From One L-Town to Another

As most of you probably know by now from my obnoxious Facebook posts about Partying in the USA and being back on Notre Dame's non-UK campus, I have, for a few days now, been officially done with study abroad. The people of the London Program executed our final Domer-bomb last Saturday (in the category of sentences I should not speak aloud to the general public), taking over a solid half of one of the giant waiting lounges at Heathrow Airport before boarding our group flights back to the US of A. The past seven days have been crazy - with 2 days in London, 2.5 days in South Bend, and 2.5 days in Logansport - and now that the London laundry hanging up to dry in my shower has left me unable to get anything done, it seemed that now is the perfect time to finally write about my final days in London and my transition back from one L-Town to another.

Since the penultimate week in London brought Parkour Greg climbing through our window, I can't really say that the final week in London brought anything to top my last blog post in terms of excitement. Mostly, it brought a lot of nostalgic lasts. There was the Thursday before the final week, when my Playing Shakespeare classmates and I put on a Macbeth performance for the entire, tipsy London Program. This was fun, nerve-wracking, and extremely weird all at the same time. Mostly, I'm just happy that the audience, which laughed uproariously at such unintentionally innuendo-laden lines as "I have done the deed," did not laugh at my famous but unfortunate line, "Unsex me here."

(If it seems obvious to you that an audience of college students would not laugh at a dramatic Shakespeare monologue, first of all, you completely misunderstand the ethos of the London Program, and second of all, you are clearly not aware that the apartment next to mine - the residents of which took up the entire first row at our performance - was referred to by themselves and others as "Douche Flat.")

The final week brought lots more lasts. The last time I could go out for drinks on a Monday night and not be considered an alcoholic (note: this was also actually the first Monday on which I went out for drinks, but who's counting). The last time I would exchange casual hellos with my friends on our daily commute through Trafalgar Square. The last time I could drop in to the National Gallery after class instead of the Art Department display hallway in O'Shag. The last time I would take an exam as a college junior. Perhaps most heartbreakingly, the last time for at least quite a while that I would shop at Primark.

On Thursday, my last walk home from class across the Hungerford Bridge brought me what is probably my favorite commute of the entire semester. The sun was shining and the temperatures hovering above the 60-degrees-Fahrenheit mark for once, and the people I encountered on my final walk across the now-familiar bridge seemed to be actively trying to make my commute one for the ages. First, there was the twenty-something American girl swearing at her boyfriend in an almost unintelligible Boston accent. As soon as I had passed the two lovebirds and could do so without looking like a psychopath, I broke into one of the biggest grins I think I have ever formed my mouth into. Sure, they were yelling at each other, but they were yelling in the voice of a country I was headed back to in 48 short hours. Weird as this may be, that Boston girl's anger brought me a whole lot of joy.

A few yards later, the joy was multiplied by the simple action of a steel-drum player on one side of the bridge. Seemingly completely at random, the man paused in the middle of his song to shout out one simple word: "happiness." The fact that I kept myself from pulling an Enchanted and breaking into song with these guys is nothing short of a miracle.

On Friday - my last full day in London - I kept the Enchanted trend alive with an impromptu walk through St. James' Park and one last stroll through Parliament Square, past all of the city's most Instagrammable sights. The roommates and I headed out to dinner for one last night of GT'z with G-02, and, before we knew it, it was time to return to the Land of the Free and Home of the Cars That Drive on the Right Side of the Road. We bid a hearty xoxo to an incredible city and semester and headed home.

If you think the story ends there, of course, you are sorely mistaken. My family surprised me at the airport with not only a welcome home poster bearing the shining American visages of both Barack Obama and Honey Boo-Boo Child, but also with a real-life ambush from my two best friends. They took the three of us back to campus, where I spent my first days back in America on the constant brink of tears over how perfect my life is. From multiple meals in the glorious South Dining Hall to a sunset stroll past the Dome en route to the grotto, a lazy afternoon of gossiping on the futons of Howard Hall,  and a Sunday bookended by singing in the loft of the Basilica and the choir corner of a full-to-bursting Keough Hall Chapel, it was exactly like I had never left - and it was the perfect transition back into life in the USA.

After one last SDH lunch on Monday afternoon, I finally returned to Logansport. I've been to a potluck dinner/banquet in the LHS cafeteria, made a midday trip to Kokomo, and had generous helpings of Sycamore, B&K, and El Arriero, so I think it's safe to say I'm pretty fully back into the swing of Logansport life already, too.

It was an unbelievable semester in London, but oh, is it great to be back. This afternoon, I'm headed back to campus for a few more days as a homeless but happy rising senior (insert a "WHAT?!" a la G-02 here). From Miami to London to Edinburgh to Amsterdam to Venice to Florence to Paris to Rome to Logansport and back to Notre Dame, it's been a pretty awesome four months.

Thanks for reading the study abroad blog, everybody. From here on out, it'll be back to The Domerberry. If you're on campus, dear readers, I will see you tonight. If you need me, I'll be the one finally sipping on the Reckers smoothie I've been pining for all semester and talking about how I've been 21 for two months and still haven't been to the Backer. Good luck on the rest of your finals, my friends - and see you soon.

test

He's Climbin' in Yo Windows

After nearly four months of living in a giant-window-filled room on the ground floor of a building facing out onto a busy London intersection and regular parkour playground, I experienced today, surprisingly, the first moment of my semester that has ever been both legitimately strange and also notably disconcerting. Before you all get worried, this is not a sad or a scary story - just a really, really weird one. In my eighteen months of blogging, I have become all too familiar with the "I cannot wait to blog about this" feeling, and the feeling accompanying tonight's events was the granddaddy of them all.

Early this evening, my flatmates and I were hanging out in my room and our common room, reveling in various states of dinner and debating our options for a night out, when we heard screeching tires, followed by the yells of what sounded like several grown men. Thinking that the time had finally and inevitably come when we would have to witness the gruesome death of one of the free-running daredevils of the Conway Front Yard Parkour Club, the three of us ran to my room's comfortably open windows to see what had happened. The casual mood of the evening went temporarily and abruptly out the window (pun both unintentional and distressing, but I can't think of a better turn of phrase) when we saw that a flashy white sports car had just collided with a bicyclist. After a few brief moments that left us, the bikers and drivers, and the small crowd of parkour guys who had seen the accident standing around in stunned silence, it became clear that the biker was shaken, but okay. He stood up and walked back to the sidewalk unaided, and all of us unwitting spectators began to return to what we were doing.

Still reeling somewhat from the shock of watching an accident unfold outside our door, though, my roommates and I lingered for a moment at the windows. (Windows which, to remind you, were a solid ten or twelve inches open. Keep this in mind.) As the people on the street returned to their business, one of the parkour guys noticed us watching the scene.

"Hey ladies!" he yelled.

Uh...is he talking to us? People from the outside can talk to us? I thought this was like a two-way zoo kind of thing, what is going on?

As the above thoughts raced through our heads and out of our mouths, our new friend continued talking.

"You wanna give me your number?"

Ya know, my gut says no on this one, but - "We don't have phones! Sorry!"

Unsatisfied with this answer, though, parkour guy decided to take our conversation to a new level: face to face.

"Eh, screw it," I'm assuming he more or less said somewhere in his barely audible mumblings, "I'm comin' over there."

I've described this before, but my roommates and I have always taken felt confident and safe in our disconnect from the street thanks to the tall, spike-tipped fence and sizable fire-escape-esque pit that separates our windows from the actual sidewalk. These obstacles proved no match, however, for parkour guy. Before we could even make sense of what was going on, our parkour friend had hopped up to and over the top of the fence and was making his way, monkey bars style, across the metal bar that connected the fence base to our building. He reached the end of the bar, and in classic "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" style, reached out for the windowsill as he asked if he could come up.

