alright, so Marseille is officially phenomenal once it's warm enough to be outside and at the beach. if I ever come back to visit, I plan to come during the month of April/May. the weather is perfect, and I go to the beach 3-4 times a week. awesome.
last weekend I went to Barcelona with Nora, her gf Marisela, and one of their friends. It was wicked fun, definitely one of my top weekends in Europe so far. Barcelona is beautiful, and so chill. I feel like everyone has this very laid back attitude, and even the tourists are just relaxing, not psycho trying to see everything or pushy or anything. I saw a lot of stuff surrounding Gaudi, like his house, his gardens, and lots of the architecture he designed or inspired. our hostel was pretty much like a college dorm, actually, which was interesting but kind of nice, since that allowed us to sit on a balcony overlooking the street with a bottle of wine and just hang out for the night. we went to the beach on saturday afternoon and also on sunday, although sunday was a briefer visit since it was cold. Nora and I got this weird rash from walking along the beach in the sand. hers was worse, but mine was just a little swollen with some redness. antihistamine and all is good now! we found a thai place, which made me happy, since it was my first thai/chinese food in france. It's about the same, gotta tell you. just as greasy and delicious, haha.
we also ate tapas, traditional spanish food, and found this awesome bar with shooters (shots with pizazz). it was wicked cool even just to watch other people order their shots because there were shooters with like fire lit up around them and then you sucked it down with a straw or you had to eat something right before or after or there was whipped cream on it. i ordered the "boy scout" which i have no idea what type of alcohol, i think maybe caramel was in there somewhere, but they lit a fire behind my shot glass and i had to roast a marshmallow in it, like light it on fire, then extinguish it in my shot glass, then eat it and drink the shot right after. delicious.
we went to a few markets, and at one food market they had this chocolate stand with pretty much every type and combination of chocolate you could imagine. there was also a few places where you could buy fresh squeezed juices for 1 euro, and they had crazy combinations like mango coconut or kiwi lime or pineapple banana coconut. it was fantastic. there was a HUGE flea market too, which nora marisela and i spent about 4 hours in, haha, just poking around and seeing what they had to offer. i found a bright orange purse for 3 euros. oh yes, i most definitely bought it, and i am very content with my purchase. it will be a wonderful summer accessory, and i suspect Dave will love it as well. :)
well tonight Nora and I are making enchiladas for my host family, and then tomorrow my friend Andrea is coming. she's studying in Sevilla, Spain, right now, but she'll be up for the weekend - yaay!
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
exhausting adventure
so nora and i had the adventures of christy and nora trying to figure out the stupid trains in Italy. i'm not a fan, haha. they change the schedules on you and aren't clear about what's a departure and what's an arrival and what platform and at what time and where it goes. we had quite the day for ourselves yesterday trying to get back to marseille from florence, and we ended up stuck in genova for 4 hours and then stuck in nice overnight. not a big deal - we bought a bottle of champagne and made pesto pasta in our youth hostel that we found in nice. it ended up being ok, and this morning we got up at 5am to get to our classes on time. i'm completely exhausted, and now i either have really bad allergies or a cold, so i'm going to rest up this week and hope it gets better!
i'm not very motivated to go to class, but i'm not sure if that's just me being tired. i think i need to re-settle into speaking french and being a student again. we've got a paper and a journalistic portrait due this week, and i think i have a presentation either later this week or next week. barcelona this weekend!
i'm not very motivated to go to class, but i'm not sure if that's just me being tired. i think i need to re-settle into speaking french and being a student again. we've got a paper and a journalistic portrait due this week, and i think i have a presentation either later this week or next week. barcelona this weekend!
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Italia!
holy cow. phenomenal, I think, might be the only word to describe Italy right now. About what I thought it'd be. I'm at Janelle's house, and she lives on the second floor of an Italian villa! No big deal, you just look out her kitchen window onto a vineyard and an olive grove and other villas up on the hills of Tuscany. wow.
ok let's start at the beginning of the week. when I got home from Morocco, my French host family was SO nice...it was great to see them, and it made me realize that part of me is really going to miss France when I go back to the US. We had a pancake dinner night for Camille, and I gave her the birthday presents I had for her from Morocco and the US. It was relaxing to be back at my French home, and in Marseille, and I can't wait to really make sure to get as much of the experience in as possible before I go back home, since Marseille really is beautiful now that the weather has gotten better.
