Italia!

My trip to Italy was a blast, and I left it not being able to wait to return. It started with a few problems though... I left my residencia a little earlier that Thursday morning than I needed, as I was not sure how much time I need to arrive. So I arrived at the airport earlier than everyone else. A classmate happened to be in the same bus as me, so we chatted on the way to the airport. When we got there we were flying with different airlines, so we parted ways. At the airport another classmate was waiting in line at the airline next to the one I was flying with so we chatted for a while too.

Then I waited for a while to go to the gate, so that the 5 other people I was planning on traveling with and I could go in together. They didn’t arrive for a while, so I went in without them and waited for them at the gate. When they started boarding the plane and they still had not shown up, I started to worry. Then two of them came running in my direction and they seemed to have had a rough time. Their other two friends coming with us are not there yet, because one was not able to check-in. The reason is that he lost his passport on a trip to Paris and the airline would not accept the paperwork that he had in place of his passport. So the other person waited a little while to see if they could find him a different ticket (or something like that).

Finally he joined us at the gate and we were 4 people altogether. I found out later what happened to the other person. Due to some unrelated problems to the trip, she unfortunately had to go home early and could not make it (I wrote her an email afterwards and she told me what happened). So we got onto the plane to leave Seville for Italy.

We flew into Milan with not a clue what we wanted to do. Originally we were going to go to Bologna to meet up with a friend of the one who lost his passport. Since we didn’t know the friend we decided to scratch that plan. When we arrived in Milan our first goal was to find a way to Milan as we actually flew into Bergamo. Then we found this cheap deal to take a shuttle bus to Milan and got on the bus. On the bus we talked to this really nice couple, Francesco and Teresa. They were asking all of the typical questions, where are you from, what are you doing in Italy, what are you doing in Spain (as we had to explain a weekend trip to Italy, doing that from the US just doesn’t seem like a good idea) and such. They are from southern Italy and were taking a weekend trip to Milan.

As we were arriving in Milan they asked if we would like to eat lunch with them, and we said yes. We bought our tickets to Florence before going to lunch as we decided we wanted to sleep in Florence that night. So we got our tickets and went to a pizzeria. Officially they didn’t have the kitchen open anymore, but Francesco and Teresa convinced them to let us eat. It was really good. I had tuna pizza and we all had some tiramisu for dessert. Quite delicious--though I must add that I absolutely love Italian food.

After eating we went to see the cathedral. Now personally I generally do not like cathedrals a whole lot. They are interesting to see because they are full of history and full of art. This cathedral I actually liked quite a bit. It was enormous, but it was also simple. Most cathedrals that I have seen seem to follow the philosophy, how much stuff can be packed into one square foot; no, there cannot not even be a square millimeter free. So it was really nice to see a cathedral that actually didn’t follow this way of thought.

Then we went and got ice cream. Italian ice cream is one of those things that when you eat it once, you can never think of ice cream in the same way again. After that we went and saw the castle and received Francesco’s famous king of Milan speech. It was really cute, we got there and Francesco started out with something like, “Now I am going to be honest with you in good Italian fashion. I am the King of Milaano and this is my castle. There is my study and that is my library...” It was quite entertaining. Then we walked back to the subway station so we could catch our train to Florence.

The ride to Florence was quite easy. We got on the train and stayed on that train until we got to Florence. On the train we had to do some money exchanging because by that point we had already done a lot of borrowing money from each other. It happened that way because no one ever seemed to have the right change for anything. So we figured out how much everyone owed whom (basically everyone was owed something by everyone) and even managed to pay most of it off then in there. One or two of us had some very small amounts left to pay, but nothing big.

When we arrived in Florence we had to search for a place to stay. We already had reservations for the following night in Florence (we were going to go to Bologna that first day) so we went to the hostel we were going to stay in the second night in Italy. Fortunately they had enough room for the four of us. Then we found food for the night, I don’t even remember what we ate, but I do remember liking it!

The next day we visited the cathedral there and that was basically it. The trip as a whole was a lazy trip in which we didn’t do much, but I ate all the time. Then on Saturday we went and saw the David in the Academic Museum. The statue was impressive, but honestly I enjoyed the musical instrument exhibit almost more. The statue is of David (as in David and Goliath from the Old Testament) and it is absolutely gigantic. It is really neat and apparently when people see it, it affects a lot of them emotionally/spiritually. I cannot say why for sure that I did not feel like seeing the statue gave me any insights on anything or why I didn’t feel emotionally affected. Maybe it could be like the Mona Lisa. When I saw that it was ok, it’s the Mona Lisa, moving on... Maybe too many people are impressed with it and I feel like it should affect me, but in reality it just seems like a piece of good art. They are from a good artist, of course those works are supposed to be great. I think it is more in who the artist is than what the work is for some. There are people who come and know nothing about art and they will sit there looking at the David for a half an hour or an hour at a time. I just don’t understand.

