damn panini I, at least, have ever tasted before in my life. One of those “really good ends to a really good day” kind of things. For dessert we were recommended at bar/bakery where they serve a regional specialty called “Ricciarelli”… Italian for fucking delicious… well maybe not that, but it was good.
Good food. Check. Café an dessert at a nice bar. Check. Beautiful views. Check.
We got back to Bologna at around midnight…all of this traveling… about 200 KM in each direction, cost less than 26 Euro. How? I don’t know.
Most importantly, and the point that I was trying to make from the beginning… Smile, you’re in Italy. So much of this exchange experience goes beyond studying. It’s really about life. To horribly quote two songs which some up my situation right now.
-It’s time like these you learn to live again…
-I’m no superman…(I love Scrubs way too much)
The “not being superman” probably is the most important for me specifically because, I don’t know if its an only child thing or not, I am soooooo independent (sometimes to my own detriment). Realizing that a) its ok to depend on people and b) that you absolutely CAN’T do everything has been so important. I think my biggest problem is realizing that I can’t have/do it all and that I will NEVER be the best at everything I do…this meaning of course that I have to make choices, be it parties on a Friday night, places to go in Europe, or even majors in university. I can't tell you how many times I've overextended myself and tried to be too many places at once, which of course in the end that I missed out on a lot...just in the time I spent to get from point A to point Z.
No more making myself miserable.
The moral of the story, for me at least, is pick wisely, enjoy the choice you made and don't set the bar too high for yourself.
So here I am, learning to live again, learning what makes me “me” in the context of being constantly confronted with things that are new and different (I never thought I would say that about Italy) and learning to just smile and go with the flow.
THAT is what is most important.
Quick updates... little bits and pieces of life here
Here are a series of miscellaneous stories that I couldn’t really put anywhere:
-The other day while out with my friend Mike from Prince Edward Island, I did a shot of absyinth at three in the afternoon…We had gone to a bar called Transylvania (gothic décor and everything) that advertises an all you can eat, five Euro buffet… I’m hi, my name is Matt, I’m a…starving…university student. On the way out we noticed a bottle of absyinth behind the bar. The conversation went a little something like this:
Me: “Oh hey, a bottle of absyinth…wouldn’t it be funny if…”
Mike: “I’ll do it if you do it…”
::Look at each other for a few seconds trying to figure out who is serious::
Me: “Ok! Done.”
Afterwards I happily attended my history of Renaissance theatre class (where I essentially know nothing and then capoeira….Needless to say I crashed pretty early that night.
Moral of the story…You do things on exchange you normally wouldn’t do at home.
-On the exam for history of Renaissance theatre (where I thought to have essentially known nothing) I received full marks...30/30…with “lode” (honors). Don’t ask me how. The exam was oral and in a group. We went around in a circle and expounded upon a pre-pared point, which was well and good by me until of course the girl in front of me chose my topic.
Panic.
Somehow I managed to connect the papacy of Urbano VIII, who happened to be a large patron of the arts and especially theatre, in 16th century Rome, to urban planning and city restructuring.
What?
Afterward the prof went around the circle and asked questions…Here is the thing, as much as oral exams are nice because you have actual contact with the professor, they are also difficult because you can’…frankly, bullshit…as well as on a written exam (hello typical B+ in the Faculty of Arts at McGill). So the first question fired off at me I had no clue about…The second I had a vague idea…something about 16th century caricatures and how they relate to theatre. Anyway, I didn’t know. That’s what I said…
I don’t remember.
In the end, somehow, I got full marks. The prof said, because I was an American and because she could tell I made an effort I deserved it.
GRAZIE!
Moral of the story…Always make the effort and take the ball back to your court (ie, the topic YOU know the most about…that’s, of course, where you’ll shine.)
-In theory (a very comfortable and widely used phrase in Italian that I love) everyone pays for the bus in Bologna (a Euro per ride… not a bad deal). In practice, no one pays. I have spoken to people who have gone five years without paying once. I, being the law abiding dork that I am always pay…simply because I am one of those people who, I don’t know always looks guilty when they break the rules or something, because I ALWAYS GET CAUGHT. So, one night I went to capoeira with some friends (neighbors from across the street, see earlier blog) on the other side of the city, requiring of course the use of mass transit. I didn’t have a dime on me, and of course I wasn’t going to the ATM just for a bus ticket, so I got on. We got to capoeira no problem; I, of course, was slightly (ok, you got me, overly) paranoid the whole time.