Monday morning Nora and I left really early on the train with a slight delay from the train and transportation strikes...alwayyys in France haha. they do love their strikes. so we got going and made it to Nice, where we ate lunch on the beach and walked around the markets and the downtown area, which was SO cute and really picturesque. Then we got back on train after train after train until we reached Pisa, where we got stuck at 11:30 at night looking for our train to Florence. our previous train had lied about the time of arrival, so we got to Pisa too late to catch a train to Florence, only a bus, which left at 1:15 am and cost 50 euro. sooo, we decided to stay in a hotel for 80 euro, and we also ate a really amazing calzone (my first food in Italy, which absolutely held up to expectations). We used emergency funding to stay in Pisa overnight, which actually ended up being awesome because our hotel was nice and it was really good to get a good nights sleep. Nora and I were both really tired from Morocco and hadn't slept much because of prepping for the Italy trip, so it was good for both of us to get some extra sleep. We also woke up the next morning to hands down, the best continental breakfast a hotel has ever provided me. Italian coffee, which i loved (if you know me, you know I don't like coffee very much, especially since 'coffee' here is espresso), cereal, nutella and croissants, juice, pastries, yogurt, muffins, you name it. We took some to go for lunch haha, and headed out for a brief visit to the leaning tower, which we both LOVED. Pisa was so cute and we came into the touristy area from the opposite direction from the rest of the world, so we missed out on all the crowds and fake, lame tourist shops and stuff, so we had a great experience at the leaning tower. We got back in time to take the train to Florence where we met Rose and got AMAZING paninis with her.
Nora and I spent the afternoon walking around Florence, and we toured the Santa Maria Novella cathedrale, which was my first experience in a huge cathedrale with all of the mosaics and paintings, and it was absolutely stunning. I was not allowed to take pictures, which is a shame, but I bought a book that explains all the paintings and includes pictures so I can always remember. I also think my dad would be SUPER interested in reading about all the stories, so that will be fun to talk about when I come home. After the cathedrale we went back to Rose's and made a fantastic dinner of pesto pasta with zucchini and gnocchi with 4 cheese sauce. um, yeah. nora and I basically owned the kitchen for a few hours, and it was SO good. we also drank Chianti wine, a specialty of the region, and then some Lemoncello, which costs about 5 euros here...crazyyy. there was a Beatles band playing at the bar across the street, so Rose and her roommates and Nora and I went out there for a few hours, which was really fun.
Wednesday morning we got up early enough to get into the Dome (duomo) before all of the crowds, and it was also fantastic. we climbed up it, so we got to see all of the paintings on the ceiling and then we went outside onto a balcony where you had a 360 degree view of Florence. then we hit up a market recommended to us by Rose and wandered around for over an hour looking for reasonably priced pizza, since it's all marked up for the tourists. we also tried to find/get into a beautiful garden, but they wanted to charge us 10 euros to get in, so we gave up and just ate our pizzas on the sidewalk, which ended up being in the sun and on this cute little old Italian road. we were in the oldest section of Florence, so there were all these little cut through roads with archways. it was so cool, even tho we missed out on the gardens...we found our own fun in Florence, which I just loved. it was nice to just explore and walk down by the river and see where we ended up.
i dropped Nora off at the station to go to Rome, and I hung out for a while until Rose got back from class. we went out to eat at this incredible Italian restaurant where i tried 5 different kinds of pasta which were all equally delicious. there was penne vodka, then some sort of pasta with broccoli white sauce, then a meat sauce and also gnocchi in there somewhere. afterwards we split a tuscany balsamic steak...yeah, right up there with some of the best steak i've ever had. i'm thinking it's just under the filet mignon from Tucker's down in LBI...definitely amazing. we got gelato afterwards that was also great, and then watched a movie and just had a night in.
this morning we got up and saw the David statue, which was almost as cool as my David in reality, haha, maybe a little cuter... ;) hehe, just kidding! i don't understand why they put such a beautiful sculpture with anything else in a museum, since after i saw the David i wanted no part of any other sculptures or artwork. everything else just didn't hold a candle. as Rose says, you think it's just a sculpture, how great can it be, but then you get there and see it and are literally awestruck. it was incredible. props to michaelangelo.
so now I'm at Janelle's, and I'm staying here until Saturday night. I plan to just walk around and enjoy myself and relax in the beautiful tuscan countryside. tomorrow we're going for a walk in the morning and then making dinner tomorrow night I think. tonight we're going out for pizza - mmm! she is SO nice, and her villa is amazing.