The next thing we knew, this random man from the parkour troupe on the street was literally hanging from our windowsill chatting us up.

This is probably a good moment to reiterate to you all that I WISH that I could invent a story like this, people. I am 100%, positively not making this up. This is, unbelievably, my actual life.

Satisfied with our proximity at this point, parkour guy tried again. "So, you wanna give me that number?"

Like the safety-trained little darlings that we are, we repeated our insistence that we don't have phones. After all, that's, like...half true. Seeing that his initial plan was unsuccessful, our new friend moved on to a new tactic: settling in for a chat. "Do you mind if I just open this a bit more?" he asked. Before we could answer, he had pushed the window up another foot or so and STUCK HIS HEAD, SHOULDERS, AND UPPER TORSO THROUGH OUR WINDOW.

To clarify one more time, there is, at this point, a random guy from the parkour crew dangling from our windowsill, half of his body in our room, talking to us about our evening plans. He started with the standard "where are you from," spouting off the few random fun facts he knew about our various home states and trying to make sense of where we went to college before getting to the good stuff: what we were doing tonight. After small-talking and avoiding the subject for a while, we eventually dropped the name of a club some people were considering, earning a "that's a fun place on Wednesdays actually" from our new buddy Greg. We snapped an entirely necessary picture with our breaking-and-entering friend and sent him on his way with a half-hearted, "Yeah, see you at the club! Maybe!" As Greg returned to his parkour, we went back to our normal lives, shaking our heads at what is, without a doubt, the weirdest thing that has ever happened to us here in Conway Hall.

Obviously, as I'm writing and posting this new blog post at 11 PM, I decided not to go out tonight. (Surprise! I'll go out tomorrow?) But a couple of my roommates did, in fact, just head out the door in pursuit of the very club we name-dropped to Greg. So maybe this weird story will have a happy ending against all odds. Perhaps the tale of the parkour practitioner who's climbin' in yo windows, snatchin' yo people up, will even end in love!

Because oh yeah - did I forget to mention this part? Theoretically-creepy Greg here was actually really hot.

Just makin' some local friends! 

I think we can all learn a few valuable lessons from this crazily improbable story. First, it can teach us all that, on occasion, you gotta open your hearts and your windows to the charming, attractive parkour guy from the street who so desperately wants in. And secondly? It shows us that my friends and I will go for pretty much anything if the involved parties are good-looking enough. Breaking and entering? I mean, only technically. We'll be shutting our windows before going to bed tonight, but Parkour Greg, we'll be dreaming of you. 

test

Maggie, Christine, and the Sun

You know that feeling of freedom you get when you finish and turn in a big paper? Well, this Wednesday, I took that feeling and turned it into an entire day's worth of out-of-the-ordinary London-y exploring. In describing it, the day wasn't all that exciting or special, but whether because of the endorphins from handing in my paper or the fact that the sun was shining for what seemed like the first time since I was about fourteen years old, I had a really great and very British day - and I thought I'd tell you about it.

From the start, this Wednesday was bound to be more interesting than the average one, for this Wednesday was the day of Margaret Thatcher's funeral. Honestly, I think that, in the days preceding it, this event scared many of us more than it excited us. Tensions are high when it comes to the British public's feelings on the Iron Lady and, in particular, her expensive Ceremonial funeral, and after the events in Boston on Monday and the extensive safety warnings and guidelines our program sent to us on Tuesday night, we were a little nervous about going about our day in these places that would be so caught up in the proceedings of the controversial day. We were advised to take an alternate route to school on Wednesday, as our usual path takes us straight across the Strand and through Trafalgar Square - two of the most high-profile areas of the path of the funeral procession that would come through at almost the same time we would. I, however, have a particular taste for adventure (read: had a paper due so was obviously running horribly late in leaving the dorm), so I decided to (read: had to to avoid being late and lost) throw caution to the wind and go about my walk to school just as I usually would.

This, as it turns out, was exactly the proper thing to do. (Sorry, program directors.) All the things that made Wednesday's festivities nerve-wracking in our heads actually made it extremely safe in practice. With riot and even terror fears at an uneasy high, the police presence was massive. Trust me, parents and Notre Dame administrators - nothing bad was going to happen to any of us with that many cops lining about half of our daily commute. Similarly, since the funeral-affected areas of our path had to, of course, be cleared for the procession, not only was there no imminent danger; there weren't even cars to avoid as we crossed the street. All the roads were closed, and the barricades and police force around the square meant that it was almost completely free of people who weren't walking to work or starting to form the small crowds that lined the procession route. Many of us were joking in class that, really, that set-up would be the perfect way to walk to school every single day. Cross the street without even checking the traffic or heeding the lights? Waltz through Trafalgar Square without dodging screaming children or creepy street performance? If you ask us, Great Britain needs to hold ceremonial and state funerals more often.

About halfway through my first class of the morning, my classmates convinced our professor to let us out into the square to see if we could catch the procession driving past. We missed it by about five pathetic minutes, but hey, we can still say we were in Trafalgar Square on the morning that Maggie Thatcher's funeral drove past it. Have I mentioned lately, for good measure, that my life is still entirely not real?

By the end of my last class of the day, the traffic patterns made weird by the funeral had gone back to normal, and to the surprise, delight, and relative confusion of everyone in the ND London Program, the sun had come out.  With the sun out, the temperature in the sixties, and my fifteen-page paper officially out of my hands, I decided I would take a detour on my way home and do some shopping in the Covent Garden area that I so often walked past.

THE BEST IDEA. I discovered a whole new treasure trove of shopping that will probably destroy what remains of my bank account here in my last two weeks, I bought a khaki pencil skirt because by God it's April, I navigated a new neighborhood successfully, and I found this:

Thanks for the photo, interwebz 

This insane-looking, brightly-colored little mini-neighborhood is Neal's Yard. It's filled with small health food cafes and other various hippie shops. As I already had my khaki pencil skirt-filled Banana Republic in hand by the time I found this place, the death stares from the flower children ensured that I didn't stick around too long - but I had a great time for those few minutes looking around at all the pink windows and yellow bricks and flower boxes lit up by this weird thing called the sun. If you ever doubt that foggy London town can be sunny and colorful, I entreat you to look no further than the extremely cool Neal's Yard. 

Even with my lovely impromptu shopping spree, though, the uncontested highlight of my Great Day in London was my evening activity: going to see Phantom of the Opera on the West End. As we had both been wanting to see the show all semester without ever actually planning a night of it, one of my spring break buds and I decided last week to buy tickets for this Wednesday to reward ourselves for finishing that aforementioned paper. Obviously, I knew that Phantom was a great show and I loved its soundtrack - after all, I had technically seen a professional production of it before, in Toronto when I was seven years old and totally capable of remembering everything about it - but, people. It. Was. Incredible. 

From the very first notes of "Think of Me" to the final thrilling moments down in that labyrinth where night is blind, I was geeking out like a weirdo at Comic Con (sorry not sorry, anyone reading this who's into Comic Con). I pretty much had my hands at the level of my eyes for most of the second act, out of sheer excitement and a tendency for excited jazz hand that eventually reached the point of medically diagnosable tic. The girl playing Christine had an unidentifiable and strange accent that was occasionally distracting, but even with her occasionally off-kilter vowels, the talent of this cast was off the charts. Every time Carlotta opened her mouth, I wanted to just yell out, "How do you do this eight times a week? Are you a human?!" When "Masquerade" started, I, for obvious reasons, thought I had died and gone to costume-loving heaven. So many rhinestones. So many colors. So much yes. As uncreative as it may be to see and love Phantom in London, this production was absolutely amazing. It's had me reprising my old voice recital performances of Christine's big numbers in the shower all week, and it is threatening to unseat Matilda as my favorite of the shows I've seen this semester. As of right now, at least, I have only one show left to finish off my semester-long tour of the West End, and it's one that, knowing me, could take them all: Wicked. My roommate and I are seeing it on Monday, and as it is something like my seventh time seeing the show, I have a feeling I'm going to like it. 

