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!