Italy definitely held up my expectations, and I am absolutely coming back here to see other parts of Italy, hopefully when I know a little more of the language. Btw it was very difficult to switch back to English when I first got here, so I guess that's a good sign, but was a little weird and frustrating at first, haha. I suppose the immersion program is really doing its job!
ok let's start at the beginning of the week. when I got home from Morocco, my French host family was SO nice...it was great to see them, and it made me realize that part of me is really going to miss France when I go back to the US. We had a pancake dinner night for Camille, and I gave her the birthday presents I had for her from Morocco and the US. It was relaxing to be back at my French home, and in Marseille, and I can't wait to really make sure to get as much of the experience in as possible before I go back home, since Marseille really is beautiful now that the weather has gotten better.
Monday morning Nora and I left really early on the train with a slight delay from the train and transportation strikes...alwayyys in France haha. they do love their strikes. so we got going and made it to Nice, where we ate lunch on the beach and walked around the markets and the downtown area, which was SO cute and really picturesque. Then we got back on train after train after train until we reached Pisa, where we got stuck at 11:30 at night looking for our train to Florence. our previous train had lied about the time of arrival, so we got to Pisa too late to catch a train to Florence, only a bus, which left at 1:15 am and cost 50 euro. sooo, we decided to stay in a hotel for 80 euro, and we also ate a really amazing calzone (my first food in Italy, which absolutely held up to expectations). We used emergency funding to stay in Pisa overnight, which actually ended up being awesome because our hotel was nice and it was really good to get a good nights sleep. Nora and I were both really tired from Morocco and hadn't slept much because of prepping for the Italy trip, so it was good for both of us to get some extra sleep. We also woke up the next morning to hands down, the best continental breakfast a hotel has ever provided me. Italian coffee, which i loved (if you know me, you know I don't like coffee very much, especially since 'coffee' here is espresso), cereal, nutella and croissants, juice, pastries, yogurt, muffins, you name it. We took some to go for lunch haha, and headed out for a brief visit to the leaning tower, which we both LOVED. Pisa was so cute and we came into the touristy area from the opposite direction from the rest of the world, so we missed out on all the crowds and fake, lame tourist shops and stuff, so we had a great experience at the leaning tower. We got back in time to take the train to Florence where we met Rose and got AMAZING paninis with her.
Nora and I spent the afternoon walking around Florence, and we toured the Santa Maria Novella cathedrale, which was my first experience in a huge cathedrale with all of the mosaics and paintings, and it was absolutely stunning. I was not allowed to take pictures, which is a shame, but I bought a book that explains all the paintings and includes pictures so I can always remember. I also think my dad would be SUPER interested in reading about all the stories, so that will be fun to talk about when I come home. After the cathedrale we went back to Rose's and made a fantastic dinner of pesto pasta with zucchini and gnocchi with 4 cheese sauce. um, yeah. nora and I basically owned the kitchen for a few hours, and it was SO good. we also drank Chianti wine, a specialty of the region, and then some Lemoncello, which costs about 5 euros here...crazyyy. there was a Beatles band playing at the bar across the street, so Rose and her roommates and Nora and I went out there for a few hours, which was really fun.
Wednesday morning we got up early enough to get into the Dome (duomo) before all of the crowds, and it was also fantastic. we climbed up it, so we got to see all of the paintings on the ceiling and then we went outside onto a balcony where you had a 360 degree view of Florence. then we hit up a market recommended to us by Rose and wandered around for over an hour looking for reasonably priced pizza, since it's all marked up for the tourists. we also tried to find/get into a beautiful garden, but they wanted to charge us 10 euros to get in, so we gave up and just ate our pizzas on the sidewalk, which ended up being in the sun and on this cute little old Italian road. we were in the oldest section of Florence, so there were all these little cut through roads with archways. it was so cool, even tho we missed out on the gardens...we found our own fun in Florence, which I just loved. it was nice to just explore and walk down by the river and see where we ended up.
