The Swiss.

I know recently in my blog posts I have been kind of trying to theme them about different aspects of Roman life but this time I'm going to have to take a break from that just to tell you all about my amazing weekend in Interlaken, Switzerland!

One of the great things about Rome (and pretty much any major city in Europe) is that travel between countries in Europe is really simple. So when a friend of mine threw up the idea of a weekend full of snowboarding and hiking in the Swiss Alps I definitely couldn't pass it up. So we booked a trip through this student tour group and took a bus from Rome on Thursday night. We slept on the bus and got to Interlaken early on Friday morning but didn't waste anytime. We found some friends (which is really easy to do when you are studying abroad because pretty much no one knows anybody so everybody wants to be friends) and decided to go hiking...serious hiking. So we hiked all the way to the top of this mountain and we where pretty much above the clouds. It was a really intense hike so now I kind of have an idea of what Adam and my dad do! That took us pretty much the whole day and then we ate Fondue...cause that's what the Swiss do and  then went to a bar which was conveniently located in the basement of our hostel. I mingled with some locals and Italy still has my heart but the Swiss people are by far the nicest people I've ever met. This could also be because most of them speak English so they are a little bit easier to mingle with at the moment since my Italian is still kind of rough. Saturday we got up early and made it to the mountain for first tracks and had the best day. It was beautiful, the perfect temperature with clear skies and good snow.

View from the top of the mountain

Anyways, Saturday night we went to a chocolate show at this local chocolate factory which was fun and then we walked around town a bit and checked out the little stores. The weekend was relaxing and low key especially compared to the bustling streets of Rome. It was a nice get away but I am happy to be back in Rome because even after a weekend away I was starting to miss it already! This could be a problem. I'll keep this one short since the last one was the never ending blog post and I promise to have a good topic next time. Hope everyone in Pittsburgh made it through the wicked snow storm! Stay warm. xoxo

The Food

So I kind of made it my goal to update this blog one or twice a week and I looked at my last post from February 8th and realized I needed to get going! But the good news is the reason I haven't had time to write is because I have been doing so much the past week which is great. After reading through the entirety of my Rick Steve's travel book that a friend got me, my roommate and I realized that we could live in Rome for four months and do something everyday and still never get to see everything we want to see. There is just so much history and so many amazing things in this city it is unreal. But again this comes with more good news. Doing a lot of things means trying a lot of different foods as we go along, so I figured I could give you some pretty good insight on that.
Last Thursday I went to the Van Gogh museum before my class. Some great things about that are that I have a new appreciation for art since I'm taking a sketchbook class so it was really cool to paintings that I was familiar with in real life instead of just reprint. Another great thing is that I was just able to head into the city center and see all this before I went to class. On Friday I went in to the city center again to explore the inside of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. All of it was absolutely amazing and   I really just can't believe how ancient it all is. We had a great tour guide and got all the history. I feel like I'm learning so much here. Now, these are obviously all day excursions and anytime you go into the city center it involves stopping at a little sandwich shop and getting a panini. This sounds average, but if you are thinking that at all... you're wrong. Everything they use here, even in the little corner sandwich shops is so fresh that a simple prosciutto-tomato-mozzarella sandwich is enough to make my day.  (Prosciutto's kind of like ham... they put it on everything from sandwiches to pizza to in your pasta)
Friday night was a low key night since we were catching an early train to Napoli (where margherita pizza was invented!)  so we just had some wine and made our own dinners. And I do have to say I'm getting pretty good. I normally make some kind of pasta dish and throw some vegetables in there and some chicken. Nothing to fancy but I'm learning from one of my roommates. One of the girls had gotten fresh pasta at the market that day and it was so good... we were just eating it uncooked as a snack. I'm going to have to do fresh pasta instead of the boxed kind sometime so I'll let you know how it turns out.

Saturday in Napoli was an all out food festival. We went to the pizza place from Eat Pray Love for  brick oven pizza and it was so good. Pepe(pay-pay), the man cooking the pizza was so funny and loved to cheese it up for the cameras so I have to put in a picture of him.

We continued wandering the city for the day and along the way stopped and got some amazing gelato at this place that was pretty famous (so we were told). The gelato places are really cool looking with all the different flavors lined up because they make them so fancy looking so I will have to remember to put a picture in here one time. Conveniently after we got gelato, we remembered that the nice Italian policeman that sat with us on the train told us about these pastries we had to try.... So nonetheless we did.

Ok so you've got your cannoli in the front right there and amazing is an understatement. Next to that is a baba` which is basically a rum cake with whatever you want in the middle... like nutella or chocolate chips or some other heavenly goodness. And the pastry to the right is what Napoli is famous for....it's called sfogliatella and I still have no idea about the correct pronunciation.  After seeing pretty much all of Napoli... we headed back to the train station. There isn't much in Napoli aside from food and churches so one day there was long enough. We stopped in a McDonalds on the way to the train (just to use the bathroom I swear!) and we got a good laugh cause they were serving beer which is kind of a funny idea if you think about it.
Overall the food here is just amazing. Its so fresh and people in Italy really take pride in their cooking and baking so everything is always good. There are a couple things I do miss about American food though. One is a regular cup of coffee in the mornings. Italian cappuccinos are pretty much like having a dessert in itself but people in Italy only serve coffee in cups that are about 1/3 the size of a normal mug. And it's always just hot enough so that you can drink it right away while standing at the counter (cause that's what you do here). So that being said, some mornings all I want it is a egular sized cup of regular coffee with some coffeemate creamer.