It may have been a day of state-sponsored mourning for the UK, but Wednesday in this long-term visitor's book was one of the best days of the semester. Here's hoping the next fifteen are all like that one. See you in two weeks, Stateside readers! 

European PDA: No One is Safe

For a few weeks now, I have been under the strict instruction that I need to write a post on that most peculiar of features of life in Europe, public displays of affection. Now that I am finished with international travel for the semester and have little left to entertain me but my icky schoolwork, it seemed that the time was finally nigh for this long-awaited post. Here in the UK and around the continent, over-the-top, squirm-inducing PDA is around every corner - and this weekend, we learned that, when it comes to this trend, no one is immune.

In the continent that so many of my friends and I count as our temporary home this semester, the comfort level with couples showing their love in public is a tad higher than it is back in the land of the free/home of the brave. It's not unusual to see young - or sometimes even not-so-young - lovers goin' to town on park benches, in stairways, and in generally any place they feel like making out with each other. Shame, it seems, simply does not exist in this corner of the world, and it fascinates us Yankee visitors to no end.

Capturing Italian PDA vis-a-vis a "travel buddy solo shot" 

Though I'll be the first to admit that, for someone who loves Chelsea Handler as much as I do, I'm pretty prudish, my main response to seeing all of this PDA is not horror, but confusion. Public makeout fiends of Europe, you positively confound me. Much like the Parkour kids outside my window, you and your antics make me wonder - do you have parents? Does anyone, in fact, have parents on this continent? Do they just not exist? Are they too busy also going on PDA tours of their home cities to pay any attention to what you're doing? Tell me, youth of Europe, because I truly am dying to know. Even more so than the question of parenting, though, all of these logic-defying public makeouts inspire in me some serious questions about the sheer logistics of the things I see going on here. Of all the European PDA hotspots, my favorite is the one that confuses me the most: escalators. You can hardly get on an escalator in London or in any of the places I've visited this semester, really, without seeing some couple, somewhere near you, engaging in some degree of very public snogging as they enjoy their leisurely ride up the moving stairs.

HOW DO YOU DO THIS, PEOPLE OF EUROPE? HOW? I suppose now would be the appropriate time to mention that my response to this trend is probably influenced by my extreme fear of escalators. Ever since hearing far too young about the horrible fate of a distant relative who once got a shoe caught in the mechanics of an escalator, I have been ceaselessly terrified of those devil-stairs. I don't like stepping onto them; I don't like stepping off of them - if they weren't so convenient for helping me avoid my even greater nemesis, actual stairs, I'm quite confident I would never use them. I hate escalators, and when I am on them, my one and only focus is on not dying. Face forward, hold railing, avoid all human contact, don't pass out from terror. And the people of this country make out while riding these things! Since the London Underground - the most vital center for escalator makeouts - has guidelines requiring you to keep to the right if you're not walking, this precarious arrangement generally forces one half of the couple to spend the duration of the ride facing completely backwards. How no one has died doing this is completely beyond me. The reach and the urgency of European PDA knows no bounds - not even those of the natural human desire to avoid death.

But surely, you say, the influence of European PDA must stop somewhere, right? It doesn't go so far as to affect Notre Dame students...does it?

Well, normally it doesn't, but it sure did this weekend! This weekend, as I've mentioned before, was centered around the London-hosted Booze Cruise. The Booze Cruise, which I am only now referring to by its actual name because my mother "still just really hates that title," is a four-hour cruise on the Thames for which students from any and all of ND and SMC's European study abroad programs descend upon London. It is the butt of endless jokes in the study abroad communities, but, chuckles aside, it really was a lot of fun. All 240 guests put on fancy clothes for the first time in months, congregated in and around Conway Hall, and headed to the river en masse for a night of dancing, singing, and casually floating past some of the world's most iconic landmarks. (Let me tell you, you have not lived until you've belted out the always dramatic "Here Come the Irish" while on a boat cruise with 10% of the junior class, passing by Big Ben.) Primarily, though, the Booze Cruise showed us all that it's not just native Europeans who can engage in PDA that would make all the adults they've ever met hang their heads in shame. (I don't include myself in this, Mother. I am among the few, the proud, the people who escaped hookup-free.) To give you some idea of the scale of the BC13 carnage, lunch in the London Centre basement today - usually home to at least half the program at any given time - was made up of a whopping ten people. Obviously, getting to basement lunch was my highest priority for this day. That basement should have been filled to the brim with all sorts of freshly reunited newfound "friends," and I was all too eager to see them interact. My disappointment at the complete lack of awkward reunions that this tiny lunch group provided was quickly eclipsed by the conversations about Saturday night that our relative privacy allowed us to have. Over the course of this day, I have learned ever more fully just what a raging success BC13 was at getting its participants to imitate the locals they've been living with all semester. There weren't any escalators to try out on this boat - though, as slippery as the stairs were and as challenged at navigating them as all of the cruisers were, "moving stairs" isn't too far from the truth - but from the dance floors to the observation deck to the flats of Conway Hall, the PDA on Saturday night was present and accounted for.

The next few days, I predict, will continue to be full of awkward encounters and fantastic things for me to observe and gossip about. A lot of people, as this week wears on, are finding themselves ashamed of what they did this weekend. But you know what? I say there's no need for shame at all - the Europeans sure wouldn't think so.

Operation Be God's Dinner Party

Ever since visiting the apartment of my Roman friends last weekend for their classy, friendship-filled dinner party, I thought to myself, "Self, that was nice. That was fun! Self, you oughta do that again." Conveniently, it so happened that this weekend - the very first after our Easter get-together - is the one during which abroad friends from all corners of Europe descend upon London for the "boat cruise" that I am contractually obligated to remind you "is neither sponsored nor endorsed by the University of Notre Dame's London Undergraduate Program." Seeing as I do live here in London and possess a full kitchen, if limited capacities for cooking with it, it seemed simple enough for me to host this second round of classy dinner party reunion-ing. And seeing as this weekend back in South Bend coincides with major reunions and parties for both Folk Choir and Vision - two groups from which I draw an embarrassing percentage of my friends - it seemed like simple fate that I do so.

It was thus that Operation Be God's Dinner Party came to be. I neglected to mention this to anyone before now, but "Be God's Dinner Party" is the name by which I have secretly been referring to this shindig for a good six days. "Be God's," you see, is the rousing final song sung at each week of ND Vision, and it's a phrase I like to frequently apply in situations where it does not belong. "Be God's Natty Champ" was a major theme of my journey to Miami for the BCS Championship, "Be God's Shamrock Series" was the cry of the Chicago game...apparently, I mostly like it for use in football games. It also seemed entirely appropriate, however, for this mid-Booze Cruise Weekend gathering of people who choose to spend their free time in extra-curriculars and summer jobs where they sing and teach kids about Jesus.

After spending the week talking about Be God's Dinner Party, looking up recipes for Be God's Dinner Party, and having nightmares about the food poisoning that could potentially result from Be God's Dinner Party, the preparations went into full swing yesterday morning.

I decided to do my shopping at the Whole Foods in Piccadilly Circus, which was both a great idea and a terrible idea. It's a great idea in that Whole Foods is all that is good in the world. It was a bad idea in that it significantly bolstered the belief I already hold that I am cooler than everyone I know. "Oh, you had a dinner party last night, too?! How great! Oh - oh, you said yours wasn't made with all organic and fair trade ingredients and free-range poultry? ...Oh."

