Here I am again, catching up on the past three weeks. Typical.
Three weeks ago, I went on an Italian adventure with my good friend Elyse. We decided to go to Siena and Elba Island. Of course we didn't do much research before we left....but I have to admit we did a pretty fantastic job considering all of our activities and sharp navigation skills. Friday morning we hopped on the train and headed to Siena. We found a great deal at a hotel near Il Campo and decided it was necessary to go on a 6 hour wine tour. We visited two vineyards and toured the town of San Gimignano. Throughout the day, we tasted 14 different wines from the Chianti region and consumed the greatest brick of lasagna I have ever had in my entire existence. Amidst all the excitement, I ended up sending home three bottles of wine to my house in the States...I guess it was a successful tour! I told myself I would not become a wine snob, but I learned so much. I can tell you all about where the different levels of grapes go, how many fingers a wine vine has, what kind of animal they use to find truffles and much much more. Overall, it was a very educational experience! The next day we toured Siena. I have to admit the Duomo of Florence is much more amazing, and complete, than the Duomo in Siena, but still amazing. After roaming the streets of Siena and eating too much Fritelle, we got on the train and headed to Piombino. From there, we planned on taking the ferry to Elba Island. Well...the train man told us we had to change trains in Montepescali...? We decided to trust his judgement. He failed to mention that the Montepescali "train station" is in fact an electronic box that allows you to travel to exactly four different places....Piombino was not one of those places. After looking at the huge train schedule on the side of the building and watching the two men riding horses along the train tracks...we decided to call my roommate and have her look up the next train station. Of course the website only gives abbreviations...so we took our chances and guessed the next station. Luckily, we guessed right! We made it to Piombino and hoped on the next ferry for Elba Island. Elba is stunning. It is gorgeous and very beautiful, something out of a picture book. While on Elba, we searched high and low for the villa Napoleon lived in during his time of exile. It was wonderful, I don't think he could complain about it. We also walked along the beach and collected numerous pieces of sea glass.
Two weeks ago, I spent the weekend in Florence! It was nice to relax and not worry about missing any trains :) On Sunday, I went horseback riding with two of my roommates and visited a Castle community for lunch and wine tasting. I don't think my horse was in a very good mood...but it was nice to ride again! It was my first time ever riding in an English saddle...I think I prefer Western. My butt was sore for a week.
Last week was spring break and I went to GREECE! It was amazing! I'm convinced I will return someday. We took a bus, and then a boat to Corfu Island and the a boat and a bus to Athens. I will tell you more about this adventure in my next post...it's time for my next class.
Pace, Yiamas, and Feta Cheese,
Kim
martedì 31 marzo 2009
martedì 3 marzo 2009
I'm such a cheater at this haha
Hi again! I'm back to tell you about this past weekend, and other various pieces of information you may or may not find interesting.
Last Thursday evening, after a long day in the jewelry studio, eating pita bakes and doria cookies with Evy, I booked it to the train station to hop on a bus to the French Riviera. Thanks to my wonderful roommates, I didn't even have to carry my bag all the way there! It was splendid. After watching 3 DVDs and making too many bathroom stops, we arrived in Nice at approximately 1 AM. We went to our budget hotel room to find 3 sets of bunk beds. It kind of looked like a hospital room with all the white and light blue, but the six of us managed to live in the smallest room on the planet for our three days in France.
On Friday morning, we woke up early and went to find breakfast. I am proud to say that we attended the same restaurant everyday and I love crepes. And French hot chocolate. We made our way to Monaco to see the Monte Carlo Casino and all the fancy yachts. I even found my future house. If you haven't noticed, I seem to have a lot of those :) We grabbed lunch so G and Claire could eat a huge pot of Mussels. Rach and I stuck with tiramisu. After roaming the streets of Monaco, we headed back to Nice to check out the pebble beach. We watched the sun set and turned in early so we could enjoy Cannes the next day.
While in Cannes, we saw the red carpet for the famous film festival and enjoyed the beach. We went out for lunch and Rachel ordered a huge platter of oysters...what a trooper. We found a cute flea market and browsed until it was time to head home for carnavale. Once we got home, we covered our faces in way too much make up and headed for the parade. If you're reading this and have access to my facebook, you should pause and go look at pictures. The floats and lights during this parade were amazing- even more impressive than the ones we saw at Viareggio. The kids, and adults, all buy bags upon bags of confetti and thousands of cans of silly string and just have wars with eachother all night. So, naturally, we bought a couple cans of silly string and proceeded to cover eachother in different colors of stringy goop. It was hilarious, to say the least. G has decided to come up with next years theme, so hopefully we will be back again haha When we got back to our room, our floor was covered in confetti that got caught in our hair and clothes. Priceless.