All that being said, if I could bring everyone the ideal souvenir from Italy it would be some type of food. But I don't ten pounds of pasta carbonara and a bag full of canolli's will stay too well on the plane....maybe the canolli's will who knows?! I think I may have overdone it for this post already so I am going to save the rest of my food stories for another time. I hope everyone is doing well at home. I know I am six hours ahead in time but remember, its almost Thursday! Have a good weekend everyone :)

Italian "Rules"

Hello everyone! It's been a while but over the weekend I've noticed a couple things here in Italy that I think are pretty interesting. Here in Roma, people don't seem to be really into any type of rules. It's more like organized chaos on a regular basis. Two things I've realized there are really no rules about are :

1) Dogs
2) Alcohol


That being said, dogs here aren't ever really on leashes. Sometimes when I'm walking on the busy road to school a couple are on a leash but for the most part they just walk along side there owner and play nicely with the other dogs that go passed. This weekend was so nice out so on Saturday and Sunday I walked up to the park (which I later found out is the biggest park in Rome... and it's right up the street from our apartment-how cool!) Now the park was just insane. Dogs were running everywhere just wildly but they just play nicely and never seem to bother anyone so I guess they don't need leashes. But there is one thing about the "no rules about dogs" thing that kind of bothers me. No rules about dogs means no rules about cleaning up dog poop. And it's everywhere. You really have to pay attention when your walking.

One night this weekend some girls and I went down to a little local area called Trastevere and went to a cute little bar and hung out for awhile.  Most of the bars here kind of remind me of coffee shops but with alcohol because they're really well kept and are cozy. But some of them are raging like the Thirsty Turtle was in College Park (sigh .....R.I.P.)  Anyways, this little area is kind of like a Shady Side area I guess and everyone just kind of walks around from bar to bar but with just open drinks in their hands. And no one even cares! There's no sort of open container rule or anything and I don't think they believe in carding anyone so I'm not even exactly sure what the drinking age is here.... I'll need to look that up.

Apparently there are rules about when bars have to close...and I guess the rule is 2:00 AM on Sunday nights. Good thing for me Italians aren't that into following these rules because the Superbowl started so late here (remember I'm six hours behind!) So Sunday was easily the longest day of my life because I had to wait until after midnight for the game to start! Last week I had found the Steelers Bar called La Botticella so me and a friend of mine who I met on my flight out of Pittsburgh headed down there at around 9 and got the last seats in the bar! It was packed which was so awesome because it was almost like being at home.

Italian Terrible Towel with the Colosseum!

Jesus wrapped in the Terrible Towel..

The bar was great though. And at 2 o'clock I was getting nervous thinking that the owner was going to kick us all out, but in true Italian fashion he did whatever he wanted. He shut the gates down over the windows (all the stores and apartments have this big heavy things that look like a mix between gates and blinds that pull down when the store is closed or you aren't home) and told everyone to be quiet if they heard police. So we all sneakily stayed in the bar for the end of the game which I thought was pretty cool...except until the end when I had to deal with the idea of a loss.... and the fact that it was now almost 5 a.m. But none the less it was time well spent. 

Now I'm caught up on my sleep (I had to take a little nap today) and I have been doing some homework. After being on winter break for over 7 weeks its a little hard to get back into the swing of doing homework again so I took a break to update you all but now it's back to the books. I hope everyone is recovering from Sunday...physically and emotionally. Preseason will be here before we know it! And I just want  to say thanks again for keeping up with me and all my adventures over here...xoxo

The Old People

Classes started this past Monday and things have been pretty busy/exhausting since then. The hills in Rome are seriously the biggest hills ever. Everywhere I feel like I'm walking up West Brightview to Provost. AUR sits at the top of this huge hill and the buses are pretty unreliable because they always go on strike and they run on Italian time which is whenever they want pretty much. So most of the time we walk. But everyone in Italy walks all the time, even the old people and they actually amaze me. Everyday I see tons of old Italian men and little old ladies walking (the women in their nice Italian leather heels of course) and I think they easily have to be seventy some years old and walking everywhere. When the old people aren't walking they're taking public transportation and they get on the bus and fight the crowd with their roll behind suit cases that have groceries in them because everyone buys groceries fresh daily here. It's really something to see because when I'm seventy some years old I don't exactly imagine myself walking to Caste Village everyday.There's a little old lady that lives in our building that I see on occasion and once my Italian is good enough I'm definitely going to become her friend and talk to her about how she walks everywhere! But I still need a couple more Italian classes before I do that.
This week has been great, I like all my classes at school so far but my Art class is definitely my favorite. We had class in a classroom this first week but for the rest of the semester we are "on-site" meaning that we get to go to a lot of the museums, parks and piazza's around Roma (and for free!). My Italian class is pretty cool too and I have already learned a lot of everyday language that I used at the grocery store today which is pretty cool. I am really going to work at learning the language because the locals are friendly and I want to be able to talk to them by the end of the semester. I am getting adjusted to life here and am starting to get into the swing of school after getting some of my books and some notebooks but the best part about this week was that we figured out how to make our heat work! It's been freezing in the apartment and only one of the radiators worked and had called about it last week. Maintenance came and the nice Italian man said he fixed everything but we were still freezing. We decided just to suck it up and deal with it (since the heat is only on for two hours a day anyways we decided we would just give up) but then today one of the girls figured out that there was a secret switch to turning them on! Which is great news for this weekend since its still supposed to be a little chilly. Its going to reach sixty next week though so I hope we don't need the heat for long. Hope you all have an amazing weekend and LET'S GO STEELERS!