Damsel in Distress

I've been planning to regale you with the (comparatively) glamorous tale of spending last weekend at a beach resort on Elba as soon as I got the pictures uploaded, but for the moment you'll have to settle for the decidedly un-glamorous story of how I got myself rescued by firemen. That's right, pompieri to the rescue.

The morning didn't start out particularly well. I woke up to find the hallway full of more ants than I like to see anywhere but Christmas Eve (get it? ants=aunts? tee hee). I killed them with a vengeance (hope the uncles weren't upset!), and felt remotely like I was committing genocide. The poor things had no chance against me and my heavy shoes and my Windex bottle of death. Then I swept the floors, and then put my purse by the door so that I could mop myself into the front corner, grab my bag, and go grocery shopping (and ant-trap buying) while the floors dried. My plan was so clever! No sitting in my room waiting for the floors to dry so I could move again! No smudging the clean floors as I tip-toed out in my dirty shoes! Fool-proof!

Right.

I had no sooner closed the door than I'd realized that my keys were inside. Locked inside. Of the apartment where I now live alone, my last remaining roommate having moved out just two days ago. Of the apartment whose owner doesn't actually live in Florence - or anywhere near it, as far as I can tell. Interesting situation I find myself in, no?

What the hell to do?

1. Call the landlady. I could, but it's Mother's Day, and I don't actually expect or want her to drop everything and come let me in. In any case, if she lives as far away as I imagine she does, it really wouldn't be practical or feasible to do that, anyway.

2. Pick the lock? I don't know how, as useful as it would be in both licit and illicit circumstances. A summer project, perhaps.

3. Call the head of our program? Again, it's Mother's Day - and her mother's in the hospital. Very much a last resort.

4. Break the door? Almost tried it - there's a loose panel - but didn't know how the hell I'd fix it once I was done.

5. Try to jump onto the balcony from a neighboring building? Ah, now there's a plan! A much better plan than numbers 1-4. Three buildings butt up against ours on that side, and it appears that there would be rather precarious balcony access from each of them. Yeah, so I'm wearing a skirt, but so what? So I spend quite a bit of time trying to identify which windows in which buildings would be good windows to try, then stalking the doorways of those buildings to try to talk to the residents while working up the courage to ring doorbells and use my weak Italian to explain a complicated situation and ask a big favor from a stranger. Oh yeah, that's the best plan. Suuure. And then, surprise! Someone finally comes out of one of the apartment buildings in question. And she lives in the apartment in question. And she's a little old lady - and a big bitch. She seems pissed that I'd even ask her, she's too busy to help, and besides, "sarebbe troppo pericoloso." "It would be too dangerous." So? (Okay, so now that I've looked at the balcony, hers in the window that would be a fifteen foot jump over a three-story drop...but come on now, little old lady, you can't be a little pleasant?)

So I give up on the balcony-jumping option, too, and I go eat a panini and a pastry at the only café open on a Sunday afternoon, and then I go downtown. Not because being downtown will be at all productive, or help me solve my problem, but because I'm stressed, and in centro I can buy gelato and Twix bars. That occupies most of my afternoon, with the addition of buying an obscenely overpriced English-language chick-lit book to read while I'm sitting outside my building contemplating whether I'll be spending the night on a park bench.

After having thus passed the entire day, I came to the startling realization that I wasn't getting myself out of this mess. Nope, someone was going to have to help me. So I called both of my last resorts, the landlady and the program director. No response from the landlady, but the program director tells me to call the firemen, who will open the door for anyone, free of charge. It's something of a process on the phone - he doesn't understand me, I don't understand him, and he mentions that there's not really much he can do, since I don't have any document stating that I live there. But the firemen come anyway, a whole group of five or six of them, and a neighbor I've never met before comes out of his apartment to tell me that they were downstairs (because at some point during our garbled conversation, either I mispronounced something or he misheard something, and so their calls didn't go through), and they opened the door in about 2.5 seconds. And then asked for proof of residence. Uh, right. Eventually, they accepted my passport and a handful of handwritten applications, receipts, etc. which listed my address. And when they left, after saving the day, I realized that my clean floor (remember how this whole mess started?) was all smudged with the dust of firemen boots.

