HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!  I hope everyone has a very fun and safe holiday and I'm very sad that I won't be with my family this year, but I'll try to make the best of it here!  We have plans to go to an American diner to have a full Thanksgiving feast and we will see how that goes.  Before dinner, however, we are heading to a free wine tasting at a cute restaurant in the city.  I guess that's putting a spin on a traditional American holiday and fusing it with Italian culture?  I'm cool with that.

I guess I should say what I am thankful for since I won't be able to say it at dinner tonight with my family... so here goes nothin!  I'm very thankful for my loving family and friends who have been so supportive during one of the best and most eventful years of my life!  I couldn't have made this move without your support and it definitely wouldn't have been as enjoyable.  To all of you who have helped make this possible, THANK YOU and I love you very much!!

Here is a cartoon for your enjoyment:

BarTHelona Part Uno

From as far back as I can remember my mom has always referred to Barcelona as BarTHelona and always emphasized the "th" sound.  I didn't actually believe that's how people pronounced it, I just thought it was another one of her exaggerated accents on key foreign words such as german with "avil strruuuudel" or "viener snitchzel" (note: I'm writing these phonetically since I'm not even sure how to spell them) and her many different accents from the UK.  Oh and she does it with Italian, Spanish and French words too...so I guess basically all the major accents.  It's actually very entertaining now to hear them, but back in the German restaurant in Epcot as a teenager, hearing your mom speak with a heavy German accent to our actual German waitress did leave a bit of a scar in my memory.  (I love you mom and all your accents!)  Ok so I went off on a tangent...where was I?  Ah yes, BarTHelona.  The city of Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and most importantly, Antoni Gaudi.  Seriously, this is his city and I've never been to a place that is so centered around one man and, thankfully so, since he was in fact a genius.

Barcelona was very surprising to me, although I'm not sure what I really expected when I went there.  I guess I just expect cities in Europe to be very old and have a lot of history from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, which I am sure that Barcelona has, but the focus of Barcelona is mainly on their more modern celebrities dating from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  The buildings to see are mainly Gaudi's, some of the best art museums to see are of Miro and Picasso, there is the grand Olympic village from the '92 olympics...everything is just very modern.  I think I loved it more for that since it was unlike any other city I've ever seen and it seems to embrace the new fads of the time and run with it, while also keeping the old city charm.  It's a unique and eccentric city that I don't think I could ever see myself living in, but admire the ones who can!

Ok so here is a short run down on the biggest celebrity of the city, Gaudi.  He was born in Southern Catalonia in 1852 and was apparently victim to many bouts of fever, which caused him to spend a lot of time in isolation and with nature.  This is important since in most of his works he incorporated natural shapes and themes that he saw at this early age.  He moved to Barcelona to study architecture and his professor wasn't sure if his designs were the work of an insane person or a genius.  He was only one of four students in the school to be granted the title of architect when he graduated.  During the cultural and political renaissance that was taking place all over Europe at that time Gaudi's outlandish ideas were embraced more readily then I think if he were to try this any other time in history.  He had many wealthy patrons ask him to design their houses, offices, apartment complexes, parks, etc.  His most famous work is the Sagrada Familia, the cathedral he spent 42 years of his life on before his untimely death (by a tram).  It is still not finished and they hope to have it done 2026 - 100 years from his death.

Instead of attempting to explain his architectural style I think I should just post a few pics so you can get the idea...

The roof of Casa Mila - aka La Pedrera (stone quarry)

Inside of Casa Mila

Casa Battlo - representing St. George slaying the dragon

Inside the Sagrada Familia - the columns that support the roof look like trees

Ok so enough about Gaudi...for now.  I guess now would be a good time to go into our actual trip!