Mostly, though, my Whole Foods experience provided me with the first very odd moment of my day. As I was meandering along, trying to look casual while desperately searching for the beans I had already unknowingly walked past six times, I noticed that I was not the only American in the store. Somewhere nearby, there was a down-home bro. "Joe Theismann, man, he was the greatest - well, no, of course he never played again after that injury!" I didn't understand much of the sports-y conversation he was having, but I knew the subject was American football and the pastime that every American but me enjoys, baseball. As he seemed to be explaining rather basic things to a British person who clearly didn't get it, I was intrigued. Eventually, I tracked the source of the bro convo: the Whole Foods deli counter guy. That's right, folks, the guy who runs the deli counter at the Whole Foods in the middle of Piccadilly Circus is a straight-up, college-aged, American bro. I have never been more confused in my entire life.

Once I picked my jaw back up from the floor, I purchased my pretentious basketful of ingredients and headed back to da Conwizzle. (Yes, I am now calling Conway Hall "da Conwizzle;" you can all thank Ms. ReNeigh I'm a Horse for that one.) From there, my setbacks were pretty shockingly few.

The first setback was a fire drill during which I and a whopping ten other people left the building. Sorry if this blog post somehow gets back to someone important and gets anyone in trouble, but I feel it should be pointed out now that if this building ever catches fire, hundreds of people will die. Death everywhere. Errbody. Since the fire alarms go off practically every time you do so much as open your bathroom door after a particularly lengthy hot shower, their efficacy at inspiring people to evacuate has been reduced to pretty much nothing. They are the fire alarms that cried wolf. I hope this building has some sort of PA system that can be invoked in the case of an actual emergency. JUSSAYIN.

Anyway, now that that PSA is over, back to my cooking. Just so everyone is aware - mother - it was not, in fact, my cooking that set off a fire alarm at any point during the day. The only thing that went wrong with my cooking was that my two pots of chili looked like entirely different substances. Same recipe. One had chicken, one didn't, and besides that, they were the exact same food. And yet, when the two pots were done simmering, the final products looked completely and utterly different from one another.

Two very different-looking chilis, all gone because they were so gosh darn tasty

 Luckily, until just now when I admitted it publicly on the internet, no one actually knew that as they were eating it, so all they knew was that I had two different kinds of chili that were both pretty darn tasty and were especially nice when paired together. So take that, people who make food look pretty for a living. Take that. The other minor setback of the day was that time when I spilled champagne all over myself because I thought the bottle was empty. Eh, you win some, you lose some.

Overall, Operation Be God's Dinner Party was a wild success. I made food that didn't kill anyone, I had my very first Ben's Cookie (I know, I know) after having it delivered straight to my door, and I got to sit in my common room hanging out with fifteen of my best buds from all over Europe all night. I am a domestic goddess, my friends. Respect it.

The fruits of my first dinner party - complete with hard candy, because I am ninety years old.

I am one classy broad

Rome If You Want To

Now that I have spent the days after Easter chronicling a trip I took two weeks ago, it is finally time to discuss what I did this weekend: ROME. 

Though this facet of my semester hasn't had too much coverage here on da blog, hating everyone in the Rome program has long been a fundamental part of my study abroad experience. They're a small, close-knit program, they can cook, they live in the same city as the pope through the terms of two different popes, their weather is nice, and they're surrounded at all times by gelato. Basically, the only thing keeping me from spending the larger part of all my waking hours envying them is the likelihood that they'd all get fat with the delicious foodstuffs they're faced with day in and day out, and they haven't even done that. The Rome Program, it has seemed all semester, is everything that anyone could ever want. With this in mind, my expectations for this Easter weekend were pretty much sky high - and they were met and surpassed. 

When my roommate and I got in to the city late Thursday night, the only thing we really had time to do was go to dinner. This, along with the ACTUAL palm trees that had greeted us at the airport, was a pretty solid start to our trip. Any weekend that starts with spinach-ricotta ravioli is bound to be filled with joy and perfection, right? 

(Spoiler: The appropriate answer to that question is "right!") 

On Friday, our day began with a tour of St. Peter's Basilica and a couple hours of exploring the Vatican Museums. In case that schedule isn't great enough on its own - and oh, it is - we also spent that entire time with our unnecessary coats slung over our arms and our sunglasses on. Having come from snowy London in the coldest March it has almost ever had, it's safe to say that we were feeling pretty good at this point. 

From the Vatican Museums, the day only continued to go uphill, as my roommate and I met up with our other travel companions, our respective closest friends from the Dublin program. We headed to a very late, very lengthy, and very delicious pizza lunch with them - yes, on Good Friday; at least we all got meatless pizzas? - before reporting to the Colosseum for the event that the Campus Ministry pilgrimage had planned for us: stations of the cross, led by Pope Francis himself. 

Though there's probably something theologically off-color about this reality, that night of reading of Christ's passion on the day when we recognize His being put to death was one of the most joyful evenings of my college career. The thing about the Campus Ministry pilgrimage - of which this was the first whole-group event - is that it drew its participants from all (European) corners of Notre Dame's International Studies department. There were more happy, scream-filled reunions at the Colosseum that night than there are on an average day at the arrivals gate at O'Hare. 

Saturday brought us this same feeling, as it drew every participant in the pilgrimage to St. Peter's Square at midday to pick up our Easter Mass tickets. It brought a reunion that knocked two of my friends to the ground and caused every person in the square to fear for some sort of minor terrorist attack, and it brought me to a gelato place where they dipped my whole waffle cone full of dairy into dark chocolate and then stuck a cookie in it. That night, it brought me to the very epicenter of the ND Rome Program for a home-cooked meal and a jam session full of just-a-few-hours-early Hallelujahs from the Folk Choir repertoire, with Folk Choir friends I hadn't seen since the days when we were sitting on South Beach still embracing the chant, "Go Irish, Beat Bama." Saturday was a good day. 

After all of this, on Sunday, it was finally time for the real reason we had all come to Rome: the papal Easter mass. Unsurprisingly, this, too, was incredible. The post-Gospel homily at this multi-lingual mass was replaced with some time for silent reflection and prayer, and I think it's safe to say I wasn't the only one with tears in my eyes by the time we reached the Creed. We were in a sunny, warm St. Peter's Square with friends from whom we'd spent months apart watching the brand new pope say mass on Resurrection Day. Does life get better than it was in that moment? 

Well, that afternoon, I went back to the gelato place where they dip your purchase in molten chocolate, so yeah, it does. 

Though Vision Break Week 2012 still holds the title of Best Week Ever, this Easter Triduum certainly takes the prize for Best Weekend. I saw great friends, I ate great food, and I discovered that I and everyone I know are complete and shameless papal fangirls. I was there in person to see Pope Francis kiss that disabled baby, people! Yo Taylor, imma let you finish, but Rome just had one of the best weekends of all time. OF ALL TIME. 

And the best part of all was that we all said our goodbyes on Sunday with the phrase, "See you next weekend." For this weekend, you see, is the London-hosted Booze Cruise. We're all reuniting again in two short days, and this time, it's on our turf. Get ready, Rome kids - because London is so ready for you. 

Spring Break: The Cribs

If you've been reading the several-parts-long epic that has been my spring break blog post collection, you have probably picked up by now that my group and I stayed in some pretty ridiculous places on our little Eurotrip. (You've also by now probably become extremely annoyed with me for taking so unbelievably long to write four stupid blog posts about spring break, so thank you for your patience and for having a moderate enough fondness for me to continue taking interest in the things that I say.) Here, then, at long last, is the final installment of my spring break blog fest, and the one I have hyped up more than any other: Spring Break: The Cribs.