And then I ate dinner (not a lot to work with there, as I'd never actually made it to the grocery store), and I'm about ready to go to bed - and not a smidge of homework done! We'll see how that goes.

La felicità

My literature class this semester is about Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth-century playwright who reformed the Italian theater. Today, we learned what he said in a 1753 letter to Francesco de Medici about happiness. According to Goldoni, these are the necessities for being happy:

1. To exist.

You cannot be happy if you do not exist.

2. To be a Christian. Specifically, a Catholic.

Goldoni was not a religious person. He avoided the subject entirely. The recipient of the letter, however, was a devout Catholic.

3. To have a "well-organized body." That is, to be physically healthy.

The soul is equal for everyone, so it's only the health of your body that has any effect on happiness.

4. To have had honest parents.

Presumably, having had honest parents means that you will be, as well?

5. To have been born a man.

Self-explanatory, really.

6. To have been born is a good country: free, cultured, democratic, and with nice weather.

He was talking about Florence.

I can’t actually post this now, because my ridiculously expensive internet only works when it feels like it, but I can write it, at least. Yesterday I bought a gorgeous new leather jacket. I got talked out of the green one I wanted, but I’m very happy with the one I ended up with, and it was a good deal, too, a good enough deal that I might still buy a really cheap/fake green one. Expect pictures soon. The man at the leather store was the first Italian to comment on my name. “O’Hara! Come Via col vento!” and then when I told him that the S. on the card actually does stand for Scarlett, he got really excited, pointed it out to his colleague, and said he’d have to tell his wife when he got home. Men are always telling their wives my name.

Last night I went out and got appropriately drunk: not quite so drunk that I don’t remember how I got home, but drunk enough that I had the balls to ask an Italian guy at the bar why the hell Italian guys are so aggressive/rude. He had no explanation. We watched the Yankee game, and too many of you will be too happy with the outcome for me to comment further on it.

This morning I went running with my roommate, which was nice because she runs at the same pace/slightly slower than I do. We were talking in English, and she mentioned how she’d lost a sports bra, only she called it a “breast-holder.” I managed to not laugh out loud at her. I’m that mature. When we got home, the house was smoky and smelled like burning. Whoops! She left a pot of water boiling on the stove while we were gone! If your house is burning down in Italian, you have to call i pompieri. (We didn’t, but it was close.)

While I was eating dinner that night, the same roommate asked me whether “that boy who was here” (that’s you, Matt) was my boyfriend. When I said no, she asked whether American boys are respectful enough of women that they don’t “try to touch you” when you’re not together. I thought she was wondering whether Matt had tried to jump my bones while he was staying in my room, but in fact she was segueing into a story about how a guy she had class with spent the whole weekend trying to get her to “go to the hotel” with him. (For the record, I told her that there are assholes everywhere, but made you all look good by saying that my friends are respectful. Girls, feel free to comment about whether this was valid.)

Then after dinner, I taught Anna how to French braid. She’d always commented on my hair when I wore it braided, and I thought she was just commenting on my remarkable skill in French braiding my own hair, but apparently she’s actually never seen a French braid. She asked if it was an African style. I guess it’s not very common around here. Is this another of those things that isn’t as French as its name?

My landlady is selling this apartment, so my roommates are all moving. I can stay through the end of the semester (that’s June 15), but at least both of the girls are moving out May 1, because they found other places to live. I don’t know when the boy is leaving, but he’s never really around, anyway. So I’ll basically be living by myself for a month and a half. I may actually be living by myself for some of that time, depending on when he is moving out. Kind of creepy. Besides which, Aurelie has lived here for a long time, and apparently a lot of things that were in common use in the house are actually hers. The really cool garbage pail with different sections for recyclables and for trash disappeared from the kitchen. Half the spices are gone. In the living room, the big mirror and the English-Italian dictionary are both gone, and the DVD player is Anna’s so it will be gone as soon as she finishes packing. On the bright side, though, they’re both going through their things to get rid of stuff, which is benefiting me greatly. I got a poster and a calendar, and once Anna decides whether or not she thinks her coat fits her well enough to keep, she may or may not be giving it to me. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed; it’s green.)

