Prague At A Glance

So last night we arrived in Prague around midnight. Because of how late it was we had to catch a cab into town and we also didn't really feel like going out that much; The day before (Thursday) was Marcus's 21st birthday and we were out pretty late and he drank a lot and we were all a bit tired.

However we did manage to make it out to a bar last night for A beer. It was a wonderful 26 CZK or the equivalence to 1 Euro!!!

We are headed out now to explore the city and really see what Prague has to offer!

OOOO before I forget;

We flew Lufthansa over here which was my first time on that airline. THE RUMORS ARE TRUE; you do get free alcohol and food even if your flight is 55 minutes long! On the first flight Joe and I actually made friends with the stewardess on the first flight and she ended up giving us extra sandwiches (I had 3 and Joe 2) as well as my beer and Joe's wine, BUT then as we were preparing to land and she came to sit down in her seat next to ours she handed us two bottles of wine!!!! One sparkling and one white... IT WAS AWESOME! And we are flying them on the way back!

Moral of that story; fly Lufthansa because it is sooo worth it!

HERE WE COME PRAGUE!

The Best Place I Have Been So Far!

I know that it seems like every time that I travel somewhere I come back, write a blog post about it, and call it my "favorite" place so far. Actually when we got back from our trip this weekend I was so excited that I Skyped my parents and was informed of this exact thing by my mother who was hard pressed to believe that Crete was my favorite because I have a hard time not calling everywhere I go my favorite... 

HOWEVER!!!

This past weekend I traveled to Chania, Greece on the island of Crete for 4 days with my roommate Marcus, the girls; Ellie, Erica, Cierra, and Sara, as well as Jerelle and Emily! The eight of us had to spend what was easily my worst night of sleep since I have been in Europe in the Milano train station, but after that slight hick-up we had an absolutely awesome weekend.

This photo was taken before I left for Crete;

Notice not only my pale skin but my excellent household skills; chopping tomatoes, wearing an apron and all!

This is a photo of me taken on the third day in Crete (remember this is 5 days later);

Notice my amazing tan, but almost my exquisite fashion sense!

Not that we have established the fact that I got super dark (yes that photo looks like I am red, but really its just straight DARK now!), but I figure I would talk about some of the really cool things that we did while there.

When we arrived the first day and a half we spent just relaxing on the beach and loving life! The water there was absolutely amazing and SUPER clear. Our hotel was less than a five minute walk from three different beaches! One was amazing for sunrises, but was a tad bit windy, another was what I liked to call "squash ball heaven" where almost every Greek on the beach was in a speedo and paddling balls back and forth with each other! And the third beach was our favorite!!! It was a nice and relaxing beach with some amazing rocks surrounding the cove. It is really hard to describe how beautiful Greece actually was so I apologize but I am going to be using a good bit of photos.

The beach we spent most of our time on.

One of the cool things about the beach was the cliffs that we went hiking on that were off the right side of this beach. It was a connection of 3 or 4 caves as well as straight drop offs right into the water below. One day Jerelle, Marcus, and I took a few hours to go explore the caves and check out what was over there, and we were not disappointed at all. It turned out that we came across some cool caves as well as some small lagoons that housed some pretty warm water!

Headed to the second lagoon from passage between the two.

Exploring the edge of the rocks that separate the ocean and the lagoons.

 We spent a few hours climbing around and checking out the rock ledges that surrounded the beach there, and actually went all the way to the point where the ledge turns and heads back towards shore.

I also got a chance to do a little bit of free climbing. The rocks there had lots of grab holes and decent foot support spots to be able to free climb myself all over the ledges. Although the water wasn't deep, where I was climbing was not high enough to have done any real damage if I had fallen!

It is hard to tell in this photo, but right there I was hanging over that second part of that rock and then directly over the water. The bit of rock that is at the bottom of the photo was actually a separate rock where Marcus shot this photo from.

I was very happy that I had brought my Vibram Five Fingers because if I hadn't I wouldn't have been able to climb on such course rock!

One day we rented bikes and took a really cool biking trip inland and to a really pretty lake positioned just under the mountains. In fact besides the overall beauty of Crete the one thing that surprised me the most was the fact that the island had such big mountains on it! To put it in perspective it was 75-80 degrees Fahrenheit everyday and there was still snow on the mountains. Actually, there was a gorge that I wanted to go hiking in but because the ice was just starting to really melt off the gorge was full of water and closed off! So rather we took the chance to rent bike and it was my favorite thing we did during the trip.

Renting the bikes and heading out for a day on the trails.

The lake ended up being AWESOME! We had a really good lunch there and hung out and just looked over the lake and back at the mountains. The food there was really good and it was a great place to just hang out for about an hour and enjoy the time that we were spending in Greece.