Let's start, logically, at the beginning of break. Technically, the accommodations our group experienced in Venice were split fifty-fifty between the place that I'll be writing about and a perfectly average hostel near the airport where the rest of the girls stayed for a night before I arrived. So not every moment of our crew's Venice living was improbably above average, but every moment of mine certainly was!

In Venezia, we stayed in a straight-up three star hotel. There are better hotels in the world than this one, but I sure as heck don't stay in them. When you're used to staying in hostels that fall in various places on the spectrum from "life-threateningly sketchy" to "right, but I'm still splitting bunk beds with a random kid from the Ukraine," staying in any hotel at all constitutes just about the ultimate in luxury living. This place was no exception. In the Hotel Gorizia a la Valigia, we had our own bathrooms (serving an average of 2.5 girls each), our own comfy beds, and free Wifi, free breakfast, and free hotel shampoo. Let me tell you, people of mostly America and Britain, you don't realize how much you love free hotel toiletries until you are re-introduced to them after months of staying in hostels and having a personal net worth that places you just above the poverty line. The same goes for free breakfast. Was my yogurt uncomfortably liquid-y? Maybe. And did the "pineapple juice" that accompanied my meal taste a little too much like the kind of thing that would come from a 20-gallon Gatorade pitcher at a Notre Dame house party? Sure. But, by God, this place was a legitimate hotel with real amenities and a real cleaning staff. Nothing bad can be said about this place. Nothing at all.

From the Gorizia, we moved on to Florence and our much sketchier-sounding second crib: the Alex House. I'll be honest: going into spring break, I was by far the most concerned about this accommodation. I hadn't paid much attention when it was being booked (read: 15 euros a night? say no more, I actually beg you), and I realized shortly before break that I wasn't even entirely sure what kind of place it was. Is it a hostel? Is it a bed and breakfast? Is it, in continuation of the trend begun back in Miami, an actual European guesthouse? I was unclear.

When, at last, we rolled up to the Alex House, my moderate fears were not soon allayed. On the night we arrived, Florence was a rainy, rainy city. We had carried all our earthly belongings for quite some distance, and when we arrived at our address, we found that Alex House was merely one doorbell of a series in a building completely inaccessible without being buzzed in. We rang the doorbell, then, standing in the downpour and praying someone would answer.

No one did.

We check our confirmation email, searching desperately for a phone number or a note about check-in times. We find a phone number and call it. It goes to what we can only assume from the Italian message is automatic voicemail. We find check-in time info and discover that the standard check-in window closed about two hours prior. We begin to panic. In desperation and exhaustion, we lean into the doorbell once more.

The door unlocks.

We rush inside and up the stairs to the reception level of the Alex House. The apparent proprietor checks us in, giving us maps of the city and assuring us we could pay whenever we wanted, as we hadn't enough cash upon arrival to pay at that moment. Just as my fears are starting to evaporate, our proprietor crushes them with the news that our room is "up a few more stairs." We follow the woman up three more flights and through two more doors into our room, and we discover that our fears were entirely misdirected.

Our "room" is an entire, beautiful apartment. We had two set-apart bedrooms. We had two couches that folded out into shockingly comfortable double beds. We had a full kitchen and a washing machine. We had a TV. We had a bathroom and two, count 'em two, heated towel racks. We had our second writing desk of SB2K13. We had our own furnished terrace. We had a chandelier. For 16 hours a day, if one sat in the right place on our stairs, we had free Wifi.

Is it what most people would call luxury? Probably not. But did we cry a little when we saw it? I mean...perhaps.

What all people would rationally call luxury, however, was the apartment we moved on to when we headed to Paris. The story of our last accommodation starts, as in Florence, with a driving rain and a significant period of worry for all of our lives. As the emails from our booking company had instructed us, we got off the Metro stop near our apartment rental and walked to the place where we could pick up our set of keys. To our delight, we found it exactly where it should have been - under the doormat of someone whose identity remains, to this day, a complete mystery. We walked the remaining blocks (in the rain, once again) to our own building and let ourselves in. We walked up the few stairs to our door and tried to unlock it.

In this endeavor, we failed. A lot.

We tried the door again and again, passing the duty off between all six of us several times before calling the emergency contact number we had been given by our rental company. In the second instance of an unsettling trend, their foreign-language voicemail greeted us with the news that they would not be answering the phone tonight. From the apartment Wifi we could just pick up from outside the door, we covered all our bases and sent our company contacts several emails. Just as we were starting to weigh the option of using the semi-stolen Wifi to look up a locksmith or a new place to stay, we try the door one last time.

Success.

The door opens onto what must be one of the most beautiful little appartements in all of Paris. It has all the elements of the Alex House apartment, but all of them are clean. Our new chandelier is made entirely of glass, as are all of the doors blocking off the living room. The place is covered in vases full of flowers, weird but trendy-looking statues, and a general air of our group being cooler than every other spring break group both this semester and ever. As I mentioned in my last post, we spent our final night in Paris sitting in our apartment watching Passport to Paris. When you have an apartment this insane and a selection of baguettes, brie, macarons, and vins from the patisserie and grocery store outside the Musee du Rodin, what exactly would you do with your final night in the city?

The places we stayed in on this trip were, in every sense of the word, insane. I've written about this comment before and I'll write about it again now: on this spring break, we only went uphill from the three-star hotel. And you know what the best part about all of this is? For the entire length of spring break, our total accommodation cost per person (excepting the first night in Venice, as not all of us had arrived yet) was $255. $255 per person for nine nights in starred hotels and luxury apartments in Venice and Florence, Italy, and Paris Effing France. My hat is perpetually tipped to the organizing ladies of this trip for finding these absolutely incredible places, and my hat is tipped to all the people I've talked to since break for tolerating my unstoppable need to brag about them.

Life is good, my friends. Life is pretty good.

Land of a Million Movies: Spring Break Part 2

Hello, dear readers, happy Easter, and my apologies. Do I know that spring break has been over for well over two weeks now? Yes. Do I know it's been eleven days since I last wrote anything at all? Yes. But as today is Easter Monday - a classic Notre Dame holiday and, conveniently, a Bank one - my schedule for the day and my sleep schedule from last night has finally afforded me the time and energy to finish blogging about my SB2K13 adventures. So here we go! 

If you'll think back to my last post about the events of spring break, you'll recall that I left off on my final day in Florence. I had finished Venice, I had had my requisite weird 21st birthday going out experience, and I was about three gelatos shy of leaving Italy behind for two and a half weeks. The rest of our time in Italy was eventful and, as always, food-filled. At my birthday dinner, our favorite little Florentine restaurant treated us to free-ish bruschetta, free champagne, free after-dinner shots of limoncello (because citrus-flavored hard alcohol is the new coffee), and - just when you thought you couldn't get better than the small cake of a few nights before - free medium-sized cake...with strawberries. The next day took us to Pisa for a few hours, where we took pictures of the surprisingly lean-y tower, met some Mormon missionaries, and even spent a solid hour and a half on an accidental, terrifying free bus tour of the Pisan countryside. The main portion of Spring Break Part 2, however, was spent in the city I've studied more frequently than any other in the world: Paris. 

Our five-day stay in Paris was really the main thing that drew me to this trip, and Paris provided me with a wealth of experiences that I will not soon forget. Mostly, though, this portion of our spring break showed me that I seriously need to branch out in terms of the cities where my favorite movies are set. 

Thanks to Moulin Rouge, Midnight in Paris, Les Mis, Passport to Paris (yes, that one), and even a significant portion of my all-time favorite film, The Devil Wears Prada, there were hardly more than five minutes at a time during our days in France when I wasn't quoting or talking about a movie that I basically have memorized. "I recently read a two-volume biography of Rodin." "Love is a many-splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love!" "Don't be silly, Andrea, everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us." "Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour - oh my God." 

You think that's annoying in paragraph form? Imagine how much worse it was in person, for five straight days. 