The first day, as I mentioned before in the previous post, we mainly focused on washing/drying our clothes to lessen the risk of BB's and then did a little exploring after a night of sangria and tapas hosted by our lovely hostel.  We decided to get to bed early since we wanted to have a big day of exploring the next day.  Saturday we went straight to Gaudi's Casa Mila (it was also called La Pedrera during it's construction because it looked like a quarry and the nickname has stuck to this day).  It was commissioned as an apartment complex on the Passeig de Gracia, one of the major avenues in Barcelona.  While most of the building is still being used as apartments, they have a museum at the top where you can also see the roof and a model apartment as it might have looked back in the early 1900's.  The audioguide tour was fantastic and we were able to see many of Gaudi's designs for other buildings, including the hanging model.  The roof was by far the star of the building (the first picture above).  There are many chimneys that look like warriors/ice cream cones and it's is sloped so you have to climb or descend stairs to get from one place to the next.

Next we headed to a cafe to replenish before our big walk up to Parc Guell, another of Gaudi's masterpieces.  But before we could make it to the park we passed by Gaudi's first commission of importance, Casa Vicens.  It is a private house so you could only get pictures from the outside and you can definitely tell that it was created before some of his more eccentric buildings.

Casa Vicens

On to Parc Guell...this was commissioned by one of Gaudi's biggest patrons.  It was meant to be a housing unit modeled after the English garden city movement.  The idea failed, however, because people didn't want to live so far away from the city center.  Only two houses were built on the property, one of which Gaudi bought and owned until his death.  A lot of the marketplace area was built up before realizing it wasn't going to catch on so it is a nice place to explore and see people selling their wares, playing music, walking around in stilts, etc.

Very crowded leading up to the marketplace

After the park we headed to La Sagrada Familia.  I forgot to mention before that the Pope was coming to Barcelona that night to consecrate the cathedral in the morning, so sadly it was closed and we would have to wait until Monday.  The Pope would come to Barcelona the one weekend we are there, since we can see him whenever we wanted in Italy.  Ah well, we went back to our hostel for a little break in the action before our spanish guitar concert we were going to later that night.

We headed out that night to stroll down Las Ramblas, the famous avenue, and check out the cute stores and restaurants.  We weren't expecting the absolute madhouse that was this avenue.  There were tons and tons of people and the concert we were going to was happening in a church where all the action was.  Now if you know me you know I HATE crowds.  Like really, really hate them and will have anxiety attacks if I'm in them for too long.  When I went on the tour of the Vatican museums I literally ran through the rooms, while my headphones were telling me the history on things I didn't even glance at on my run.  I think I was done about 20 minutes before I saw the rest of my group come out. So here I was on the brink of attack and we had to head right towards more crowds and I didn't know whether to run or to curl up in the fetal position on the side of the road (yea it gets THAT bad).  Well, we ran and the girls were great at handling my crampiness and we came to a semi open area to the side of a completely packed area full of ralliers and/or protesters for the Pope.  We had heard that there were going to be protests for his visit since apparently Spain leans a little too far on the liberal side for the Church's liking...  Spain's Catholic following has been going down steadily and they allow gay unions and abortions - for shame! (Sarcasm font would be super useful right now)  Anywho, we saw a lot of people chanting and cheering.  Since my nerves were still a little rattled we decided to go to a bar before the concert...not the best idea.  It was an Irish pub so Court and I got ciders (that came in bottles that were 2 pints worth - first bad decision of the night) and Caroline got a Long Island ice tea - no idea why she did that except her excuse of "it's only 1 euro more than a drink that doesn't have that much alcohol so I figured it would be worth the money."  That was the 2nd bad decision.  So we drank, but since we underestimated the size of the ciders it took a little longer than we anticipated and by the time we finished and got to the church we were at the BACK of the line and feeling a little tipsy.  This place was first come first serve so our seats kind of stunk and of course as soon as we sat down we got really tired.  The concert was pretty good, but would have been better had we not made those unfortunate decisions right before.  C'est la vie.

After the concert we had plans to go out, but we were tired and couldn't get the energy to go out.  Well, Caroline could, but Court and I were worn out.  I think I'm going to save the rest for another day since I am tired and need to get ready for our Thanksgiving festivities tonight!