The city itself was a really beautiful place and I was really glad that we were able to spend some time there walking around, the girls went shopping, we explored a castle and the lighthouse, and we had lunch and dinner there two nights. The port itself reminded me a lot of Portofino, but much prettier and a lot warmer! The city itself was much prettier at night

It was an absolute blast and I really enjoyed myself. It was really hard to take photos that showed how amazing the views truly were.Truthfully the one thing that I am starting to recognize more than anything else is that regardless of how many photos I take I can never seem to capture how amazing it truly is, and really the amazing part about studying abroad is the experience of the things you do with the people you do them with because you can't actually capture those inside of photos.

O and I won't even say anything about the sunsets.... I'll just give you a few photos!

Headed to Prague, Czech Republic tomorrow for what will be a 5 day 21st birthday celebration for my roommate Marcus whose birthday is today! HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAN and I am really fortunate that I got the chance to have you as a roommate and experience some of the things that we have done together!

Italian Wedding Anyone??

I have been very lucky since I have been here to have met many Italians and experienced some really cool things because of my relationship with those people. For example; I went to a really awesome chestnut festival in Cuneo last semester with my Italian roommate and some of "our Italian friends" (his friends that I like to call my friends). Another one is that I have had the chance to consistently play soccer with some Italian guys almost weekly last semester, and a few times this semester. I have been invited to Christmas at my professors house and spent a week there with him and his family. And next Wednesday, the 25th of April, is an Italian holiday and I believe that we are going to make a trip to the Cinque Terre and spend the day at our friend Matteo's house.

However, today I received the coolest invitation from any Italian since I have been here; A wedding invitation! Although that might not sound super cool, I can assure you that IT IS AWESOME!!!

I happened to meet him while at my professors house of spring break when he came over for dinner one night. The three of us (my professor, his friend, an

d myself) had some really great conversation about life, religion, family, politics, school, work, and history. In fact, we started eating dinner around 9:30, and talked well into 1:00 am! We talked about some very interesting things that night and I actually evolved some of my views on some political and religious topics because of the conversations that we had. We also spent some time talking about him getting married this summer. At one point he casually say that he wanted to invite me to their wedding! 

AND HERE IT IS!!!! - Today I received a very formal invitation to their wedding!

Unfortunately I don't think I will be able to make it to the wedding as I will be traveling around Italy with my family at the time (may try to buy a ticket to go up to Torino for the day and attent the wedding), however it is still a great honor to be invited. One of the things that I really wanted to do while here in Italy was go to an Italian wedding, and here is my opportunity!

In other news:

Last night we went and saw Pinocchio, the children's opera, and it was an absolute pleasure. I will try and put together a blog post about it in the next few days, but what I loved about the play was how interactive it was. There was a group of little kids in a section of the Opera house seated amongst everyone else and where actually a part of the play! In fact, it reminded me a lot of the scene in "Finding Neverland" where the orphans show up and absolutely change the dynamics of the crowd by laughing and having fun!

 Also, Tonight we will be going to Milano to spend the night playing charades in the park so that we can make our  flight to Crete, Greece tomorrow at 7am! We will be there tomorrow, all day Saturday and Sunday, and we don't leave until around 5pm on Monday. I am really excite to spend 4 days on the beach relaxing with some friends and enjoying Greece.

Italian Style Haircut

So today I got my haircut for the second time since I have been here in Italy. The first time was at the beginning of this semester after letting it grow out for about 5 months, but today I decided it was just beginning to look a little too long.

Today when I went to get my haircut I had somewhat of a revelation on the differences between American culture and Italian culture. I haven't talked about this before on my blog, but in order to graduate a year early like I am going to I had to take one more marketing class. But because I was going to be here all year, the only way I could do this was by completing an independent study while I was here. So that is exactly what I am doing, and my independent study is on the differences in sales cultures in America and Italy, and one aspect of my paper is recognizing the overall cultural differences between American culture and Italian culture. Here is a perfect example of the differences;

Allora, today when I walked in to get my haircut they welcomed me by taking my scarf, jacket, and cardigan and followed it up by seating me in a chair and bringing me a caffe! Yes that is right, for no reason except that I am awesome they brought me a caffe to drink while I waited for the guy to cut my hair. I don't know why it isn't this way in America, but it was a pleasant surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed! After living in Italy for 7 months now, my need / desire for coffee on an average day his rose dramatically, therefor when I was asked if I wanted a caffe my reaction was something like this;

After my caffe I spent about 5 minutes trying to translate what I wanted with my hair; potentially the hardest translation ever because I know no words that have to do with cutting hair, and didn't bring my laptop like last time!

Then the boring part; I sat there while the guy cut my hair. We actually chatted a while about America and Italy and traveling and it allowed me to practice some of my Italian for my test tomorrow.

After he was done cutting my hair the nice lady shampooed and washed my hair a second time! It was lovely and I enjoyed it!