Sunday wasn't too exciting, we always forget that everything in Europe is closed on Sundays. So trying to plan on shopping on Sundays never seems to work out for us. Because everything was closed, we hiked to the Henri Matisse museum and saw the city of Nice on accident...it took over an hour to walk there. But it was worth it and on our way to the bus to go home, I had Subway :) Just so you know, subway in France is for sure not the same as America. If you want yellow peppers, you won't get them there.
A few things I forgot to mention, that may or may not make you laugh:
1. I almost ordered tripe when I was in Rome...and no, I didn't know that tripe was cow stomach.
2. I drink an unneccesary amount of espresso. It's going to become a problem.
3. I broke two of the lamps in my room already.
4. I thought I was good at bargaining until I got a bunch of Italian men in trouble when I bought my first purse at the market...I still got it for my price...but man it was embarassing.
5. I want a badass leather jacket like Rach.
6. My roommates and I like to buy eat-my-feelings-pastries.
7. Every person that I Skype with complains about the lack of light in my apartment. Now that I think about it, my apartment does lack light.
8. The woman who lives underneath us always gets mad when Claire smokes out the window.
9. I love the kebap guys next door, they know us personally and let us take adventures through the storage room on the bottom floor of our apartment so we can try to find the magical door that leads to the place where our clothes disappear when we drop them from the closeline.
10. We call the small grocery store across the street "conrad's" instead of "conads" because it reminds of Conrad from Weeds.
Enough of that for now, hope this was worth your while :)
Pace, Love and Kebap,
Kim
Last Thursday evening, after a long day in the jewelry studio, eating pita bakes and doria cookies with Evy, I booked it to the train station to hop on a bus to the French Riviera. Thanks to my wonderful roommates, I didn't even have to carry my bag all the way there! It was splendid. After watching 3 DVDs and making too many bathroom stops, we arrived in Nice at approximately 1 AM. We went to our budget hotel room to find 3 sets of bunk beds. It kind of looked like a hospital room with all the white and light blue, but the six of us managed to live in the smallest room on the planet for our three days in France.
On Friday morning, we woke up early and went to find breakfast. I am proud to say that we attended the same restaurant everyday and I love crepes. And French hot chocolate. We made our way to Monaco to see the Monte Carlo Casino and all the fancy yachts. I even found my future house. If you haven't noticed, I seem to have a lot of those :) We grabbed lunch so G and Claire could eat a huge pot of Mussels. Rach and I stuck with tiramisu. After roaming the streets of Monaco, we headed back to Nice to check out the pebble beach. We watched the sun set and turned in early so we could enjoy Cannes the next day.
While in Cannes, we saw the red carpet for the famous film festival and enjoyed the beach. We went out for lunch and Rachel ordered a huge platter of oysters...what a trooper. We found a cute flea market and browsed until it was time to head home for carnavale. Once we got home, we covered our faces in way too much make up and headed for the parade. If you're reading this and have access to my facebook, you should pause and go look at pictures. The floats and lights during this parade were amazing- even more impressive than the ones we saw at Viareggio. The kids, and adults, all buy bags upon bags of confetti and thousands of cans of silly string and just have wars with eachother all night. So, naturally, we bought a couple cans of silly string and proceeded to cover eachother in different colors of stringy goop. It was hilarious, to say the least. G has decided to come up with next years theme, so hopefully we will be back again haha When we got back to our room, our floor was covered in confetti that got caught in our hair and clothes. Priceless.
Sunday wasn't too exciting, we always forget that everything in Europe is closed on Sundays. So trying to plan on shopping on Sundays never seems to work out for us. Because everything was closed, we hiked to the Henri Matisse museum and saw the city of Nice on accident...it took over an hour to walk there. But it was worth it and on our way to the bus to go home, I had Subway :) Just so you know, subway in France is for sure not the same as America. If you want yellow peppers, you won't get them there.
