a blog about cultural differences

Vernazza, the fourth Cinque Terre town

This blog entry is going to be a doozy. I will try to remember everything as best as I can, because apparently I can’t stay dedicated enough to my blog writing to update once a week.

The second week of April, I picked up my family in the Venice train station, and we returned to Ferrara for 2 days, then went to Florence for a night to meet up with Dad’s second cousin Kelly and her family, where they own a really cool bed and breakfast right in the middle of the center square. On Easter morning, we watched a really old Florentine tradition that involved blowing up (okay, not really… there were just a lot of fireworks coming out of it) a 400-year-old “cart” that was pulled into the center square by oxen that didn’t look too pleased. I also got to meet my 5 year old third cousin, Alessandro, and we bonded. We then left that afternoon for le Cinque Terre (the “five lands”), which are five small, picturesque fishing villages on Italy’s west coast on the Ligurian Sea. We spent two nights in the first town, Riomaggiore, and spent the second day there hiking above the towns–however, we only made it to Vernazza, the fourth town, before we decided to take the boat back and change for dinner. Then, we headed north to Lake Como and the small town of Varenna, which I felt like was overpopulated by honeymooners (although it was incredibly beautiful). Our last morning there, we took a cooking class about 10 minutes outside of Varenna, and getting there involved going up winding mountain roads in the rain (fun!) and then we took the train to Milan, where we caught our train to Venice for our last few days of vacation. Our first whole day in Venice was actually spent with a quirky tour guide, Paolo, who drove us to the Dolomites and showed us Cortina, where we ate lunch. After lunch, of course, we took lots of potential Christmas card pictures–Paolo became our photographer, and pretended to be the paparazzi… like I said, he was quirky. Our final day of vacation was spent touring Venice’s main attractions as well as its back “roads,” before everyone had to catch a bus to the airport at 4. I was sad to see them go, but I was glad they came to visit me–Mom kept saying how lucky we were to have amazing weather (minus the one day it rained, but we were inside all day, so it didn’t matter) so of course, within minutes of returning to Ferrara, it began to downpour–and continued to do so for most of the week.

After vacation, I had to turn my focus to final papers and exams–which are never fun to do. In typical “me” fashion, I ended up writing most of them at the last minute, and everything was going smoothly until the night before my medieval history paper was due. Of course, this was the one that I had tried the hardest on, because I had heard from first semester students that the teacher was a bit harsh with his grading, and I had been working on it for the entire day before it was due–I had about 1600 words, and needed 2000–so I felt pretty confident that I could take a break for a little bit, and come back and finish it later. So, I texted Vassilis asking if he wanted to go out, and I met him in Piazza Ariostea at 8:30. We ended up running into some of his friends that I hadn’t met, and it took about 20 minutes of my awkward silence until one of them was like, “but wait, aren’t you Italian?” and when I shook my head no, he was like, “Oh! I’m so sorry, I thought you were and you could understand us.” I could understand them a little, but I was just trying to be polite anyway. We stayed for an hour, and his friends bought us both another drink (bad idea) even though we insisted we didn’t want anything. After they left and I was able to spend about an hour with Vassilis by myself, his sisters called and were like “You’re late for dinner.” So I went to go see Kelsey, and got a cornetto, and got home around 12:15. When I returned to my room, I immediately heard a strange clicking noise coming from my desk. I thought that my iPod had finally died, because it sometimes makes a similar noise when it’s trying to change songs–but it was coming from my computer. I was able to save (three times over) my paper, and change my MSN status to online, but when I went to go open an internet window, the dock froze, so I manually shut down my computer and tried to restart it. The computer restarted, but instead of coming up with the normal apple startup logo, there was a grey folder with a question mark on it. So… my almost finished paper that was due at 2pm the following day was trapped inside my computer that wouldn’t start up–reason to freak out, don’t you think? I immediately sent an e-mail to the professor from Maria’s computer, and he surprisingly took sympathy on me, and told me not to worry about it (I also happened to have an exam in his class that same day). I did end up having to rewrite my entire paper later… which sucked, because I knew it wasn’t at all the paper that I wrote before… I just hope that the professor will take my misfortune into account and go a little easy on me…

I went to the office with Luciana and Giuseppe, where Luciana proceeded to open up my computer and take out the hard drive to see if we could connect it to one of the computers there and download a program to help save any of my data. After a few hours, we gave up, and took the computer back to the place where I had the logic board replaced earlier, and they said they would try to save anything they could off the hard drive and let me know by the afternoon. Meanwhile, I went to go take Luke’s exam, and he went to go talk to Richard about how to handle the paper MIA situation. By Friday, the computer repair shop had given me two options: to pay them 100 euros to see if they could recover my data, or to have them send it apple, get a new hard drive because mine was still (thankfully) under warranty and lose all my data… I chose the second option. I had to wait almost 2 weeks to get it back BUT when I did get it back (on Thursday) they had upgraded me to the new operating system and given me the entire Adobe CS4 Creative Suite (photoshop, indesign, dreamweaver…) for free. That’s huge. Especially for me, I can make a lot of use of these programs as a magazines major. Anyway, I lost all my documents and photos (those thankfully are still in little tiny thumbnails on my iPod), however, I was able to recover most all of my music thanks to Margie, Claire, and a program I downloaded.

Thankfully, I didn’t have a completely boring two weeks without my computer–the first week, I went to London to visit Margie (my roommate) during the last week of her program. It was a nice change, being able to speak english, although for one night, I met a Japanese girl and a girl from Milan who were talking to each other in Italian when I got out of the shower–so they said hi to me, and I was like, nono, I also speak Italian (it was quite cool). We saw so many things, rode on the London Eye, visited Buckingham and saw the changing of the guard, walked across Abbey Road, went to the Tower of London, saw Spring Awakening–it was all amazing.

Anyways, I returned to Ferrara two Fridays ago, and since I forgot that Europe was on 24-hour time, I booked my flight for 7 in the morning. Stansted Airport is about an hour and a half outside the city, and I had to take a taxi from my hostel to the bus station, and since international flights require you to be at the airport 2 hours before, I had no sleep. I went to bed at midnight after packing, and woke up at 2:30 so I could leave the hostel at 3am. Thankfully, I’m pretty okay with traveling by myself, and everything went surprisingly well.

This past week has been incredibly hot–90s all week, and my apartment doesn’t have air conditioning (or a fan!) so it’s been slightly miserable and boring–plus I didn’t have my computer, so I had no music to listen to or anything… I got so bored I cleaned my room. For those of you that know me… that’s huge. Of course, it’s dirty again, clothes are everywhere because I keep avoiding laundry, but for those of you that know me, that’s typical. Most of you probably don’t know this, because I’ve been absolutely horrible with updating this, but I’m staying in Ferrara until July 9th mainly to keep improving my Italian, but also because I didn’t find a job in the states (I had a Skype interview with a camp I went to as a kid, but that didn’t work out). You’ll never get me to admit that I stayed in Ferrara for Vassilis, in case you’re wondering. Originally, I was going to try and be an aupair of sorts for a family in Padova, but I wasn’t able to stay as long as they needed me, so I’ll teaching Maria English in exchange for being able to stay there until the beginning of July. That being said, I’m sure I have an interesting summer ahead of me!

Ciao!