We didn’t do much else that day because it was raining. Originally we were going to go see the castle gardens (or something like that), but due to the bad weather and lack of umbrellas, we decided to sleep or go to the markets instead.

On Sunday we went to Pisa, which was just fun to go to. We spent only a few hours there, which was enough to poke fun at all the other tourists taking the typical pushing the tower back up photos. I have several photos with a bunch of tourists doing that, but from the wrong angel. My favorite photo from that is me eating a pizza in front of the tower, yes it was a whole pizza and I ate it all!

Then we went back to Milan after visiting Pisa. We ate dinner in Milan then took the last shuttle bus to the airport and slept in the airport. Let it be known that if I can choose not to sleep in an airport, I will not do that again. If it must be, ok; but by choice, no. I barely slept that night and I arrived in Seville completely ready to say goodnight to the world. Our flight was at 7 in the morning, so around 5 we went and checked in. The flight went smoothly and I think we even landed early, which was nice.

When I got back to my resedencia, I truly did check out and fall asleep, I woke up for lunch and then slept some more before class. That is the nice thing about my Mondays, I don’t have class until 5pm, and so I have the entire day to practically do what I want. It took me a few days to recover from the trip. It was a good trip. The only thing that could have really made it better was the people I traveled with. Now, I really enjoyed traveling with whom I traveled with, it is just that we have different ideas and I would have been a lot more adventurous with other people. Traveling is an adventure and this last trip wasn’t as adventurous as it could have been. Next time right?

Almost a Month!!

So I was thinking about my blog and how I completely have not done anything with it in practically a month! Sorry about that! I have not fallen off of the face of the earth.

Ok, some things that happened in October. Well, I went to Cordoba, which is a town near Sevilla. I really liked Cordoba, except the people in my program that complained about the rain all the time. We did some interesting things while we were there such as visiting the Mosque there. Now this is a one of a kind Mosque. Built by the Muslims many years ago with columns everywhere in it. I hope to bring my computer in to the wireless next week to put photos online, stay tuned! Then when the christian kings conquered Spain they actually built a cathedral inside of the mosque! As you can imagine it makes for a strange mix of Islam and Christianity that was really neat to see. Then we also visited some Roman ruins where they use heating similar to that of the Roman Baths (anyone from Wilmeth's Latin class should be thinking about the toilets of Rome video right now). It was set in a very pretty location with a view out into a valley and hills. We also did an olive oil testing! Now, I don't like olives too much, but the olive oil testing was a lot of fun, I even bought some olive hand lotion, which is some of the best hand lotion I have ever had. This was an overnight trip and our program treated us to a feast! We were given about 4 or 5 appetizers (anything from cheese to fried egg plant), the main dish and a tray of assorted desserts. Everyone left the meal completely satisfied with the food, if not a little too stuffed.

That weekend was the weekend that I went to Church! The Church here is a mission church as I believe I mentioned before in my blog. People attend from all over the area and there are not that many people that attend either. They also only occasionally have actual Church services because there are only two pastors of the IELE in Spain. Before the service we had a nice Bible study about what is the Church and I got to get to know the people that came. After Church I went to have lunch with Juan Carlos, the pastor and their families at Juan Carlos' house. That was really nice.

Last weekend I went to Granada, which I absolutely loved Granada, except the part that I had a somach ache for the entirety of Friday and part of Saturday, which was basically when we were there. By saurday lunch I could eat a meal again, instead of picking at my food. We visited the Alalambra which is the big thing to do there. It is one of the most visited sites in all of Europe. It is more mountainous there where as it is much more flat in Sevilla, and I definitely like the mountain scenery a lot.

Saturday when we returned to Sevilla I went to have dinner at Nick's apartment. Nick is from Australia and he and his friend Rolf run a Bible Study on the campus of the University of Sevilla. So Nick invited us all over to have spicy food (from Asia, as he has spent time there teaching English). I was very happy that I could eat again as the food was very good and my Dad should be jealous of how hot it was!

Sunday we had our first real choir concert in conjunction with the municipal band of Sevilla. The entire concert was Mozart. We sang Requiem, Ave Verum and Vammo di Core. It was a lot of fun. I am thankful for choir, because I know a bunch of Spaniards now that I do things with from time to time. They are soo nice!

More people have moved into my resedencia. Now there are 5 Spaniards, 5 US Americans and 2 Italians. It is really funny with the Italians (they moved in last weekend) because one speaks a little english and the other a little spanish. There is a lot more going on in the resedencia now than before.

We also had midterms a little while ago, which some tests were definitely better than others. I am not too worried though.

So that is the rough overview as to what I have been doing. I am sure that I will have a lot more to talk about next week (after this weekend, another trip, my last big trip of the semester) and I hope to get photos up as well. So until next week!