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.