Moral of the story: get your hair cut in Italy!

All in all it was a very successful trip today; one that I will remember until I forget about it.

A Weekend In Aosta

To start this blog off as a tribute to The Titanic which will celebrate its 100th anniversary of sinking this coming Sunday, and mainly because I can, here is "My Heart Will Go On" By Celine Dion.

HOPE YOU ENJOY IT AS MUCH AS I DO!!

                                        
 
Last semester we took a day trip to Aosta to do a little bit of hiking and walking around the city and I absolutely loved it. It is such a special city because it is located in this valley that is surrounded on every side by beautiful and massive mountains including Mont Blanc. We went up to Pila (the ski resort town of Aosta) and had an awesome picnic lunch and hung out.

BEST PICNIC EVER.... No argument!

However this time my experience was a little bit different, and in my opinion a lot cooler! Since the beginning of this semester we have met our neighbors Silvia and Francesca, and spent a good bit of time hanging out with them and enjoying practicing Italian with them over the delicious dinners that they sometimes cook for us! Luckily for us, Silvia is from Aosta, and invited us to her house one weekend. Unfortunately we were not able to stay as long as we had originally hoped to stay for, but non-the-less it was still a good time.

Marcus and the Roman Amphitheater surrounded by mountains

Marcus and I arrived in Aosta a few hours before Silvia because we didn't have class on Friday and she did. We took these few hours as a chance to grab some foccacia and after some gelato, walk around the city, and even check out the Roman ruins. I have now been to Rome (the heart of the Roman Empire), Paestum (where you can see a Roman civilization surrounding the preexisting Greek temples), and other places around Italy where some Roman ruins are visible, but speaking specifically on location and the surrounding beauty, this is by far the prettiest location that the Roman Empire decided to make camp!

 Friday night we went to a really cool pizzeria for dinner that on the inside was designed like a ship. The whole feel was very nautical, and just gave off a very unique vibe. It was interesting to me because in America it is much easier to find restaurants that are "theme" based, however this was the first restaurant that I can remember going to here that was all based off of a specific theme. The best part of the place was its pizza though. When they came out the pizzas didn't even fit on the plates that they were served on. It was hanging off the edge by 1/2" - 1" all of the way around. It was by far the biggest pizza that I have ever eaten since I have been here in Italy. I was worried that I was not going to finish it, but then I realized I was not going to tarnish my reputation of finishing my pizza AND SOME at every dinner I have ever had here in Italy!

After dinner Silvia and her boyfriend took us to two really cool bars. The first one was in the heart of the city and had potentially the coolest bar ever; the bar was made out of an old VW bus! It was a really chill place with lots of lounge chairs and couches in the basement. My roommate Marcus goes to school in Chico and apparently Saturday was Cesar Chavez day, so we took it as a chance to have a couple Coronas in his honor! There was also a Foosball table in the basement, so we played a few rounds [ I actually am worried about my level of Foosball, ping pong, pool, and other games because I have not played them in over 7 months now and they may just embarrass me! ]. The second place we went was much more local pub that was actually the courtyard and the bottom floor of a huge house in Aosta. Apparently the guy who owns it is British and most of the workers are from Scotland, but the beer was cheap, the people were plentiful, and it is enough of the way off of the beaten path that if you don't live there you wouldn't find it, so it is somewhat of a "local" bar to the young generation of Aosta.

On Saturday Silvia took us to Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe, and we were able to check that out as well as a few small towns along the way! The mountain is so big that when you see it in the distance it looks like you are right up upon it, but then you drive for another 30 minutes until you finally reach it! I have a hard time even describing the views, so I am just going to show you some of the cool pictures that I took;

All in all it was a really great weekend that I was able to spend with some really great people in potentially my favorite mountain area of Italy! It is sort of sad to think that will potentially be the last time that I go to Aosta, but I am thankful for at least being able to go not once, but twice, and having seen the things I did when I went.

THE BIGGEST STUDY ABROAD PROBLEM!!!!

So I initially planned to study abroad at the end of college because I thought that it would be a great way to end my college career.... Turns out that I have been liking it so much that I might not graduate in time.....

Long story short; I was notified last night after I was asleep that I needed to apply for graduation by the end of the day... Yes I should have known to look at this myself, but no, I didn't think that I would get a 4 hour notification on this.

Going to try and figure this out with my university as I WILL be done with school and ready to move on to the real world.

BIT OF GOOD NEWS: If I can get this resolved and graduate on time I believe that I will be coming back to Italy this summer to take a seasonal job here for 3 - 4 months!

A Day Trip To The Beach and an Eight Hour Return Trip!

A few weeks ago I went to Noli, Italy for a day trip to the beach with a few of my friends. Although it isn't the closest place to visit for us, it is down close to Genoa in the Liguria region, it is only a 22 euro round trip train ticket! It happened to be a really warm and clear day and so we decided that it would be a great excuse to get out of the city and switch it up for a day!