Geez, Michelle, so demanding!

Well, since Michelle insists on pictures that I didn't get from Google image, here are a few:

We went to Assisi a few weeks ago:

That's the Umbrian countryside.

That's the Basilica of San Francesco (That's St. Francis, for those of you who don't speak the lovely Eye-talian language), from the medieval fortress to which we climbed. I don't have any good pictures of the medieval fortress, but it was awesome. I'm a sucker for a good medieval fortress.

Here's the ground in Assisi. Yes, I think pictures of the floor are cool. Alexa and Laura (my Laura), you can both just shut up! I've been taking pictures of cool floors ever since Pompeii, and you can thank yourselves.

When Matt was here, we went on a bike tour for his birthday:

Here are Amanda, me, Lauren, and Matt himself, with the Duomo in background. This was when we were still relatively low and hadn't climbed any real hills yet. Notice that Lauren made sure to take her helmet off before taking a picture.

Her priorities changed a little after a few hills.

There's the birthday boy!

Some Tuscan vineyards.

That day, we went to Parma, where I failed to take any interesting pictures, and then the next day to Bologna:

Here are Amanda and Lauren in Bologna. I think.

Here's a fountain in Bologna.

When we got back to Florence that night, we went to a bar to watch the Final Four game:

Amanda and Lauren at the Red Garter.
Hoya Saxa!

In more recent news, there's a mystery in my bathroom! Or else someone stole my toothbrush. Something like that. A few weeks ago, I realized I needed to change my toothbrush. It was getting worn. I had a spare in my room, but didn't bother to change it immediately. The next morning, though, when I woke up, my toothbrush was gone! [Shocked gasps from audience] I guess I threw it out the night before when I decided I needed to, and didn't remember in the morning. I didn't see it in the trash, which was funny, but I didn't really look very hard. I got my new toothbrush from my bathroom and brushed my teeth. And didn't think about it again until this morning, when my old toothbrush was in the garbage - on top of the garbage. Which has been emptied several times since my toothbrush disappeared. Which could only mean that it was thrown out that very morning. I don't care about the toothbrush. It needed to go. I was about to throw it out myself. But where the hell was it for two weeks? And who takes someone's toothbrush for two weeks and then throws it out? And what on earth was that person doing with my toothbrush for two weeks? I'm so curious! I'm trying to figure out how to casually ask around about it in Italian, but I think I'd just sound accusatory, which I wouldn't be. Just curious. Really, really, curious. My roommates are such nice, normal people. I could understand a normal person stealing money, or food, but a toothbrush? The most plausible answer I can come up with is a ghost.

Also, I got a postcard from Juan today. That makes him my new favorite friend. Take a hint, the rest of you! You could learn something from Mr. Mata.

I'm baaaack

If this semester has taught me anything, it’s that English isn’t an easy language to learn. Italian’s not easy, either, of course, but I already knew that. I’ve been helping my roommate write a speech, in English, for her application to get her doctorate at an English-speaking university. It’s actually quite fun. I get to feel like I’m really good at something, even if she does want me to talk in a British accent because she doesn’t think American English will be well-received. Her speech is tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed. I’m very invested in her being accepted to this program.

Other than that, I also get to give lots of little English lessons every time I go to Judo. One man told me that he and his husband…actually, he never told me what they did. Once he asked what husband meant, he got so embarrassed he just stopped talking and walked away. Earlier this week, I tried a certain move on the kid I was working with. Afterward, he stopped to consider it, assuming the traditional thinker’s pose:

*

“Come si chiama questo?” he asked. “What’s this called?” The move? No. His chin. And I also get to try to wax linguistic in Italian to explain the pronunciation differences between word and world or thing and think. (Tangential story: Tonight at Judo, I worked with someone I’d never met before. He introduced himself, and then said, “You study at Georgetown University?” I said yes, and that was it. He didn’t tell me how he knew, how he’d even heard of Georgetown here. My best guess was that he’d already met some Georgetown students, but it was weird that he didn’t think to mention it. When I finally asked how he knew where I went to school, he pointed out that I was wearing a Georgetown t-shirt. Oh. Right.)