Despite the non-stop quote-fest, though, Paris was exactly as it should be: magnifique. For me, there were two main things that placed Paris in a league of its own among spring break destinations. The first is that it allowed me to use a bit of my rather rusty French. It's been a while since I've taken a class, but I did study the language for three years in high school and three semesters at ND, so I like to occasionally pretend I'm decent at speaking it. Paris gave me a great outlet for this semi-delusional belief. Trying to buy a box of macarons at the famous and heavenly Laduree in the middle of a miles-long rush hour line? Order in French! Need to explain that, as a US citizen studying in an EU member nation that's not the one you're travelling in, you should, in fact, qualify for a museum entry fee discount? Definitely don't use your native language for that! Lost on the entirely confusing Métro? French again! To my delight, though, the Parisians really were remarkably accepting of my desperate desire to speak their language. On one occasion, my French got me directions from a butcher shop to a patisserie around the corner where we could still buy baguettes at 6 PM. At Versailles, it allowed me to skip the crowds around the English signs and take in most of the info about each room while also being forced to use my brain. In my one big French mistake of the weekend, my French "skills" got me pure Brazilian chocolate macarons instead of plain chocolate - darn. My French knowledge also allowed me to play this really fun game all weekend where I would make my travel buddies try to read things in French and then laugh at their horribly mangled pronunciations. It was great! 

The second half of the beauty of Paris (besides the actual, physical beauty of the city itself and all of its sights, sounds, tastes, and smells) is that, for any 18-25-year-old studying in the European Union, almost every attraction is totally free. By simply flashing my UK visa, I got in free to nearly every major site of the city: the Louvre, Versailles, the Musée de l'Orangerie (home of the incredible Monet water lilies), Les Invalides (home of Napoleon's tomb), the observation deck of the Arc de Triomphe, and the Rodin Museum (home of The Thinker and of a whole lot of Midnight in Paris references), to name a few. We saw these things, the Cathedrale de Notre Dame and the Basilique Sacre-Coeur, the artists' village of Montmartre and the site of the Moulin Rouge, almost every from-the-ground angle of the Eiffel Tower, and, on the first day, two of my dearest friends from Vision 2012 - all for free. 

From walking the streets of the Latin Quarter at sunset sharing baguettes and gossip with my favorite Flute Fairy on day one to watching the entire Mary-Kate & Ashley Paris classic in our apartment on our rainy last night, Paris made for a fantastic second half of spring break. 

None of our experiences on break, of course, would have been possible without our absolutely insane accommodations. Between the 4-star hotel in Venice and the varying degrees of luxury flats in Florence and Paris, our digs on this trip were nothing short of insane. Each one also has its own crazy story to go with it, usually involving us standing in the rain fearing homelessness. So, now that I've written, at long last, spring break blog part 2, stay tuned for the final SB2K13 entry: Spring Break Cribs. And once that's written, I'll move on to more recent events - Easter in Rome, known also as The Best Weekend of My Life. Thanks for the memories, Paris, and readers, keep reading to see which city wins in the battle between European travel-movie titans that is Passport to Paris vs. The Lizzie McGuire Movie. 

Spring Break: The Playlist

For a couple of years now, I have made it a habit to buy myself a new album of some kind before embarking on any trip. For LCC New Orleans tour, it was Lady Gaga's Born This Way; for Folk ChoIreland, it was Ingrid Michaelson's Human Again; for Edinburgh last month, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. When I went to buy myself a new album to accompany me on spring break, though, I found that my iTunes money supply had mysteriously dwindled to a dollar and some change. I went to my purchase history, knowing that I share an iTunes account with my sister, and prepared for the damage. Twenty country and pop songs. My interest in country music ranks consistently just below my interest in how Citigroup stock is doing, so I skipped over those to peruse the Top 40 fare. Finding some Bieber on the list, I decided to download the most promising selections from the sibling's new purchases and make them my spring break playlist. Despite having no initial interest in any of the songs, I ended up listening to the playlist on an endless loop for the entirety of break. I have so many thoughts on the songs, in fact, that I decided I needed to break them down in a blog post.

Do any of you particularly care what I listened to on spring break? Probably not. But do you or should you have a burning desire to learn as much about me as possible to most effectively model your lives on my own? Yes. So here it is, folks, the official Domerberry playlist of SB2K13.

"Stay" - Rihanna (featuring some person I don't care about called Mikky Ekko). I'm sometimes embarrassed to admit that I would still call myself a pretty big Rihanna fan, but this song reminds me that that is exactly what I am. This song is catchy. It's a very angsty, emotional kind of song, which makes it fun to sing along to when I'm alone in my flat (sorry, neighbors). Mostly, though, this song makes me wonder why on earth iTunes has it labeled as "Explicit." This song seems pretty squeaky-clean by Rihanna standards. If we're handing out explicit labels for seriously far-fetched innuendos nowadays, I've got a long list of new additions for your "explicit" stock, iTunes: it's called every song ever.

When I Was Your Man - Bruno Mars. Pretty much the guy version of "Stay." Admittedly, the subjects don't really have that much in common. But they're both sad, they both pretty much only require a vocal range that stretches from three notes below middle C to five or six notes above it, and when you're half asleep while listening to them, they literally sound like one, seven-minute-long breakup ballad. Thanks, Ri-Ri and B.Mars, for making the start of my playlist really, really depressing.

Suit & Tie (featuring the inexplicably caps-locked JAY Z) - Justin Timberlake. Oh, JT, I love you so. This song is so catchy, and so deeply inappropriate. I had this stuck in my head for the entirety of break, and now that I'm writing about it, it's stuck in my head again. And do I care? No. No I do not.

Carry On - Fun.. This song has got to stop doing what it's doing to me. Considering how many inside-joke-y references to "Some Nights" I've made since last summer all over my blog and my everyday conversations, it should come as a surprise to no one that I fell immediately in love with this song. Though I have still yet to venture particularly far into the world of Fun. beyond their soaring, literary, and Billboard Hot 100-approved singles, I have adored Fun. in the contexts where I've experienced them. I loved "We Are Young" as soon as that started happening, I have based my entire life around "Some Nights," and now, I have "Carry On" to keep the Fun.-induced tears tradition alive. "But I like to think I can cheat it all to make up for the times I've been cheated on"? Are you kidding me? STOP BEING PERFECT, FUN.. JUST STOP.

Troublemaker - Olly Murs. Last summer, my eleven-year-old host sister in Edinburgh told me, in a game of music-swapping we were all playing, that Olly Murs was, like, the best thing ever. If I liked One Direction, she said (which, of course, I unabashedly do), I would loooove him. Cut to ten months later, this song finds its way onto my iPod, and we are shown once again that the tastes of eleven-year-olds are and will always be an accurate reflection of my own. Also, in listening to it so many times, I have discovered that the chorus of this song overlaps almost perfectly with the chorus of Britney Spears' "Crazy." If I liked this song before making this realization, I now like it enough to make it the first dance at my wedding.

Okay I'm kidding. Sort of.

Mirrors - JT again. I don't understand what this song means. I don't even remotely understand. I thought it might have been a really dirty but cleverly coded innuendo that was just flying over my head, but then he dedicated the video to his grandparents. Mostly, I choose to ignore the confusing words to this one and just focus on what it's really good for: a taste of what N*SYNC would sound like if they made a record in 2013. Seriously, everyone, go listen to this song again. Post-modern boy band. Right on down to the "Is this secretly dirty?" lyrics, that is all it is. And again...I am not complaining.