Insert nice capoeira class here. I sang. I danced. It was right after being sick so of course I was really happy to be getting back into my groove.
So we hop on the bus on the way back. No problem.
Stop. Hammer time.
You know when your spidey-sense goes off two seconds too late…that is exactly what happened at the next bus stop. I got that sinking feeling in my stomach.
Something was wrong.
“Ragazzi.. biglietti…” The guy flashes his badge for the transport agency of Bologna.
Now the girls that we were with had a ticket that they stamped about eight million times and somehow it was still valid…even though they were sharing it as well. I, however, had “stupid international student” as my only aliby.
Shit. Shit. Shit. What about my passport, my visa? Did they just say they would call the cops?
“I.. don’t know… it’s my first night here…” Ok, I may have been accentuating my accent a bit to get the point across.
So, sometimes, like in class or in other situations, the Randy “lie there like a slug” routine from A Christmas Story works. This time it didn’t.
Ok, I gave in. I’ll pay the fine….40 Euros. We got off in the city centre, and the guy, with my identification in hand, waited as I painfully withdrew 40 Euro from the Bancomat… I gave in without a ticket or anything; this was something that I just wanted to BE OVER….white flag and all, I surrender.
Um, hi, Matt, that’s 40 rides on the bus.
Moral of the story… I CAN NEVER BREAK THE RULES (every since the time when I was four years old and my friend Nick convinced me to put my four fingers in my mouth and say truck, the result being that I went crying to HIS mom to tell him what I had done)…. Period. (Grrr)
Last Sunday, I sat in the main square for about five hours, taking the sun and essentially doing nothing.
It felt so good…’nuff said.
Moral of the story…Do nothing sometimes, especially in sunny places…It’s incredibly gratifying, more so than finishing papers, writing long exams and getting good grades on both.
Amongt other things I went to the opera (incredibly gorgeous and amazing, five minutes by foot from my apartment, where I had a front row seat I had bought that day that normally costs 70 Euro that I got for 15 because I was a student), pleaded with a bouncer to let me and my friends OUT of a bar (all because they messed up and let us in without giving us proper drink tickets that we needed spend ten Euros on or spend a 75 Euro fine…needless to say we were guilty until proven innocent…very frustrating and something I don’t care to delve into too deeply), AND registered for my FINAL year of courses at McGill (and panicked not only about the future, but about the fact that they changed a backdoor way of signing on to the overloaded course registration program, essentially rendering a maybe well known trick useless…).
I’d say after reading all this you’ve been fully updated on my existence apart from eating and sleeping.
France in a week!
-The other day while out with my friend Mike from Prince Edward Island, I did a shot of absyinth at three in the afternoon…We had gone to a bar called Transylvania (gothic décor and everything) that advertises an all you can eat, five Euro buffet… I’m hi, my name is Matt, I’m a…starving…university student. On the way out we noticed a bottle of absyinth behind the bar. The conversation went a little something like this:
Me: “Oh hey, a bottle of absyinth…wouldn’t it be funny if…”
Mike: “I’ll do it if you do it…”
::Look at each other for a few seconds trying to figure out who is serious::
Me: “Ok! Done.”
Afterwards I happily attended my history of Renaissance theatre class (where I essentially know nothing and then capoeira….Needless to say I crashed pretty early that night.
Moral of the story…You do things on exchange you normally wouldn’t do at home.
-On the exam for history of Renaissance theatre (where I thought to have essentially known nothing) I received full marks...30/30…with “lode” (honors). Don’t ask me how. The exam was oral and in a group. We went around in a circle and expounded upon a pre-pared point, which was well and good by me until of course the girl in front of me chose my topic.
Panic.
Somehow I managed to connect the papacy of Urbano VIII, who happened to be a large patron of the arts and especially theatre, in 16th century Rome, to urban planning and city restructuring.
What?
Afterward the prof went around the circle and asked questions…Here is the thing, as much as oral exams are nice because you have actual contact with the professor, they are also difficult because you can’…frankly, bullshit…as well as on a written exam (hello typical B+ in the Faculty of Arts at McGill). So the first question fired off at me I had no clue about…The second I had a vague idea…something about 16th century caricatures and how they relate to theatre. Anyway, I didn’t know. That’s what I said…
I don’t remember.