Other than my new calling as an ESL teacher, the most exciting things to happen since I last wrote (quite some time ago now) have been the visits of Matt, my family, and my cousin Michaela. (That’s in chronological order there, not excitingness order.) I worried that the cold Italian spring weather, on the cold Italian floor of my unheated Italian apartment might actually kill Matt, considering that he’s used to…well, Africa. Luckily, he survived, with the loan of my pink-flowered pajama pants. (He wouldn’t let me take a picture, or I’d be sharing it with you now.)

We took a bike tour through the Tuscan hills outside of Florence, which was fun but somewhat “strenuous,” and stopped for lunch at a restaurant on top of a hill, where we got to know our (psychotic) tour-mates, who laughingly recounted the story of seeing a man being beaten to within an inch of his life. “The guy had it coming to him. He was making faces,” they said. “At least it was amusing for us.”

We went to Parma for cheese, ham, (exquisite) pumpkin ravioli, and a really nice hotel. (I snuck in as the fourth person in our three person room. It’s easier to do this in a really nice hotel than it is in a bare-bones hostel.) The next morning, Matt and I were intrigued by what our map showed as the ruins of a medieval fortress, so we went looking for it. It was a park; there was a moat of grass (which looked really cool), a playground, a jogging path, basketball courts, etc., all where a medieval fortress used to be, but they hadn’t left many of the ruins, apparently not anticipating the visits of people who love medieval ruins. Shouldn’t medieval Italian cities know better? We saw a gorgeous, brightly-painted, beautifully-decorated church in Parma.

We spent an afternoon in Bologna, saw a rather plain church, with a “vibrant” band playing in the square outside of it, and walked around for ages looking for dinner, before finally settling on a rather mediocre apperitivo. Back in Florence, we watched the Georgetown Final Four game, with its disappointing conclusion, at a bar. I don’t remember getting home.

My family was late getting in the next morning, which was overall a good thing, because I was still getting sick at two o’clock that afternoon. When they finally called, we got good and lost trying to find the hotel on a street none of the Florentines we asked had ever heard of, and then Matt got to meet my sisters without any clothes on. Okay, so they did have towels on, but it’s not nearly as interesting to phrase it that way. Matt was then lucky enough, over the course of the next 4 days, to spend several hours of his Spring Break hanging out in my parents’ hotel room. I’m sure he enjoyed it.

If I get around to it, I'll write about more visitors, sightseeing, etc. Or maybe I'll just skip right to the present day. You know, if something exciting happens. We'll see.

*Not an actual picture of Marco thinking.

Spring Break, Part III

After London comes Amsterdam! We probably got high just from standing in our hotel lobby to check in. No doubt at all why everyone was there - except one unfortunate soul who had interviews and drug tests to look forward to when he got back. We were sharing our room with 6 strangers. The first night was uneventful - we walked around, got dinner, and watched the soccer game, and went home and went to bed early. I didn't want to, and wished we'd gone out instead. So I was up most of the night bored and unable to sleep, right? Well, actually, I passed out immediately and slept all night. Everyone else was up for hours do to snoring, roommates making noise, and someone smoking. Me? I had a lovely night. And then came morning.

In the morning, I woke up early and thought about getting up, showered, and dressed early. I rolled over, and was confronted with the naked ass of someone I began to think of as "Naked Ass Guy." Not wanting to get any closer to his naked ass, I stayed in my bed, slept more, and periodically turned over, hoping it would be gone. It never was. Finally, I decided I was tired of being held hostage by some guy's naked ass, and I got up. But I think first he may have put his tighty-whities back on. I tried to avoid looking. Some time later, Naked Ass Guy got up (now in underwear), stretched, and turned around, and...wait a minute! This isn't Naked Ass Guy. This is Naked Ass MAN. Naked Ass 40-year-old man. (FYI, while I refer to him as Naked Ass Man, because I saw his Naked Ass, there are even more unfortunate people who refer to him by more graphic names, reflecting their even more unfortunate viewpoints.) Naked Ass Man began trying to be friendly asking us questions about where we were from and finally telling Amanda that "There's history, there's herstory, and then there's ourstory."

