I don't speak Spanish, but neither does Barcelona

We left La Rochelle yesterday morning and began our 13-hour day of car and train travel to get to Barcelona. Stéphane generously drove us to Bordeaux, where we got a train to Narbonne, and transfered to another train that took us to Barcelona. The train Bordeaux-Narbonne train ride was mostly just countryside, but the Narbonne-Barcelona trip was filled with several breathtaking views. We rode through the Pyrenees mountains, and the train took us along the Mediterranean coast for most of the ride. We also saw a beautiful sunset. It pretty much justified such a long day of travel!

I only had one full day in Barcelona (which was today) because we decided to extend our time in La Rochelle by a few days. So today we really packed everything in. We got up early and took a quick swim in the pool on the roof of our hotel (since we changed the dates of our time in Barcelona, we switched hotels, and got a great last-minute deal on a better hotel) and then went out to see the city. First stop was La Sagrada Familia, Antonio Gaudì's beautiful, and still unfinished, cathedral. In the afternoon we took a 3-hour bike tour of the city. The bike tour was wonderful, because not only did it give us exercise, which we seriously lacked yesterday, but it took us all over the city in one afternoon. There's no other way I would have been able to see all of Barcelona in one day. We saw the Gothic Quarter, the Olympic Village, had drinks on the beach in Barceloneta, saw Gaudì's two apartment buildings...it was great. Although it was a bit humid - finally, in Barcelona, we've found the heat we've anticipated this whole trip - but there were enough clouds so that the sun wasn't beating down on us. Our tour guide was a Belgium man named Wim who was pretty low-key, in a good way, and we enjoyed his take on Barcelona.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant that's actually a culinary school, much like the CIA in Hyde Park, which we had heard people usually line up around the block for. Luckily, it's Sunday, so we got in almost right away. It was delicious. We sat next to a couple from Italy, and spoke to them in a half-English, half-Italian conversation. It was good practice for tomorrow, when I leave for Rome, since all these different languages have really been messing with my head. I needed practice with Italian!

Tomorrow my one goal is to buy a copy of The Little Prince in Catalàn. Last summer I decided to collect copies of The Little Prince in different languages. So far, with the help of my generous and well-traveled friends, I have 8 copies. All of the bookstores were closed today because it was Sunday, but my flight to Rome is in the afternoon, so I'm optimistic that I'll find a copy in the morning!

PICTURES!

The ceiling of the Paris Opera, designed by Marc Chagall

I was able to burn a CD of pictures at the supermarket yesterday, so now I can post some here! I did my best to limit myself to just a few...there are 546 on the CD. Here are 14 of the best ones. Sadly, I can't figure out how to reorder them, so they're not chronological!

Lucas and Robin

Sunset in La Rochelle

La Rochelle Harbor

View of Montmartre and Sacre Coeur from the Musée d'Orsay balcony

The Eiffel Tower

Gabrielle Street

Notre Dame

The table set for lunch in La Rochelle, I love all of the colors!

Amsterdam

A canal in Amsterdam

Another point of note: after I finished writing in my previous entry how I'm picking up so much French, etc, etc, I remembered a faux pas I made the other night. I was playing cards with Pamela, Robin, and Lucas (they love this game called PIG, similar to SPOONS if you know that one, except you stick your tongue out instead of grabbing a spoon from the center), and instead of saying "beaucoup," which means "a lot," I said "beau cul," which means "beautiful butt."

Ha. Ha. Ha. You can imagine how much the boys laughed at that one!

La Rochelle, city by the sea

Right now I'm in La Rochelle staying at the home of our family friends. La Rochelle is a beautiful port city, with a beach and a marina. But even more than the scenery, I'm enjoying living with French people and working on my French skills! The boys, Robin (13) and Lucas (11) are a lot of fun. (Their names sound so much better in French than in English...actually almost everyone's does!) They don't speak any English, so they're patient with my limited French skills and correct me when I'm wrong, and teach me a lot too. I'm managing pretty well with my high school French - there's a mistake in every sentence but I can carry on a conversation, and even sometimes understand when Robin and Lucas babble to each other. They don't make fun of me when I speak incorrectly in French, but Robin has taken to calling me "Schtroumpfette," the French word for a smurf (smurfette?), because I wore a blue dress with a blue zip-up hoodie the other day. Apparently I have quite a few items of blue clothing because he's been able to call me that every day since!

Two days ago we went to the small beach town called La-Faute-sur-mer, where Robin and Lucas' grandparents have a summer home. Unfortunately it was cloudy and drizzly that day so we couldn't go swimming, but we went to the beach and played a version of dodgeball. There were a few members of their family at La Faute who don't speak any English so again I got to exercise my French skills. We had a very elaborate lunch that day - the midday meal is the big event in Europe - with fresh vegetables from the garden in La Faute and delicious mussels, and Pineau that Kada, the boys' grandfather, made himself!