Valencia

Buon giorno!  Caroline and I have finally come back from Malta and I'm ready to update the blog starting from Valencia for your reading pleasure :)

Before even coming to Italy it was decided that one of our number one trips to go on would be Barcelona.  Caroline and I went to Spain last year, but were only able to see the south all the way up to Madrid, located in central Spain.  It was too hard to get over to Barcelona on the east, but we vowed we would sometime in our life - thankfully 'sometime' was just the next year!  One issue was that Ryanair doesn't fly directly to Barcelona, it actually flies an hour outside of it.  They do however fly directly to Valencia so we thought we would spend a night there and head up to Barcelona by train to see the coast, which I heard was beautiful.  Since nothing really flies out of Florence we had to make the trek to Pisa and fly out of there, which was actually surprisingly easy and uneventful.  I became a bit worried before we boarded because of the many signs saying that your carryon baggage MUST fit in this bin or you could not take it on.  Now I have a very weird shaped backpack - it's shorter and wider than the normal backpack, which technically makes it hard to fit in one of those bins shaped like a normal rolly carry on.  Luckily no one said anything on our flight over, but on the way back is a different story that I'll get to later.

Ok so enough about boring logistics and on to Valencia!  Valencia is beautiful and reminded Caroline and me of a mix between Madrid with it's grand architecture and Malaga's coastal town feel.

As soon as we came out of the train station my breath was taken away by the beauty of the city and I was excited to explore.  We had about a 15 minute walk to our hostel, which was very cute and we were able to get our room to ourselves even though we had one open bed.  After we settled in we set off to find some dinner!  We found a restaurant called Baldo with a waiter who did not speak a lick of english and spoke mainly Catalan (we think) since it didn't sound like spanish.  We settled on paella Valenciana to salute the city, a couple of tapas of patatas bravas and croquettes (my fav!) and red wine.  All in all it was a good meal...the paella was a bit bland, but Caroline and I had experienced that before in spanish cooking when we came before and Courtney's sister who lived in Spain for 6 months also said the same thing.  The tapas were amazing though!

The waiter continued to talk to us in rapid Catalan even though we clearly didn't speak it, and somehow Caroline was able to discern that he wanted us to meet him and his friends at the bar around the corner when he gets off at either 12:30 or 2:30 to celebrate his birthday.  He also gave us his number.  While it was nice of him, we just nodded our heads and headed out to explore a little bit before passing out early. We saw some cool piazzas and buildings that we were looking forward to seeing in the daylight and also got ice cream to top off our meal.

The next day the nightmare begins...

Bed Bugs.  I don't know what those words elicit in your mind, but in my mind it's something like "HOLY &^%$!!!" followed by more streams of expletives that would just look silly on here.  They are disgusting and it's an epidemic that is only going to get worse all over the world since apparently we can't use DDT anymore (yes we are now all experts based on the fact that we found them).  We woke up and had breakfast and when we came back to our room I noticed a little bug on my pillow.  My mind immediately went to BBs (writing the word even gives me the skivvies) and I wanted to shoot myself.  Cue panic mode and everyone began to freak out.  We believe that they came from these giant green blankets we pulled out of the closet before going to bed because we were cold, since we didn't notice anything before going to bed.  Also, this hostel has awards and stellar reviews for it's cleanliness so I don't believe it has much to do with them, this was probably from the many travelers that have come through there.  We were so freaked out that we bailed on exploring Valencia and decided to get the hell out of there, first alerting the staff and then heading up to Barcelona where we could wash and dry every single thing we had.