We were relieved to discover that Naked Ass Man and his thankfully clothed wife (wife?) were moving to a different room that morning. That day, we got lunch at a very nice little restaurant, and went to the Van Gogh Museum, which I liked much more than I'd expected I would. I don't like having to interpret paintings. I prefer being told what the painter was thinking, and luckily, Van Gogh told his brother, in writing, everything he was thinking.

After Van Gogh, we went to the other end of the culture spectrum and visited the Heineken Exprience. A 10 Euro entrance fee gets you 3 "free" beers and the entire museum - which is actually very cool. There were even games. And a bust of Louis Pasteur:

Here are Andy and Amanda pretending to be Heineken DJs:

We got hamburgers for dinner and then and spent the night - the entire night - hanging out in the bar in our hostel. Each of us, all in our own way, fell in love with the bartender, named Zeppie (we think.) After a night of reggae music, the DJ left and she turned on iTunes and played anything American that she had - and some Dutch hip hop. We met a kid from VA Tech, and several British boys took pictures with us, and were our friends for about 8 minutes, until the British girls they had been talking to got back, at which point they dropped us. Amanda did make one of them "save the Queen," though, when she dropped 2 pence in his beer.

We also saw Naked Ass Man, who was all by himself, dancing with his eyes closed and his arms flailing, in a bar where no one else was dancing. We happened to be talking just then to the boys who had moved into his bed, and told them not to worry; it was good that they brought their own sheets, but they probably didn't want us to tell them what he'd been doing in their bed last night. I think they may have gained some insight, though, from our constant references to him as "Naked Ass Man" and "Ball Sac Man."

We were at the bar until 4 am, and in the end April and I played pool against VA Tech guy and some girl who was really good, which put us at a disadvantage because. . . we don't actually know how to play pool. I managed to sink the 8 ball 3 times in 1 game (that's not good, fyi - it's also actually impossible).

Spring Break, Part II

The day after Oxford, we went to the British Museum, which was seriously incredible. I was fascinated by the Rosetta Stone, which April and Amanda missed entirely because, I believe, they were too busy trying to "walk like an Egyptian."


Other highlights included:

St. Senan's bell (remember when I went to Jonathan's Christmas party after staying up for two days straight? Those two days had been spent writing about St. Senan. I can't remember a damn thing about his bell, though. Surprised?):

a Viking horde from Ireland:

a reliquary (prettier than most) with a thorn from Christ's crown of thorns (which made up for there having been no thorn in the "Church of the Thorn" in Pisa):

and quite a few decorative tiles, with which I was slightly familiar thanks to A History of Decorative Tiles in the upstairs bathroom at Aunt Nina's house in Rhode Island:

After the British Museum, we went to Trafalger Square and climbed some lions, although some people (coughcoughAndycoughAmandacough) were very afraid of the astonishing heights to which we ascended:


We ate at Pret a Manger, the most amazing restaurant that London has to offer poor college students, took pictures with Big Ben in the background:

Then we saw Westminster Abbey but didn't go inside because it was too expensive, walked across the River Thames singing "Don't Dream It's Over" and every Disney song we could think of. We walked back across a very high and narrow bridge, but Andy survived.

That night, we met Lara and Scott for Indian food, where the whiskey sours are strong and the pina coladas are weak. We went out looking for a bar afterwards, but couldn't find one that had dancing and no cover, until we walked past a place called "Element."

Amanda: "Is there a cover?"
Bouncer: "No. Have you ever been here before?"
Random Guy Who Walked Up Just Then: "I have."
Bouncer: "Okay."