The following day was another new experience for me - my first (and second) motorcycle ride! Robin and Lucas' father, Stéphane, owns a motorcycle, and when we all went out to dinner, he gave me a ride on his motorcycle while everyone else followed in the car. It was beautiful being on the highway at sunset, riding past fields and ending up at the beach where the restaurant was. But the ride back home was beautiful too, because you could see the stars! I promised Stéphane I wouldn't tell how fast we were going (and I don't know the conversion into miles anyway) but it was pretty fast. Très cool.

Yesterday my mom left for Paris, where her flight flew out of this morning. Yesterday evening, Yannick and Stéphane took me and Pamela on a bike ride through some little back roads all the way to the sea. It was magnificent! The late-day sunlight was perfect; we passed a big field, and behind the field were little white houses with reddish brown roofs, and behind the houses you could glimpse the sea. When we got to the sea, it was low tide. That particular coast is rocky, not sandy, and you could see the 2.9km-long bridge leading to the island of Île-de-Ré in the distance. And last night, instead of dinner, Pamela and I took the boys biking into town for some ice cream by the harbor.

I'll leave you with this: Robin and Lucas say that we speak to each other very fast in English, so I asked them what they hear when we talk, and Lucas said "blah blah blee bloo," and I told them that I hear French as "jjjjohh johnh," that very nasal sound. That conversation made me think of this clip from Family Guy, which I then showed to the boys. (Full credit to Lael for finding it.) Hopefully I'll have more success than that in Italy!

I love Paris in the summer, when it drizzles

I write this sitting at our friends' computer in La Rochelle, because we didn't get a chance to go to an internet cafe in Paris. So I'll have to summarize a few days in this post, if I can manage to type it all, because some of the letters on French computers are in different places and it's throwing me off a bit!

In fact, the weather in Paris wasn't that bad, despite the title of this post. It rained a bit the first evening we were there, and it poured yesterday when we took the train to La Rochelle, but otherwise it was warmer than Amsterdam and partly cloudy. We spent three nights in Paris, but really only two days. On our first morning we went to visit Notre Dame, which was only a five minute walk from our hotel in Saint Germain, near the Latin Quarter. We saw the inside of Notre Dame but decided against climbing to the towers, because the wait on the line would be an hour and a half!

After lunch, we went to the Musée d'Orsay, mecca of Impressionism. I could live in that museum. The building is a former train station, so the architecture alone is beautiful. But the paintings are extraordinary! Renoir, Degas, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh...really, I could take up residence there and never get bored. We took a guided tour focused on the Impressionist paintings (the museum's collection goes from the 1840s until 1914) and the tour guide was great. She was very animated and enjoyed occasionally imitating the figures in the painting to help us better understand!

That evening we had a picnic dinner in front of the Eiffel Tower, and at dusk, took a boat ride down the Seine river to see the buildings all lit up. It was breathtakingly beautiful to see the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Place de la Concorde, and especially Notre Dame lit up at night. After the boat ride, we decided to walk back to our hotel instead of taking the metro, since we hadn't taken the metro to get to the Eiffel Tower, so it couldn't be that far the other way, right? WRONG. We left the Eiffel Tower around 11:15pm and got to our hotel just before 12:30am. Our legs were très très tired!

The next day we got a later start and took a picnic lunch to Montmartre, the former artist's colony of Paris, which is up on a hill and provides a beautiful view of the city. We also went inside the Basilisque du Sacre-Coeur, a neo-Byzantine style cathedral. We also passed Rue Gabrielle (Gabrielle Street) and took the requisite pictures there. Then we walked to the Moulin Rouge, again to take pictures, and took the metro to the Opèra Garnier, the famous opera house home to the Phantom and to Degas' ballerinas. We went inside the opera house, which really is exquisite, and saw a special exhibit called "Image(s) of Dance", featuring costumes, photos, paintings, and sculptures of the dancers of the opera house.

That night we went to dinner in the Latin Quarter, but first I got a single scoop of mango sorbet in a cone from a famous ice cream parlor on Île-St-Louis. It tasted like real mangos in a cone.

Yesterday morning, in the rain, we didn't wander far from our hotel before we went to the train station, because we don't have an umbrella and refuse to buy one just for the sake of having it, at an elevated price for tourists. We had lunch at a cafe nearby, and the lunch wasn't really worth remarking on, but the chocolat chaud (hot chocolate) was amazing. It was really dark chocolate, cocoa I guess it would be, with foam and more cocoa powder on the top. Mmmm...