The train ride was stressful as we were all still panicking, but the parts of the coast I saw were beautiful.  We finally got to Barcelona and into our fabulous hostel.  Thankfully they had laundry in the hostel so we took everything we could and washed and dried it.  It was very stressful and tensions were high in the group, understandably so.  We headed to the grocery store and got trash bags and zip lock bags and put everything we owned in them.  We did have one roommate from the Netherlands and who knows what she thought, but we tried not to care.  We were determined to beat this thing so there was no way we would bring anything back to our place in Florence.  We were also determined not to let it ruin our trip so we basically did everything we could that first day and tried not to think about it again until we were heading back home.

That does it for part one of our trip.  Sorry to have grossed you out, but it does get better I promise!  Barcelona was a fantastic trip and I will work on updating that post this weekend!

Ciao for now friends and word to the wise - if you are traveling ANYWHERE, be aware that you can find those things in even 5 star hotels so just be careful...being exposed to them is one of the grossest things that have ever happened to me and I wouldn't wish it on anyone!  Thank god we never had any bites, but the war continues and you'll just have to read on to hear how we are dealing with it...

Coming soon...

My posts on Barcelona, Valencia, and soon to be Malta will be coming soon to those who are anxiously awaiting a post (as I know all of you are, duh).  We had a bit of a mishap in Valencia that caused this week to be crazy and uber stressful...I will fill you in on this in due time, but don't have time to recount it now.

Caroline and I are headed off to Malta tomorrow and will be back next Thursday so I won't be able to update you all until after that, but expect many posts after then!

A presto! xoxo

Happy Halloween!!

Well I am a day late, but I hope you all had a fantastic weekend celebrating!  We sure did...too much fun I think :)

First let me recap our fun day trip to Arezzo, a small town just an hour south of Florence.  While reading up about Arezzo I can tell you that it is thought to have been one of the twelve most important Etruscan cities and it is the birthplace of scholar, poet, and the "Father of Humanism" Petrarch; artist and historian Georgio Vasari; inventor of the musical scale Giudo Monaco; and renaissance masters Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo (well he was born just outside of Arezzo, but it still counts!).  The Piazza Grande is also famous for being the backdrop for Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, one of my faves.  There is a plaque in the Piazza commemorating the film.  This also prompted us to look up Roberto Benigni's awesome acceptance speech from the Oscars when he climbs over the chairs, one containing Stephen Spielberg no less, to get to the stage.  Here is the video for anyone interested to relive the moment!

Ok back to our trip...our first stop was the Basilica of San Francesco, which houses one of the most famous fresco cycles by one of the greatest Renaissance artists, Piero della Francesca. The Legend of the True Cross is a series of frescos starting with the tree planted at Adam's burial with a seed from the Garden of Eden and ending with Christ's crucifixion on the wood from that tree.  The series walks you through various stages of the cross, from when the Queen of Sheba tells Solomon that the savior will hang from that tree, thus dismantling the Jews, to Constantine's dream before battle of angels showing him the cross in heaven, which prompted him to go into battle with a cross on his shield and he won.  He also later converted to Christianity.  Then there are some other frescos of battles depicting the triumph of Christianity over paganism.  It was actually very pretty, but at the time none of us had any idea what the frescos meant so I'm glad this blog gave me a reason to look it up and learn a little something!

Our next stop was the aforementioned Piazza Grande then up to this really cute park with so many trees with yellow leaves!  One of my favorite things about fall is the leaves changing so I of course was in love.

Next we headed to a couple other churches and Georgio Vasari's house, which had been turned into a mini museum.  It had some nice paintings, but other than that it wasn't much.  We then went to a couple more museums and the Duomo.  It was a wonderful day in a really cute city!