So we all go inside, excited that that random guy probably just got us into some sort of member's only club, right? We go inside, and up the stairs, and realize that we are the only girls there. We've wandered into a gay bar. A big deal? Not for us, but it apparently was for them. We were ushered into a separate room, which was subsequently roped off from the rest of the bar. Just in case heterosexuality is contagious. We ordered a round of drinks, which were mostly absolutely incredible, and asked our waiter if he knew where we could find a place to dance. He thought about it, and said that he mostly just knew gay clubs, but there was this one place he had been. . .

Us: "Did you like it?"
Waiter: "No."
Us: "Did you like the music?"
Waiter: "No."
Us: "Oh."
Waiter: "Maybe if I was on drugs, I would like it. It was very 'boom boom boom.' All the people wore sunglasses."

Make sure to read the part of Waiter in a very heavy, very non-British accent. Instead of going to that club, which he didn't like, we went to the club he recommended, a club called G-A-Y. Are you sensing a theme to our evening? At G-A-Y, though, we weren't the only girls there, probably not the only straight people there, and they didn't quarantine us. We spend a small fortune in pounds, which are worth quite a lot, using the jukebox to choose music that we never heard, and some of us drank quite a bit. I was made aware this afternoon (by Amanda) of the fact that we were not the only (presumably) straight girls to grace the dance floor at G-A-Y last week: Hilary Duff At G-A-Y!

Scott carrying April to G-A-Y, because she was wearing Amanda's shoes

That was a fairly late night, and the next day we got up, got dressed (after each shower in London, I towelled off with a bed sheet, because I'd forgotten my towel), got lunch at Pret a Manger (again, in case I didn't mention all the other times we did), and went to Portobello Rd., which looks remarkably unlike it did in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. They say to go on a Saturday. I'd listen to "them," because Tuesday was a little lackluster. Portobello Rd, by the way, is in/near Notting Hill. Again, it didn't really resemble the movie. You can't believe anything you see on VHS.

Next came Harrods, where we got chased out of the wedding dress department because we weren't actually getting married, and then the Tate Museum of Modern Art, remarkable for the art I don't understand, and the giant slides. Slides I understand. I won't name names, but if I did, you'd notice a theme regarding who was too scared to give it a try. Suffice it to say, April and I went on the slides (and Andy went on the little one), and they were incredible.

April and I with the giant slides at the Tate

Following the Tate, we went got fish and chips for dinner (because you have to, at least once, right?) at a restaurant called Ye Olde London. The fish and chips were alright, but nothing to write home (e.g. blog) about (and yet I find myself doing so anyway). I ordered Strongbow (the drink), because I'd learned about Strongbow (the person) in Medieval Irish History.

At Ye Olde London

We walked home singing "Don't Dream it's Over" and all the Disney songs we could come up with (whenever we go from one place to another and I don't mention the in between, assume it's accompanied by "Don't Dream it's Over" and all the Disney songs we can remember), and decided to stay in and play Trivial Pursuit. After a strong start, April and I choked on questions with answers like "a circle." Andy and Amanda had taken the lead, when we got a little hungry and decided to go on a junk food run. Junk food bought, we headed home.

And then I saw Inga walking down the street towards me. For those of you who didn't go to high school with me. . . Inga did. Once again, I'll have to cue that Disney song I've used once before. . .

It's a small, small, world.

What the hell? Well, Inga is studying abroad in London this year. I forgot. She told us about a bar we should try, and said "It's open late, so you guys can go, if. . .[suspicious look at our convenience store bags]. . .you want to put your stuff down and go out." She totally knew that our bags were full of junk food, and that, though on Spring Break, we weren't going out that night but sitting in our hostel and eating junk food. I'm just glad we weren't singing "Part of Your World" when we ran into her.

When we got back to the hostel, though, we'd been inspired by our encounter with Inga, and decided that, in fact, we did want to go out! We went looking for the bar she'd described, but couldn't find it, so we went to another bar, where the dance music consisted of minute-long clips of songs ranging from the Macarena to "Build Me Up Buttercup." Our brief encounter saved us from wasting our last night in London getting a good night's sleep.

At some point, we also saw the London Bridge from afar, and I post this only because I think it's a pretty picture, and could be a postcard if not for that barge in the foreground.

Still to come: Amsterdam!