In the end, somehow, I got full marks. The prof said, because I was an American and because she could tell I made an effort I deserved it.
GRAZIE!
Moral of the story…Always make the effort and take the ball back to your court (ie, the topic YOU know the most about…that’s, of course, where you’ll shine.)
-In theory (a very comfortable and widely used phrase in Italian that I love) everyone pays for the bus in Bologna (a Euro per ride… not a bad deal). In practice, no one pays. I have spoken to people who have gone five years without paying once. I, being the law abiding dork that I am always pay…simply because I am one of those people who, I don’t know always looks guilty when they break the rules or something, because I ALWAYS GET CAUGHT. So, one night I went to capoeira with some friends (neighbors from across the street, see earlier blog) on the other side of the city, requiring of course the use of mass transit. I didn’t have a dime on me, and of course I wasn’t going to the ATM just for a bus ticket, so I got on. We got to capoeira no problem; I, of course, was slightly (ok, you got me, overly) paranoid the whole time.
Insert nice capoeira class here. I sang. I danced. It was right after being sick so of course I was really happy to be getting back into my groove.
So we hop on the bus on the way back. No problem.
Stop. Hammer time.
You know when your spidey-sense goes off two seconds too late…that is exactly what happened at the next bus stop. I got that sinking feeling in my stomach.
Something was wrong.
“Ragazzi.. biglietti…” The guy flashes his badge for the transport agency of Bologna.
Now the girls that we were with had a ticket that they stamped about eight million times and somehow it was still valid…even though they were sharing it as well. I, however, had “stupid international student” as my only aliby.
Shit. Shit. Shit. What about my passport, my visa? Did they just say they would call the cops?
“I.. don’t know… it’s my first night here…” Ok, I may have been accentuating my accent a bit to get the point across.
So, sometimes, like in class or in other situations, the Randy “lie there like a slug” routine from A Christmas Story works. This time it didn’t.
Ok, I gave in. I’ll pay the fine….40 Euros. We got off in the city centre, and the guy, with my identification in hand, waited as I painfully withdrew 40 Euro from the Bancomat… I gave in without a ticket or anything; this was something that I just wanted to BE OVER….white flag and all, I surrender.
Um, hi, Matt, that’s 40 rides on the bus.
Moral of the story… I CAN NEVER BREAK THE RULES (every since the time when I was four years old and my friend Nick convinced me to put my four fingers in my mouth and say truck, the result being that I went crying to HIS mom to tell him what I had done)…. Period. (Grrr)
Last Sunday, I sat in the main square for about five hours, taking the sun and essentially doing nothing.
It felt so good…’nuff said.
Moral of the story…Do nothing sometimes, especially in sunny places…It’s incredibly gratifying, more so than finishing papers, writing long exams and getting good grades on both.
Amongt other things I went to the opera (incredibly gorgeous and amazing, five minutes by foot from my apartment, where I had a front row seat I had bought that day that normally costs 70 Euro that I got for 15 because I was a student), pleaded with a bouncer to let me and my friends OUT of a bar (all because they messed up and let us in without giving us proper drink tickets that we needed spend ten Euros on or spend a 75 Euro fine…needless to say we were guilty until proven innocent…very frustrating and something I don’t care to delve into too deeply), AND registered for my FINAL year of courses at McGill (and panicked not only about the future, but about the fact that they changed a backdoor way of signing on to the overloaded course registration program, essentially rendering a maybe well known trick useless…).
I’d say after reading all this you’ve been fully updated on my existence apart from eating and sleeping.
France in a week!
I HATE my sinuses....period.
Just when you think you start to get the hang of something, life throws you a curve ball.
This past week I had my seasonal “oh my God I want to cut off my nose and pray to the God of Nyquil” sinus infection. Looking back on the week before and retracing my steps that led me to rolling around in a mountain of snot for well over a week, I guess there were a few bad decisions that I had made.
Bad (for my health, but incredibly cool).