Now onto Halloween weekend!  Saturday during the day I had a huge craving for chocolate chip pancakes so we all went to The Diner (real name) for brunch.  We were all pretty hungry and weren't sure about the portion sizes so each of us ordered a main dish and then ordered a side - I also needed something salty because even though I wanted pancakes, I usually can't eat a lot of them since they are too sweet.  So both Court and I got home fries and Caroline got an egg - literally the description said ONE egg so we assumed they would be small portions.  Fast forward 10 minutes later and we literally got 6 giant plates of food.  They didn't even all fit on our table, but luckily we were sitting in the corner and had space to put the extra plates down on another random table next to us.  The other thing was that Courtney got a bagel and a side of home fries, but unbeknownst to her, the bagel actually came with fries too.  Oh and lastly, Caroline's ONE egg had to have been at least 4-5 eggs AND it came with toast.  I mean, that's a meal in itself!  Basically we had our work cut out for us.  I had maybe 1/3 of my pancakes because the sweetness got to me and maybe 1/3 of my side of fries, not a great showing.  Courtney fared about as well as I did, but luckily we had Caroline there.  Now Caroline is a phenomenon to both Courtney and me.  She can eat so much it's actually super impressive and I find myself telling random people about her amazing eating ability.  She's also so little so I have no idea how she does it and where that food goes, but both Court and I were glad she was there in our moment of need.  Caroline was able to finish the rest of my pancakes and all of her plate - though I did help her with her egg(s).  Needless to say she did us proud and we sat for a good 20 minutes after the meal trying to not pass out from food coma and not barf from the copious amount of food we just took in.  Saturday night we went out with our friends Kate and Jess and met at Sei Divino, a wine bar close to our apt.  We were able to get a table in the main bar area and decided to get the cheapest wine on the menu because, let's face it, we have no jobs and don't have much money.  So the bottle comes out literally with dust on it...not great.  When we finally finished the bottle, Jessica headed up to the bartender to ask for a menu.  

Sidebar: this bartender also had giant sideburns and a mustasche that curled up at the ends.  He looked awesome.  

I was only able to catch a little of his mustache 

Ok so back to the story...The bartender told Jess that he wanted us to try a bottle that is normally 25 euros, but he will give it to us for 20 so we don't have to get poor quality wine.  He was right, it was much better than the first bottle.  THEN he gave an even nicer bottle for free!  Jessica was definitely the MVP of that night and we are going to make her do that more often :)  I also decided to finally take my camera out with me, which resulted in me somehow taking over 50 pictures!  There were a ton of funny ones with Caroline, Court and Jess, but I'll just choose a couple to post here...

Sunday was rainy so we decided to stay inside until our big festivities that night.  We headed to Moyo for aperitivo with the girls and it was awesome!  Moyo is a very hip bar with a dj and everything and the food they had laid out for aperitivo was amazing!  Little pizzetti, fried bread balls, tons of different pasta salads, cous cous, and a few other things.  Everything was delicious and it was free!  You just had to order a cocktail, which we were going to do anyways.  I got a Cosmopolitan and it was the best one I have ever had.  I was nervous because those things can be hit or miss and this one was so good I even got another :)  We then headed over to the girls apartment to get ready for the night.  Everyone had something to wear except me, but that was soon about to change.  Courtney and my friends from work had sent a package to us, but sent it to Jessica's school so we could make sure it got here.  Luckily Jess told us that she had it so we opened it and surprise!!  It was a Halloween package with tons of goodies for me to choose from!  It literally couldn't have come at a better time!  I didn't have a cohesive costume so they just dubbed me the spirit of Halloween.

Thanks Ana and Rabiah!!!!!  You are the BEST!

So after we got ready we headed to Astor, Caroline's favorite place here because they play the best music.  We were able to get a great seat before it got too crowded.  Then all of a sudden Thriller came on and 4 zombies came marching in and did the Thriller dance.  They had forreal looking costumes too and the makeup was so real it was disturbing.  But their performance was awesome and it was right in front of us.  We then spent the rest of the time enjoying the awesome music, the dj honestly didn't play one bad song and Caroline was officially obsessed.  Halloween was definitely a success!

We stayed inside all day today mostly trying to recover from our big weekend, but also because it was raining all day.  It's supposed to rain the next few days so we are going to have to think of more indoor things to do until our trip to Valencia and Barcelona on Thursday!!!!!  I am so excited to go on our first far away trip, yay!!!

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!!