So now I'm in La Rochelle, trying to make the best of my limited French skills. I learned a new phrase last night: Je pige que dalle! It's slang for Je ne comprends pas, meaning I don't understand. Comes in handy!

And look at that, I managed to write another essay, even on a foreign keyboard, typing at half the speed. Today we're going to be given the grand tour of La Rochelle by our friends...in mixed French and English I'm sure, which is the best way!

But we'll always have Paris.

Rain on the Amstel River and Dinner on a Houseboat

One thing I was a bit unprepared for in Amsterdam is the weather. It's pretty chilly here at night, and even during the day today because it was drizzling. I've already dug out my corduroy jacket that I wasn't expecting to break out until the fall in Bologna, and long pants as well. But the trade-off is that since we're so far north, the sun starts going down around 9:15pm, and it doesn't get completely dark here until 10pm, which is amazing!

Today we saw the Anne Frank House, and our plan to get there early and get in quickly was carried off successfully. The museum was very moving, I'm really glad we got to see it. I particularly enjoyed all the photos and short film clips of Anne, her family, and interviews with people who knew her. The diary that they had on display was actually a temporary reproduction because of climate control issues in the museum, but it affected me nevertheless, just to see it right there.

After that we returned our bikes, which we didn't really get to ride this morning because of the rain, and then walked around, grabbed falafel for lunch, and walked around some more. We walked all through a shopping street (no bikes or cars allowed, which of course makes it a novelty in Amsterdam!) and passed the Royal Palace and several churches. Mom and I decided that since we hadn't gone to a coffeeshop, we should at least try those little green cannabis lollipops we kept seeing all over. Alas, they did nothing, but it was a fun Amsterdam experience anyway. 

We went to Linda's houseboat for dinner, which is actually bigger than our apartment in the city. (If you've been there, I'm sure you aren't surprised.) The boat actually has a concrete foundation, sort of like a barge, so it doesn't rock at all in the water. Some houseboats' floors are level with the water, but this one was a bit below the water, so you looked out the window and the water was right there. At one point, two swans came to the window and peered in on us!

We've been filling up on stroopwaffels, Dutch cookies that are thin, flat waffels filled with sticky sweet syrup in the middle. Yum. We bought a package of mini stroopwaffels to take on our four hour train ride to Paris tomorrow. 

I AMsterdam (are you?)

Sorry for the corny title, I couldn't resist. The city of Amsterdam has a tourism campaign called  "I AMSTERDAM", and there are big red and white signs all over. I kind of think it's a clever pun...

Tonight was our third night of four in Amsterdam. I'd heard reports from friends before I came of how charming and cool this city is, and they're all true - I could definitely live here, provided I had my own bike to ride around on the cobblestone  and brick streets.

Our trip started off a little slowly. Were you in New York last Thurday night? Do you remember the thunderstorms? I do. Our flight was delayed for four hours in JFK, so instead of leaving NY at 9:30pm, we took off at 1:30am. The great part about that, however, is that I slept for almost the entire flight, which never happens. (If you've ever flown economy to Europe before, I'm sure you can commiserate.) So the next day in Amsterdam, which was really only evening and night because we missed our connecting flight from Frankfurt, I had almost no jet lag. Another first. Woohoo!

On Saturday we got the big things out of the way: the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum. Both had beautiful exhibits (and the Rijksmuseum, is currently being renovated and only has their Dutch Golden Age paintings on display) and many works of art that I'd studied in art history class. It's such a cool feeling to walk past a painting and have studied it before, especially by artists (I'm ashamed to say) I knew nothing about a year ago. In the evening, we had a delicious impromtu dinner at Pamela's friend Peti's apartment. Peti knows an Iranian family, mother, father, and son, who own a teahouse, and on Saturday nights have music jams. She took us there, and it was great. It was like being in someone's home, just a teeny little place with musicians (and some instruments I'd never seen before) playing all kinds of music. They even somehow got me to sing for one song. It was such an obscure little place that one woman asked us where we were from, and when we told her New York, she said, but how did you find this place?

Today we rented bikes in the morning. Actually, it was 11:30am by the time we got to the rental place, and they had already sold out of small adult bikes, and neither I nor my mom could fit on the medium adult bikes. They had one large child-sized bike left, so my mom rode that one, and Linda, her high school friend who lives in Amsterdam, rode the rental bike, and I rode Linda's bike. It's one of those old bikes with the beautiful curved handlebars - I felt like I was in an old Italian movie, or in "Life is Beautiful" when Roberto Benini calls out to his future wife, Buongiorno, Principessa! and she thinks he's crazy. But anyway, biking through Amsterdam was quite an experience. The bikers are particularly relentless, you really have to go fast or stay to the right and let them pass. Also, it's a bit like jay-walking in Manhattan; you have to make quick decisions or stay on the sidewalk. No dawdling across the street, even on a bike, or you'll get run over.