Staying out until three in the morning essentially piazza hopping with some of my Erasmus friends. Picture this: via Zamboni, one of the main streets in Bologna filled with people overflowing from the bar right next door to some ancient (were talking 12th century) university buildings. As per usual, everyone just kind of hangs out, drinks outside, and enjoys life. The whole experience was compounded by the lunar eclipse that was taking place the very same night. After exhausting the Piccolo Bar (which, I assure you, wasn’t so piccolo) we made our way to another square in one of the oldest areas of the city; Santo Stefano. This is where it gets dicey but incredibly cool. Just to paint a little backdrop for all of you, the church in Santo Stefano was built by the patron Saint of the city and was consequently where they keep his relics…so we’re talking a pretty important spot. Now imagine this: people just sitting out in front of the church, drinking, smoking (not sure what substance), singing and even dancing a bit…for the Montreal people in the audience it’s kind of like tam tams alla italiana…only in front of the church built by the patron saint of the city…
Sacreligious is the new…something….I guess.
It was so cool though and I couldn’t help but think…my favorite line for this trip:
“Oh my God guys, this is like L’Auberge Espagnole” [geeky noise followed by hand movement adjusting invisible glasses].
So needless to say, sitting outside until all hours of the morning probably didn’t help my sinuses out too much.
Good (for my health and neighborly relations).
I discovered recently that we have access to our roof here in Bologna! This is a very exciting prospect for me because it doesn’t require me climbing the same death defying rickety old ladder that I had to climb in Montréal to get to the roof (sometimes with a beer or garbage full of food in my hands) and affords some unbelievable views of the city and surrounding country side….we can see…everything.
Sweeeeeeet.
So… it was about 70 degrees, sunny and clear….views of rolling hills, the cathedral and two towers…this would be healthy and all natural solution to my nascent illness… some fresh air…maybe actually doing some readings for courses…you get the point.
Some of my apartment mates and I were outside on the terrace/roof enjoying and taking in the warm Italian sun when a lady from a terrace across the way called over to us.
“Hey! Hey! Are you guys students? Where are you from?”
I had a this point pretty much lost my voice, so when I responded it sounded like an old New York City pill popping lady with big hair that somewhat spoke Italian… no matter, I still got my point across.
“Want to see my puppy!?”
Um… YES. The dog was ADORABLE. Although I forgot the name.
Then she started telling us about her life in Bologna, how when she moved in there was no one living here… and about the plants on her terrace….one of which was an olive plant.
“You know, I like it but it attracts too many birds that ruin the terrace…YOU want it?”
Ok… so you just complained about it, but you’re still offering it to us…
“YES!” Delight trumps reason yet again.
“OK I think about it, bye!”
Later on that very same day while one of my apartment mates was studying for her exam outside, all her papers blew away, consequently causing a neighborhood raucous that would lead to us meeting more of our neighbors. She bolted out the door and down the street and was maybe able to recover 1 or 2 pages… but on the bright side, as we were all leaning out the windows (again very Italian) a guy from a way called over to us. He’s an Erasmus student, Portuguese, just kind of interested in meeting people. That is what is incredibly cool about being here, everyone has no one so they are always looking for some one to talk to. Turns out that one of his apartment mates I had already met through another Erasmus event, a Belgian girl who’s kind of teaching herself Italian as she goes….and studies economics. So after yelling back and forth for about 10 minutes we all went our separate ways again. I ended up at their place later on that day because we consequently gave each other little tours of our apartments.
Very cool.
Bad for my health (and I think spiritual well being).
Going toe to toe with a gypsy girl that was aggressively begging for money in the main square probably wasn’t the best of ideas. I was sitting with two English girls who I had just met in the main square (if you find native English speakers here, you are ALWAYS best friends and shouldn’t be ashamed to interrupt and awkwardly barge into conversations to prove your mother tongue). Then a little girl came over, probably 10 or 11, and started climbing on these girls…
“You’re so pretty, you’re so pretty… .some money.”
Now, most of the time, when people ask me for money, I really don’t have any. Even though I probably seemed cold hearted, you probably would’ve done the same.
“OH! We don’t have anything.”
Little girl turns to her friend and whispers something in their language… which I still to this day believe was a curse on my poor sinuses or something… then cursed me out again in Italian… nice huh?
So after unsuccessfully getting some money out of the British girls they moved on, but right before they left, the little girl pretended that she was going to spit on me. Was that to seal the curse or something… I don’t know. I just know that after that I day I started feeling worse.