A few things I forgot to mention, that may or may not make you laugh:
1. I almost ordered tripe when I was in Rome...and no, I didn't know that tripe was cow stomach.
2. I drink an unneccesary amount of espresso. It's going to become a problem.
3. I broke two of the lamps in my room already.
4. I thought I was good at bargaining until I got a bunch of Italian men in trouble when I bought my first purse at the market...I still got it for my price...but man it was embarassing.
5. I want a badass leather jacket like Rach.
6. My roommates and I like to buy eat-my-feelings-pastries.
7. Every person that I Skype with complains about the lack of light in my apartment. Now that I think about it, my apartment does lack light.
8. The woman who lives underneath us always gets mad when Claire smokes out the window.
9. I love the kebap guys next door, they know us personally and let us take adventures through the storage room on the bottom floor of our apartment so we can try to find the magical door that leads to the place where our clothes disappear when we drop them from the closeline.
10. We call the small grocery store across the street "conrad's" instead of "conads" because it reminds of Conrad from Weeds.
Enough of that for now, hope this was worth your while :)
Pace, Love and Kebap,
Kim
lunedì 2 marzo 2009
I'm really sorry I'm so bad at this blog thing.
Hey! Here I am again, trying to play catch up on the past few weeks...forgive me once again.
The last time I posted, I was planning on going to Fiesole and Venice...I did make it to Fiesole, but haven't gotten as far as Venice yet. Fiesole was just a short bus ride outside of Florence and my roommates and I decided we needed to get a taste of the chocolate festival. We were hoping it would be bigger than we expected, but it was wonderful just the same. We hiked the town and sampled all of the yummy chocolate. We almost walked all the way back to Florence! very impressive.
The next day, we traveled to Viareggio, a town on the coast of Italy. We went for their carnaval, and even though we were a little late for the festivities, we were still fascinated by the huge, moving floats and pounds of confetti that littered the streets. There was a ferris wheel with a 12 year old boy operating it, so naturally we decided it was necessary to ride on it. It gave us a beautiful view of the city and the ocean. I've decided I'm going to come back for a day at the beach..hopefully it gets warm enough while I'm here!
Last weekend I traveled to Rome. My two roommates, Gianni and Rachel, signed up for the Rome trip with our school. Suzy, Claire, Steph and I decided we should travel there as well. So, the timeline of events leading up to our arrival in Rome went something like this...
6:45 AM : Kim, Suzy, Claire and Steph board the regional train and head for Rome.
8:30 AM: G and Rach board the EuroStar and head for Rome.
10:45 AM: G and Rach have arrived in Rome.
11:08 AM: Kim, Suzy, Claire and Steph arrive in Rome.
Stupid EuroStar.
11:10 AM: Steph realizes she missed her connection to the next station to meet her friend.
11:20 AM: Kim runs into Alicia and Patrick in the bathroom.
11:25 AM: Kim, Suzy, Claire, Alicia, Patrick and Patrick decide to find a hostel together.
Ok, I'm done with the play by play....but basically, the adventure to Rome started out very interesting. We ended up staying at a hostel called "Fawlty Towers". I laughed really hard at this. And I hope you do too (hopefully SOMEONE knows what the TV series "Fawlty Towers" is because no one else was able to join in on my laughter....). Next, we opened Alicia's Rick Steve's guidebook and basically followed every piece of advice in it for the entire weekend. We bought a Roma Pass, which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone planning on traveling to Rome for three days. It was amazing. You pay 23 euro and receive a three day bus/metro pass, the ability to cut in line at every tourist hot spot and the first two places you visit are free. So, basically, if you visit the colloseum and the Rome museum, you have paid for your pass and saved a lot of time. We were a little bummed when we found out we couldn't use it at the Vatican, however, we just happened to be in Rome on the last sunday of the month! Do you know what that means? The Vatican is free. I have to admit, I am very impressed with the amount of money we saved and time we made up for due to our long train tride to and from Rome. Over the weekend, we saw all of the major sights, the Colloseum, the Pantheon, the Rorum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, etc...it was amazing. Rome was a bit overwhelming for me though, I'm proud to say I have no regrets about choosing Florence over Rome- which is a wonderful feeling for me. We also found a gelato place that sells not 10 flavors...not 30 flavors...not 50 flavors...but 130 flavors of gelato. Yes, 130. Amazing. It was really great, and my favorite flavor was either the rice krispie bar or the grapefruit. Two very different, yet very amazing, flavors. My friends and I also experienced our first "ice bar". It's a regular bar, except everything is made of ice- the bar, your classes, the floors, the benches, everything. When you enter, they place a huge, rather ugly, robe on you to keep you warm and then you can stay in the bar as long as you like for 15 euro...I wouldn't pay for it again, but it was pretty neat and the drinks were delicious.