Our first stop was De taart van m'n tante, the cake of my aunt, a cake shop that my friend Chelsea absolutely insisted we go to in Amsterdam. We had intended to go yesterday after the Van Gogh museum, but it had already closed. It was very over-the-top girly and pink and kitschy inside...right up my alley. It reminded me of Alice's Teacup, or a restaurant I went to in Madrid called Jardin de las Mariposas (Garden of the Butterflies). It wasn't crowded at all on a Sunday at noon, which I think is unusual, and I had a delicious cake and cappucino. I ordered a pink strawberry lemonade cake called the Annemarie. I think that's actually the one Chelsea told me about. It was delicious!

Then we continued on our bike tour led by Linda, and ended up in the center of town, in old Amsterdam, where we visited Rembrandt's house. None of his paintings are there, but there are lots of his sketches and etching / engraving prints. The house is furnished exactly as it was when he lived there. The box beds were so tiny...they slept propped almost upright. We also got to see an etching demonstration which was fascinating. 

After that, we biked around some more, around the canals, and passed through a few markets, one of them being the famous flower market. Everything is so colorful here, the houses, the boats, even the bikes! We ended tonight with dinner at a Tibetan / Nepalese restaurant, which we decided to try because none of us had ever eaten that kind of food before. It was a lot like Indian food, but a little more Chinese-influenced, at least that was my impression. Tomorrow we're going to see the Anne Frank House (we tried to buy our tickets online tonight but they were all sold out...so we're getting up at an ungodly hour to see it before we have to return our bikes, which were 24-hr rentals), and then see the Monday Morning Market (flea) and maybe take a canal boat tour. We're having dinner on Linda's houseboat tomorrow night. I can't wait to see the inside of one, they're so interesting from the outside. Today I passed a houseboat with a garden patio on top, and another rowboat that was shaped like a gigantic wooden shoe!

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

We ordered Chinese food tonight.
My fortune cookie said: "Sometimes travel to new places leads to great transformation."

Benvenuti al mio blog! (Welcome to my blog!)

Ciao! So this is it, my lovely little blog on which I will post ramblings about my semester in Italy.

The semester will start in September, but I'm leaving for Europe in the middle of August. This trip sort of just...evolved. I'll start from the beginning. Since I'm incapable of giving a short explanation, skip down to the bullet points at the bottom of this post for the quick summary!

I've been planning to study abroad in Italy since I started taking Italian freshman year. The program I'm doing has an optional three-week summer session in southeastern Italy (in the heel of the boot.) I opted not to do this summer session, but will meet up with that group in Lecce for their last two nights of the summer session, along with two of my friends from school, Caitlin and Nicole. There is a six day break in between when the program in Lecce ends and when we all meet in Bologna, during which we (Caitlin, Nicole, and I) are planning to see the area around Naples.

In April, our friends from France, whom we hadn't seen since 2000, came to New York to visit us. I wanted to visit them in La Rochelle for a few days before my semester in Italy started, not wanting another eight years to go by, and my mother, the wonderful woman from whom I inherited the travel bug, wanted to go too. Once that decision was made, it seemed easy enough to tack on Amsterdam (where my mother's high school friend lives on a houseboat with her husband, a Dutch sailor) and Paris, which is not too far from La Rochelle. Before I knew it, Pamela, a close family friend, was joining us on our adventure, since she too has a friend in Amsterdam, and loves to travel.

Somehow I'd have to get from La Rochelle to Lecce. But flights from France to Italy were - I kid you not - as much or more than flights from New York to Europe! And making the trip by train would be, at the very least, a solid two or three days. Luckily, a well-informed travel agent at the student travel agency nearby figured out that if I could get myself to Barcelona, I could book a flight from Barcelona to Lecce, with a layover in Rome, where I'll meet up with Caitlin and Nicole.

I don't blame you if you didn't make it through that whole explanation. Basically, I'm traveling for about a month before my semester starts. Hopefully the itinerary will be made clearer through my posts. But I figured I'd better offer an explanation before I started posting about being in countries other than Bella Italia, and things got confusing.

In summation:

• Amsterdam
• Paris
• La Rochelle
• Barcelona
• Rome
• Lecce
• Naples
• BOLOGNA

I hope that you enjoy reading about my travels as much as I'll enjoy writing about them. I would love to hear from you (yes, if you're reading this, you!) no matter what you're up to this fall!