Good and bad (Good for mental well being, bad for my cold)
So I wasn’t having the best day… anyone who has been or is currently on exchange knows that moods change faster than you can say “study abroad” and you can, within the same day go from loving to where you at to posing that all encompassing question to yourself:
“WHAT AM I DOING HERE?”
Needless to say I was going through one of those mood switches and was also getting sick… for consolation I made my way to the main square (begrudgingly) to access the internet (on a side note, you think that with the limited time and access I have to the internet, I would really be organized and use it efficiently, but unfortunately old habits die hard and I can’t help but open messenger programs as soon as I get there… meaning that I kill any shread of productivity in my body.)
As I got closer to the piazza huffing and puffing and whipping my nose on my sleeve (oh, sinuses) I heard some music that sounded really, really familiar.
PEOPLE WERE DOING CAPOEIRA (ANGOLA) IN THE MAIN SQUARE.
Sick or not, I made my way over…first sat down in the circle and started singing…then eventually worked up the courage to play a wheezy game with someone I had never met before in my life.
It. Was. So. Cool. Wheezing like the former fat kid I once was while doing the mile run or not, I was so happy.
This is all very anti-climatic because needless to say, these were the events that lead up to me being SICK AS A DOG. I have a nice gap in my life that started about a week ago (Monday) and went until I reemerged from my room a few days later.
Ok I wasn’t deathly sick and ended up forcing myself to go to some classes in true McGill style, but I was aslo watching a lot of Scrubs (in French), drinking a lot of tea, and sleeping… a lot. I also tried about every kind of herbal cure you can imagine and have come to the conclusion that Nyquil and synthetic substances always work better in the end... no matter how horrible they are for you.
Ta da! That's my life.
(In other news, in a few weeks I'm going to the French alps with a friend of mine from France....and all his friends from university... don't ask how I get myself into these situations but I'm so psyched for it.... roadtrip à la française here I come.)
This past week I had my seasonal “oh my God I want to cut off my nose and pray to the God of Nyquil” sinus infection. Looking back on the week before and retracing my steps that led me to rolling around in a mountain of snot for well over a week, I guess there were a few bad decisions that I had made.
Bad (for my health, but incredibly cool).
Staying out until three in the morning essentially piazza hopping with some of my Erasmus friends. Picture this: via Zamboni, one of the main streets in Bologna filled with people overflowing from the bar right next door to some ancient (were talking 12th century) university buildings. As per usual, everyone just kind of hangs out, drinks outside, and enjoys life. The whole experience was compounded by the lunar eclipse that was taking place the very same night. After exhausting the Piccolo Bar (which, I assure you, wasn’t so piccolo) we made our way to another square in one of the oldest areas of the city; Santo Stefano. This is where it gets dicey but incredibly cool. Just to paint a little backdrop for all of you, the church in Santo Stefano was built by the patron Saint of the city and was consequently where they keep his relics…so we’re talking a pretty important spot. Now imagine this: people just sitting out in front of the church, drinking, smoking (not sure what substance), singing and even dancing a bit…for the Montreal people in the audience it’s kind of like tam tams alla italiana…only in front of the church built by the patron saint of the city…
Sacreligious is the new…something….I guess.
It was so cool though and I couldn’t help but think…my favorite line for this trip:
“Oh my God guys, this is like L’Auberge Espagnole” [geeky noise followed by hand movement adjusting invisible glasses].
So needless to say, sitting outside until all hours of the morning probably didn’t help my sinuses out too much.
Good (for my health and neighborly relations).
I discovered recently that we have access to our roof here in Bologna! This is a very exciting prospect for me because it doesn’t require me climbing the same death defying rickety old ladder that I had to climb in Montréal to get to the roof (sometimes with a beer or garbage full of food in my hands) and affords some unbelievable views of the city and surrounding country side….we can see…everything.
Sweeeeeeet.
So… it was about 70 degrees, sunny and clear….views of rolling hills, the cathedral and two towers…this would be healthy and all natural solution to my nascent illness… some fresh air…maybe actually doing some readings for courses…you get the point.
Some of my apartment mates and I were outside on the terrace/roof enjoying and taking in the warm Italian sun when a lady from a terrace across the way called over to us.
“Hey! Hey! Are you guys students? Where are you from?”