i dropped Nora off at the station to go to Rome, and I hung out for a while until Rose got back from class. we went out to eat at this incredible Italian restaurant where i tried 5 different kinds of pasta which were all equally delicious. there was penne vodka, then some sort of pasta with broccoli white sauce, then a meat sauce and also gnocchi in there somewhere. afterwards we split a tuscany balsamic steak...yeah, right up there with some of the best steak i've ever had. i'm thinking it's just under the filet mignon from Tucker's down in LBI...definitely amazing. we got gelato afterwards that was also great, and then watched a movie and just had a night in.
this morning we got up and saw the David statue, which was almost as cool as my David in reality, haha, maybe a little cuter... ;) hehe, just kidding! i don't understand why they put such a beautiful sculpture with anything else in a museum, since after i saw the David i wanted no part of any other sculptures or artwork. everything else just didn't hold a candle. as Rose says, you think it's just a sculpture, how great can it be, but then you get there and see it and are literally awestruck. it was incredible. props to michaelangelo.
so now I'm at Janelle's, and I'm staying here until Saturday night. I plan to just walk around and enjoy myself and relax in the beautiful tuscan countryside. tomorrow we're going for a walk in the morning and then making dinner tomorrow night I think. tonight we're going out for pizza - mmm! she is SO nice, and her villa is amazing.
Italy definitely held up my expectations, and I am absolutely coming back here to see other parts of Italy, hopefully when I know a little more of the language. Btw it was very difficult to switch back to English when I first got here, so I guess that's a good sign, but was a little weird and frustrating at first, haha. I suppose the immersion program is really doing its job!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
'it just keeps getting betterrrrrr'
i am so happy i named this blog 'the adventures of curious christy' because this week in morocco so far has definitely been an adventure, and a far from eventful one at that. i've realized that when rough situations come up, my first reaction is to laugh. even when it is 100 percent not funny. like falling in the metro and spraining my ankle - definitely not funny, but nora and i were laughing so hard that i couldn't breathe. like today, when i was SO sick to my stomach in the middle of morocco running around a mosque looking for a bathroom about to pass out. definitely not funny on any scale at all, but 20 minutes later i was laughing, especially since the toilet we found was a traditional moroccan toilet, meaning a hole in the ground made of porcelain. so here i was, so sick because of some bad food i ate at a restaurant, squatting on my sprained ankle over a hole. it was great, gotta say. part of the experience for sure.
aside from that adventure, morocco is pretty amazing. the culture is so cool. after work everyone kind of goes out to walk around and hang out and maybe have some coffee or have a snack or just hang out in the park. dinner is served at about 10pm, and you have to eat a LOT. moroccans are very hospitable, and food is tied to that hospitality. hence, part of the reason why i got sick, haha.
the medina here is beautiful, and HUGE. there are donkeys that pass in the roads, there are chickens and dead cow spleens for sale and all sorts of crazy foods and spices and pastries. there's also some touristy stuff like necklaces and bowls for tagines and scarves and tapestries. i saw how leather is made and dyed, and how tapestries are made, and all sorts of artisanal craftsmanship. amazing.
no camels for me though. not really too many in fez - the one big disappointment in morocco but other than that its good. it's been rough on the ankle, but i'm hoping that next week in italy the terrain will be a little more stable and even.
pictures will be up sunday!
aside from that adventure, morocco is pretty amazing. the culture is so cool. after work everyone kind of goes out to walk around and hang out and maybe have some coffee or have a snack or just hang out in the park. dinner is served at about 10pm, and you have to eat a LOT. moroccans are very hospitable, and food is tied to that hospitality. hence, part of the reason why i got sick, haha.
the medina here is beautiful, and HUGE. there are donkeys that pass in the roads, there are chickens and dead cow spleens for sale and all sorts of crazy foods and spices and pastries. there's also some touristy stuff like necklaces and bowls for tagines and scarves and tapestries. i saw how leather is made and dyed, and how tapestries are made, and all sorts of artisanal craftsmanship. amazing.
no camels for me though. not really too many in fez - the one big disappointment in morocco but other than that its good. it's been rough on the ankle, but i'm hoping that next week in italy the terrain will be a little more stable and even.
pictures will be up sunday!
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