C'Mon - Ke$ha. Ke$ha is my girl, and I have no shame in owning up to that fact. Like all of Ke$ha's music, this song simultaneously makes me want to dance and makes me sit back and ponder for hours how anyone could even invent such a life for themselves as Ke$ha's bottle-of-Jack-toothbrushing self manages to do. Furthermore, the full verse of rhymes on the syllable "rrr," set in motion by the mind-blowing line "Feelin' like a sabertooth ti-grr," has actually changed my life. I almost applauded from my seat on the Stansted Airport bus when I heard these rhymes for the first time. You've done it again, Ke$ha. Go buy yourself some soap.

Beauty and a Beat - Justin Bieber. I love Justin Bieber and everything that he does. This is not news.

My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light It Up) - Fall Out Boy. Quite honestly, I am not sure how this song made it onto my sister's list of recent purchases. There is only one person in this family who identifies as faux-edgy enough to listen to Fall Out Boy back in the time when listening to Fall Out Boy was a thing, and that person is me. This song has also shown me that, unsurprisingly, I am entirely out of touch with what the young kids are and aren't listening to these days. I assumed that new Fall Out Boy music was the kind of thing that the young folks - like the college-junior folks - could really only embrace through a deeply refined sense of irony. Fall Out Boy? Sewww retro - and yet so recent. Given the complete lack of irony that characterizes the rest of this playlist, though, it seems that this is not the case. Meanwhile, as I dissected the layers of context and meaning that surrounded my sister's purchase of this song, I also came inadvertently to discover that I really, really like this song. Pete Wentz, there may still be a place for you hiding somewhere in my heart, even after all these years.

Those nine songs - and pretty much just those nine songs - were the soundtrack to my spring break. They accompanied me through two countries, four cities, two flights, three trains, and a bus ride, and they have done me well. I can now answer the question, "What's the cool jams?", and I know that not only can one feel like a sabertooth tiger, but one can rap about that feeling in such a way that it rhymes with kosher. Thanks, SB2K13 playlist. You've set the bar pretty darn high for Easter.

It's My Birthday And I'll Eat What I Want To: Spring Break Part 1

(Sorry if the formatting on this is messed up - I don't understand this iPad!)

Hello, everyone! As most of you probably know if you've read this blog before, I am currently smack in the middle of spring break. Over this ten-day vacation, my friends and I are visiting Venice, Florence, and Paris. Having done Venice early in the weekend and Florence for the past few days, today is our final day before heading to la France. As it happens, today is also my twenty-first birthday. I guess you could say things are pretty good. 

It is from this place of pretty-good-ness that I bring you the first installment of my spring break blogging. There's a lot of ground to cover regarding our trip so far, so settle in with your computers, I'll settle in to my chair on our terrace watching the sun begin to set over the bell tower, and we'll get started. 

My trip began on Friday morning with a solo flight to Venice. Thus was slightly terrifying, but thanks to the always-comforting efforts of Ryanair, the happy discovery of a group of London Program guys on my flight, and copious amounts of Justin Timberlake music, I survived. Our time in Venice was short - just over 24 hours in my case - but filled with excellent things...most of them food-related. I had a surprisingly delicious broccoli pasta Friday night (happy meatless Friday!) at a restaurant where the menus were handwritten each day in Italian and the rest of the clientele was about 4/5ths Italian men named Benito and Giovanni aged 70 and above. On Saturday, we got pasta in takeout boxes - I'm talking straight China Lane here, people - at a somewhat more touristy but no less awesome little place called Alfredo's. My "cinque fromaggio" gnocchi was, you know, a couple notches better than 4-cheese pasta at the dining hall - a rating I give quite literally, as I think 4CP is closer to God than anything on campus short of Fr. Hesburgh himself - but the main thing I took away from this restaurant was the music. Authentic Italian crooning, you ask? Jazzy instrumentals? No. When we first got in line, they were playing "Dirrrty" by Christina Aguilera. This was followed up by, in no particular order, Pink, Gnarls Barkley, post-Y2K Madonna, and, I kid you not, Eiffel 65. Terrible American pop music is, indeed the universal language. 

To follow this meal up, we grabbed our second gelato of the trip. I paired a strawberry flavor that looked promising with something whose name I could not translate but which had large dollops of chocolate scattered throughout that I felt couldn't fail to please. When I took my first bite, I realized just how accurate that evaluation was. Friends, this gelato tasted exactly like a cup of chocolate ice cream from Sycamore. If you don't know what Sycamore is, I am sorry for your loss. It is a frozen custard stand in Logansport, open only seasonally, that serves up the best frozen goodies east of the Mississippi. And this gelato tasted just like it. I cannot adequately describe the joy I felt in consuming this gelato, but I can approach it by sharing the following fact: the dollops of chocolate scattered through the gelato? Yeah...those were Nutella. 

We headed to Florence by train on Saturday night, and our time here has continued the trend of life-changing nomz. On Saturday night, I had ricotta-spinach ravioli and a "small cake" of chocolate and pairs to which I remain fondly attached to this very day. Sunday brought with it a focaccia-bread sandwich the size of a basketball, which convinced me that I will in fact starve upon my return to London and my subsequent refusal to eat the peanut butter and Tesco bread monstrosities I call "sandwiches" ever again. For dinner, I had a lasagna that might just keep me away from the pasta line at SDH for the rest of my life. Oh, and throughout each of these days, you can just assume with total accuracy that gelato is a near-constant.

Yesterday, in the only proper manner for the eve of my twenty-first birthday, the gastronomical focus of the day was more balanced between food and wine. After a quick lunch (and gelato) near the leather markets where I had spent the morning buying a purse from an Italian woman in negotiations performed entirely in the only language we both spoke, French, a few members of my group and I headed out on a bus tour of the Chianti wine region. The bulk of this tour was spent at an ancient castle turned modern vineyard for a tour, wine tasting, and what I like to call "classy snacktime." I'm largely indifferent at best towards wine that isn't white/pink and sparkly, but I was surprised to find that the fairly intense reds we were tasting were nowhere near as disgusting as I expected them to be. The snacks, however - a sheep cheese, Italian salami, bruschetta with painfully expensive olive oil, biscotti, and the highlight, cheese-salami-bruschetta crostinis - were 100% on point. Nom. 

After dinner last night, we had to figure out what, if anything, we wanted to do by way of going out for my birthday. Our hip young tour guide for the day, Irene (a name that sounds much cooler in Italian than in English), gave us recommendations for a few clubs, but as most sounded far out of my price range and one had a most recent review on Trip Advisor entitled "SEXUAL ASSAULT," I was more than happy to just enjoy my dinner with an extra glass of wine of my choosing and to call it a night. As we were leaving the restaurant, though, we happened by total chance upon a group of Notre Dame guys from the London and Oxford programs. They were headed, funnily enough, to one of the clubs Irene had suggested (not the sexual assault one, to our delight). They were also already fairly intoxicated and, thus, very enthusiastic about us all going out. I figured if everyone was so excited about it, I could manage a short time at a club for my 21st. We headed back to our apartment - yes, apartment; the post regarding our insane accommodations on this trip will come later - to change, and we heard from the guys that the intended club was apparently closed on Mondays. We found a much tamer bar to replace the closed club and headed over there. After some initial mishaps involving mismatched drinks and some surprise €7 charges for the boys, the night actually turned out to be really entertaining and fun. As I mentioned,the guys were pretty hammered - hence the "entertaining" - and, to my great and pleasant surprise, the least intoxicated of the bunch even picked up the tab for my very first legal-in-all-countries drink. After two months living in the UK, I may not have had the fun of walking into a bar for the very first time as a newly-minted legal drinker that would normally accompany a 21st birthday, but celebrating in an English pub in Florence, Italy, full exclusively of American college students (the only people out on a Monday night) wasn't half bad. 