I had a this point pretty much lost my voice, so when I responded it sounded like an old New York City pill popping lady with big hair that somewhat spoke Italian… no matter, I still got my point across.
“Want to see my puppy!?”
Um… YES. The dog was ADORABLE. Although I forgot the name.
Then she started telling us about her life in Bologna, how when she moved in there was no one living here… and about the plants on her terrace….one of which was an olive plant.
“You know, I like it but it attracts too many birds that ruin the terrace…YOU want it?”
Ok… so you just complained about it, but you’re still offering it to us…
“YES!” Delight trumps reason yet again.
“OK I think about it, bye!”
Later on that very same day while one of my apartment mates was studying for her exam outside, all her papers blew away, consequently causing a neighborhood raucous that would lead to us meeting more of our neighbors. She bolted out the door and down the street and was maybe able to recover 1 or 2 pages… but on the bright side, as we were all leaning out the windows (again very Italian) a guy from a way called over to us. He’s an Erasmus student, Portuguese, just kind of interested in meeting people. That is what is incredibly cool about being here, everyone has no one so they are always looking for some one to talk to. Turns out that one of his apartment mates I had already met through another Erasmus event, a Belgian girl who’s kind of teaching herself Italian as she goes….and studies economics. So after yelling back and forth for about 10 minutes we all went our separate ways again. I ended up at their place later on that day because we consequently gave each other little tours of our apartments.
Very cool.
Bad for my health (and I think spiritual well being).
Going toe to toe with a gypsy girl that was aggressively begging for money in the main square probably wasn’t the best of ideas. I was sitting with two English girls who I had just met in the main square (if you find native English speakers here, you are ALWAYS best friends and shouldn’t be ashamed to interrupt and awkwardly barge into conversations to prove your mother tongue). Then a little girl came over, probably 10 or 11, and started climbing on these girls…
“You’re so pretty, you’re so pretty… .some money.”
Now, most of the time, when people ask me for money, I really don’t have any. Even though I probably seemed cold hearted, you probably would’ve done the same.
“OH! We don’t have anything.”
Little girl turns to her friend and whispers something in their language… which I still to this day believe was a curse on my poor sinuses or something… then cursed me out again in Italian… nice huh?
So after unsuccessfully getting some money out of the British girls they moved on, but right before they left, the little girl pretended that she was going to spit on me. Was that to seal the curse or something… I don’t know. I just know that after that I day I started feeling worse.
Good and bad (Good for mental well being, bad for my cold)
So I wasn’t having the best day… anyone who has been or is currently on exchange knows that moods change faster than you can say “study abroad” and you can, within the same day go from loving to where you at to posing that all encompassing question to yourself:
“WHAT AM I DOING HERE?”
Needless to say I was going through one of those mood switches and was also getting sick… for consolation I made my way to the main square (begrudgingly) to access the internet (on a side note, you think that with the limited time and access I have to the internet, I would really be organized and use it efficiently, but unfortunately old habits die hard and I can’t help but open messenger programs as soon as I get there… meaning that I kill any shread of productivity in my body.)
As I got closer to the piazza huffing and puffing and whipping my nose on my sleeve (oh, sinuses) I heard some music that sounded really, really familiar.
PEOPLE WERE DOING CAPOEIRA (ANGOLA) IN THE MAIN SQUARE.
Sick or not, I made my way over…first sat down in the circle and started singing…then eventually worked up the courage to play a wheezy game with someone I had never met before in my life.
It. Was. So. Cool. Wheezing like the former fat kid I once was while doing the mile run or not, I was so happy.
This is all very anti-climatic because needless to say, these were the events that lead up to me being SICK AS A DOG. I have a nice gap in my life that started about a week ago (Monday) and went until I reemerged from my room a few days later.
Ok I wasn’t deathly sick and ended up forcing myself to go to some classes in true McGill style, but I was aslo watching a lot of Scrubs (in French), drinking a lot of tea, and sleeping… a lot. I also tried about every kind of herbal cure you can imagine and have come to the conclusion that Nyquil and synthetic substances always work better in the end... no matter how horrible they are for you.
Ta da! That's my life.
(In other news, in a few weeks I'm going to the French alps with a friend of mine from France....and all his friends from university... don't ask how I get myself into these situations but I'm so psyched for it.... roadtrip à la française here I come.)
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