I know I have left out a few details about my adventures...but that just means I need to do a better job about updating my blog. So, in a few hours, I will write about my trip to the French Riviera and let you know what I left out. I miss all of you! Much love!
Pace,
Kim
The last time I posted, I was planning on going to Fiesole and Venice...I did make it to Fiesole, but haven't gotten as far as Venice yet. Fiesole was just a short bus ride outside of Florence and my roommates and I decided we needed to get a taste of the chocolate festival. We were hoping it would be bigger than we expected, but it was wonderful just the same. We hiked the town and sampled all of the yummy chocolate. We almost walked all the way back to Florence! very impressive.
The next day, we traveled to Viareggio, a town on the coast of Italy. We went for their carnaval, and even though we were a little late for the festivities, we were still fascinated by the huge, moving floats and pounds of confetti that littered the streets. There was a ferris wheel with a 12 year old boy operating it, so naturally we decided it was necessary to ride on it. It gave us a beautiful view of the city and the ocean. I've decided I'm going to come back for a day at the beach..hopefully it gets warm enough while I'm here!
Last weekend I traveled to Rome. My two roommates, Gianni and Rachel, signed up for the Rome trip with our school. Suzy, Claire, Steph and I decided we should travel there as well. So, the timeline of events leading up to our arrival in Rome went something like this...
6:45 AM : Kim, Suzy, Claire and Steph board the regional train and head for Rome.
8:30 AM: G and Rach board the EuroStar and head for Rome.
10:45 AM: G and Rach have arrived in Rome.
11:08 AM: Kim, Suzy, Claire and Steph arrive in Rome.
Stupid EuroStar.
11:10 AM: Steph realizes she missed her connection to the next station to meet her friend.
11:20 AM: Kim runs into Alicia and Patrick in the bathroom.
11:25 AM: Kim, Suzy, Claire, Alicia, Patrick and Patrick decide to find a hostel together.
Ok, I'm done with the play by play....but basically, the adventure to Rome started out very interesting. We ended up staying at a hostel called "Fawlty Towers". I laughed really hard at this. And I hope you do too (hopefully SOMEONE knows what the TV series "Fawlty Towers" is because no one else was able to join in on my laughter....). Next, we opened Alicia's Rick Steve's guidebook and basically followed every piece of advice in it for the entire weekend. We bought a Roma Pass, which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone planning on traveling to Rome for three days. It was amazing. You pay 23 euro and receive a three day bus/metro pass, the ability to cut in line at every tourist hot spot and the first two places you visit are free. So, basically, if you visit the colloseum and the Rome museum, you have paid for your pass and saved a lot of time. We were a little bummed when we found out we couldn't use it at the Vatican, however, we just happened to be in Rome on the last sunday of the month! Do you know what that means? The Vatican is free. I have to admit, I am very impressed with the amount of money we saved and time we made up for due to our long train tride to and from Rome. Over the weekend, we saw all of the major sights, the Colloseum, the Pantheon, the Rorum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, etc...it was amazing. Rome was a bit overwhelming for me though, I'm proud to say I have no regrets about choosing Florence over Rome- which is a wonderful feeling for me. We also found a gelato place that sells not 10 flavors...not 30 flavors...not 50 flavors...but 130 flavors of gelato. Yes, 130. Amazing. It was really great, and my favorite flavor was either the rice krispie bar or the grapefruit. Two very different, yet very amazing, flavors. My friends and I also experienced our first "ice bar". It's a regular bar, except everything is made of ice- the bar, your classes, the floors, the benches, everything. When you enter, they place a huge, rather ugly, robe on you to keep you warm and then you can stay in the bar as long as you like for 15 euro...I wouldn't pay for it again, but it was pretty neat and the drinks were delicious.
I know I have left out a few details about my adventures...but that just means I need to do a better job about updating my blog. So, in a few hours, I will write about my trip to the French Riviera and let you know what I left out. I miss all of you! Much love!
Pace,
Kim
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