Anyway, after an afternoon filled with viewing Botticellis at the Uffizi and blogging on terraces, I'm off to get ready for the repeat visit to the small-cake ricotta ravioli place that will serve as my birthday dinner. Check out Instagram for a small preview of spring break photos, and look forward to more blog posts and photo albums once we're in and back from Paris. Ciao, everyone! It's time for more gelato.

Brugesterdam: It Was...Warm

(Disclaimer: As you can deduce from the outfits in our photos, this trip was not, in fact, warm. It is an inside joke that brings the eight of us great joy. Sorry, all 6,999,999,992 people of earth on the outside.) 

This weekend, I went with seven new and old friends on my most exotic trip scheduled for this semester: Bruges and Amsterdam. Though I certainly know plenty of people who have gone to these cities while studying abroad, they are a bit further off the beaten path than your standard Italy/France/Ireland fare, so I'll start with a bit of geographical explanation. 

Bruges, for those of you who may not know (cough Laura cough), is located in the Flanders region of northwestern Belgium. Right here: 

In Bruges, as in all of Flanders, they speak a few different languages. The city technically falls within the German-speaking portion of Belgium, so there is plenty of German. As French is the other main language of Belgium, many people in Bruges also speak French. The region of Flanders also has its own dialectical language, Flemish, which is roughly a hybrid of French and German with a little Dutch mixed in sometimes, and which is pretty much total nonsense. Finally, since Bruges's main industry is catering to tourists who, as is so often the case with tourists, speak English with some significant frequency, almost everyone in Bruges speaks English, too. 

The linguistic situation in Bruges can be pretty much summed up by an exchange I witnessed on Friday afternoon in a chocolate shop between a saleswoman and the French family that was in line behind me. After hearing the saleswoman bid my friends and I goodbye in nearly accent-less English, the père of the family behind us approached the counter and apologetically said to the woman, "I need French." In response, the saleswoman laughed and said, in nearly accent-less French, "Je parle les tous, Monsieur." 

Roughly translated, this means, "Homeboy, I speak errythang." Given my fluent English, very shaky grasp of French, and desperate desire to be worldly and speak twenty languages, it's safe to say that I hate everyone in Belgium. 

Things in the Netherlands - where, for the record, Amsterdam is located - aren't much better. Their official language is Dutch, which is yet another nonsense-looking Germanic language. It sounds vaguely like what German probably sounds like when spoken by goofy clowns, and it looks like English as typed out by someone with a first-grade-level grasp of spelling and a keyboard that sticks on every vowel. ("Noord" means north, "friis" means fries, etc.) 

Luckily for the 95% of the world's tourist population that doesn't speak Dutch, Dutch appears in Amsterdam about as often as Latin appears in a post-Vatican II Catholic church. It's there, but you don't really need to bother learning anything but your native language to get by. Everything in Amsterdam is labeled and announced in English, and if your preferred language is something else - French, Italian, German - you can probably find extra handouts printed in that language, too. 

By way of general information about the country, the weirdest part about the Netherlands is how close it ultimately is to the UK. Amsterdam is located at (A) in the picture below, and London is (B). 

Though that map shows the lengthier driving route, the straight-line distance from Amsterdam to London is only 223 miles. To put that in perspective, the distance from South Bend to Detroit is just about 220 miles. Amsterdam is in a country my sister had barely heard of, it speaks a language that sounds like it should come from the other end of the world, and it is as far away from London as Detroit is from Notre Dame. Riddle me that, Batman. 

Anyway, now that I've blown your minds with my astounding linguistic and geographical knowledge, I suppose I should talk about some things that I actually did this weekend. 

The trip began bright and early Friday morning with the Eurostar train from London to Brussels, a train ride whose uneventfulness is paralleled only by the uneventfulness of Brussels itself. We didn't make an actual stop there in Belgium's capital city because, as the popular phrase has gone among the London program kids, Brussels is the Philadelphia of Europe. (Catchphrase credit goes to Cee-lo Green; sorry-I'm-not-sorries go to my favorite PA-born Howard RA, the artist formerly known as ladysasalol.) From the city that dad says brussels sprouts are from,  we hopped on another train over to Bruges. 

Bruges had three main events: the bell tower, the chocolate, and the waffles. The bell tower, located in the center of town at the edge of the Markt, or main square, consisted of 366 increasingly narrow steps leading to a bell-filled room from which you could see various incredible views of the whole city. 

Hallo! 

The bell tower also contained stopping points pretending to be museum exhibits every 50 steps or so, which is how I managed to get to the top of it without dying. 

After summiting the bell tower, we decided to reward ourselves in the only appropriate Belgian way: chocolate. You may recall from an earlier post of mine that chocolate is my entire life. Bruges, then, is a great place for me. There are chocolate shops not only on every corner, but in every other storefront. Did I spend 40 euros on chocolate in something like an hour and a half? I don't know. Maybe. Yes. 

When not eating and buying straight-up chocolate, Bruges also offers another Belgian dessert specialty: waffles. Reading this from America, you may think you already know what a Belgian waffle is. It's, like, a thing. Everyone knows. Right? 

Wrong. In Bruges, a Belgian waffle is a magical thing made approximately as follows: 1) Roll huge quantity of perfect-looking dough into a giant ball; 2) toss said ball into glorified panini maker; 3) remove your newly-made, rough-around-the-edges, golden-brown waffle; 4) humor your gluttonous American customers by covering it in chocolate sauce, a heaping scoop of Ferrero Rocher ice cream, more, insta-hardening chocolate sauce, and powdered sugar. If I could marry this waffle, I would do it. And we would live a long and happy life together. 

Please note the bag of chocolate hanging off the wrist with which I am about to shovel an ice cream-covered waffle into my mouth

While Bruges was great, though, it was a fairly short stop, and on Saturday morning, we headed on to Amsterdam. For those of you wondering, no, I did not smoke, eat, or otherwise ingest any cannabis-based products during my time in the highest of the Low Countries. My friends and I did, however, do a variety of other, tamer Amsterdam-y things. These included: 

- Walking (briskly) through the Red Light District, so that we could say we did. Here, we concluded that the Red Light District made us all really uncomfortable and also vaguely sad, and I decided that the writers of Les Mis could make, like, so much money if they could somehow sell the rights to "Lovely Ladies" to the RLD to be played there on an endless loop (as it was the entire time in my head and the heads of anyone who matters). 

- Eating more delicious breakfast food at non-breakfast times, specifically, pancakes for lunch. 

Nom. 

- Narrowly avoiding death at the hands of totally reckless bicyclists approximately 80 times each. Giving them their own lanes of traffic: good idea. Giving them free reign to use those lanes irrespective of traffic patterns, stoplights, and pedestrians: REALLY BAD IDEA. Especially since most of them are probably high half the time anyway. #stereotypez

- Visiting the house where Anne Frank and family made their hiding place during the Second World War, which has since been turned into a very tasteful, powerful, and excellent museum that I would very highly recommend.

- Seeing a windmill.

Cue "Man of La Mancha" references 

- Seeing a giraffe. 

In case you thought I was kidding 

- And finally (and most importantly), staying on a boat hotel called the Gandalf, owned and operated by a bearded, friendly Dutch hippie man named Hans. For those of you reading this who were a part of or a visitor to my group in Miami back in January, imagine the European Guesthouse floating on a canal, actually in Europe, with a landlord whose name was actually Hans, and without the stray cats, and you have the Gandalf. It is just as incredible as you think. 

In all, this trip, too, was pretty great. It had chocolate. It had waffles. It had canals. It had Hans. As my tripmates and I would say, on a scale of ugly to prutty kewt, it was definitely, uh...prutty kewt. Next on the schedule for all of us in the London Program is spring break, which starts at the end of this week. Keep checking back here on da blog for my tales of adventure and intrigue (read: probably just more chocolate) - and my 21st birthday - in Venice, Florence, and Par-ee!