Orange tree in the city

Lemon tree in someones yard

The city of Noli is a really pretty place; it is a small beach town with houses that remind you of a more residential version of Florida's coast cities. There were a few homes that had lemon trees out front, and the heart of the city had orange trees everywhere. Although Noli was a small city, the pedestrian only zone inside of the city was actually rather large in comparison to the size of the city itself. It also had a really nice public beach access point which allowed us to get to the heart of the beach in a very short amount of time.

 The beach there was actually one of the best beaches that I have been on since I have been in Italy!

SIDE NOTE: Italian beaches are rocky, not sandy, and therefor your feet always hate you when you spend too much time at the beach. However, the beach at Noli was surprisingly not as bad because of the very small size of the pebbles, giving the feeling of it more like sand than rocks.

Our wonderful view for the day

Our spot on the beach

Marcus and I skipping rocks

Relaxing on the beach

The day itself was really awesome. Even though the water was SUPER cold we all decided to get in and take a dip. Marcus and I skipped rocks for a while (shout out to Cierra who also knows what she is doing!) and then we just relaxed and listened to music. We spent about 3-4 hours hanging out on the beach until a storm started to come through. We tried waiting the storm out, but after a long lunch and some more waiting we just decided to head home early, but we weren't so lucky........

So we waited......

And waited......

AND WAITED!!!!

Ended up being over and hour and a half that we waited at the train station. Luckily I was able to understand what some of the people on the train were saying, and one of the train stations on the way back to Torino had been struck by lightning and the wires there were down; making it impossible to cross as a train, and leaving us 2 hours from home for almost 2 hours!

Listening to Shout and having some fun!

Eventually they got everything fixed, and we managed to have a little bit of fun with it! The train that finally took us home was ABSOLUTELY the fullest train I have been on since I have been in Italy. In fact, we didn't even try to find seats, but rather we came across a little area between two of the carts that we all were able to fit in, and settled down there. Marcus pulled out his iPod and speakers, and we just listened to music and played some fun games to pass the 2 hour train ride home.


We got back home to Torino just after midnight (original plan was to be back by 6!) and had dinner just around 1am! Although the second half of the day wasn't exactly what we had planned, it was an absolute blast, and I really enjoyed myself.

Shout out to everyone back in Cincy!! Miss you all and see you soon! #mycity #rep

Italian Opera

I wrote a blog post a few Sundays ago about Rigoletto; the Italian opera that I went to that day, to inform everyone that I was going, and I wanted  to follow it up now even though it is a little bit delayed. I just had such a great time there that I really wanted to talk about it. In fact, we are looking into going back and seeing Pinocchio on the 18th of April because the tickets are pretty cheap, and we would actually understand everything that was going on just because we know the story of Pinocchio.

The plan started out for it to be a lot of our friends going as a group on a Tuesday night here in Torino, but we recognized shortly after that we had our 1st Midterm in our Italian II class on Wednesday. Therefor, we wanted to go on Sunday night, but because it was the last day of spring break some people had not made it back into town yet, some tired from their travels, some had made plans to do other things, and some just backed out. In the end it was only Ellie and I, so we turned it into a fun date of just the two of us and it ended up being absolutely awesome, and a really cool experience.

The chandelier on the ceiling!

Our view of the stage

Full house for Rigoletto

The mustard man!!

It ended up being good for us that I decided to read the summary of the opera before we went, otherwise our Italian level would not have allowed us to really understand what was going on. [My Italian is really getting good, and am able to really talk to people, but when it comes to Old Italian; dropping off endings, running words that don't go together together, and things like this... well lets just say its like seeing a play in a dialect of Italian: I was able to understand about 50% of the words spoken!] The opera itself, although the only one I have ever been to, was very impressive to me, and I was really impressed with the main lady. Her voice was absolutely incredible and I really enjoyed hearing her sing.

One of the coolest parts of the whole thing was that we got lucky and had our own box so we ended up with a pretty awesome experience. Therefore, we were able to take a few videos while the opera was going on! Although the videos that we were able to take are awesome, they don't even to begin to do it justice. The sound of the performers was just incredible and something that I will remember for a long time. However, I would feel bad if I didn't even try to let you all hear what it sort of sounded like!! So here are a few videos that we were able to take.I apologize that they are crooked, but when we filmed them it was on an iPhone, and now this is what they are!

She was absolutely amazing and she had potentially the best voice of anyone I have ever heard sing.. EVER! The other really cool moment was when the famous opera song "La Donna e Mobile" was sung. I was hoping that we would be able to hear it, but I wasn't 100% sure if we were going to be able to, so when it happened I got really excited!

I am really excited to potentially go back and see Pinocchio on the 18th!!