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!