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In a nutshell. The past month has been amazingly good. I've felt many highs and lows. Every moment here is a little bittersweet because with every moment that passes is a moment closer to the end of this part of my life. At the same, with every passing moment I'm getting closer to the time where, on a whim, I can just jump in my car, pick up a burrito and eat it on the beach. I can go to restaurants and have attentive waiters who will promptly refill my bread basket and my glass of water WITH ice.
Sometimes the little things just mean so much.
But there are so many things I will miss here. I will miss this house. Oh, this house, with it's crooked walls and floors, splinters in the floor, the ever-malfunctioning toilet. If only these walls were bilingual. I will miss living in the center of a city where everything is so accessible and pedestrian friendly. I will miss public transportation. I will miss the open air markets, that you can find on any day of the week, where I can buy watermelons from Spain and bananas from Cameroon. At least, I can revisit these things in Toulouse or save myself a plane ticket and go to the farmer's market held once a week in the PV shopping center, sandwiched between Starbucks and Petco... Then there are the things that only a time machine would allow me to revisit. I have met an incredible group of people here and to think that we will never be in the same place again hurts more than anything else. To those of you who read this: Thank you for being a part of this experience and thank you for being you. Each of you are such distinct individuals and I am grateful to have met all of you. I hope we stay in contact on the other side and reminisce once in a while about our one year stint as FOBs in France.
hmm...ok. pauline made me dinner. A TABLE!
oh, and i like tomatoes now. gasp!
I know, i know, i know.
Is it cool if I just copy and paste an email that I wrote to Vica?
Ok, cool. Thanks.
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hi vica,
it's been a while, no?
my school is on strike again this week, so i could only go to one class. so ridiculous. i could have stayed in italy for another week!
yea, italy was great. i can't get enough of it. i'll try to give you a summary of my trip in a nutshell. i went from florence to rome to sorrento to assisi to venice to florence to cinque terre. whoa. in florence i met tiffany and some of her friends from her program we went to an interpol concert and then afterwards we met these italian kids who drove us in their cars to another concert.
next day went to rome with tiff and stayed in her dorm, which is right by the vatican. she had school so i was on my own a bit. i really like rome and i had a good time checking out things i hadn't seen the last time i was there. it was pretty cool bc i arrived on the first day of the conclave and then the second day i was at hardrock cafe happy hour pigging out on chicken wings, potato skins, and nachos when all of a sudden they turn off the music videos on the tvs and change it to the italian news and they're showing video of st. peters where i had just been like an hour earlier and then the new pope came out on the balcony and everyone in the bar just went off cheering. it was a pretty cool feeling to be in the city during such a big event.
after 3 nights in rome, i went to sorrento to meet brandon and erin. i was to meet them at our hotel and since i had shitty directions, i was roaming around sorrento for 4 hours trying to find this place. at one point i was crossing a wooden bridge drawn across the ocean over these big, jagged rocks and the sun was setting and there was no one around and i thought i was going to have to sleep in a cave in the cliff. but i found them eventually, and we spent a good 3 nights together exploring the area - pompeii, capri. sadly, the blue grotto was closed due to rough waters, so which just hiked around capri.
after that i had 3 days to do my own thing since erin and brandon were going to rome and i wanted to do something else. so at the last minute i say, "why not assisi?" stupidstupidstupid. i've now learned to nevernevernever go to a small town on a saturday night without reserving lodging in advance. i get there and everything is booked. this one man tells me that everything is booked in a 30 km radius. um ok. so it's 9 pm and i have no place to stay. i can't find anything in the old town on top the hill, and i can't find anything by the train station. i'm hungry at this point and i decide to go to this restaurant above the train station that turns out to be a nice resto and everyone is with their families and i'm just sitting there in the corner with my big backpack next to me and i'm trying to look like i WANT to be alone. haha. whatever it was fine, i bought myself a nice 3 course meal. i take my time to eat and i get out around 11 pm and i buy a ticket for the earliest train to venice, but it doesn't leave until 630 am so i have time to kill. i check out the train station waiting room and there's a bum muttering to himself in the corner. there's cops talking to bums and drug addicts in front of the station. and at this point im just like OH MY GOD, what have i gotten myself into. then i see the greasy, skeezy manager from the restaurant i had just eaten at and he's trying to talk to me in italian, and somehow i communicate that i have to place to stay and he then offers to let me stay in his house, where he lives ALONE, and it's a 5 min drive from the train station...uh. NO. he's totally puzzled by my hesitation to take up his offer. i get away from him and decide that i need to make things happen right now or i'm never gonna get out of assisi alive. i go back to a hotel across the street from the hotel and i somehow convince the manager to let me sleep in his lobby even though he's freaked that the cops will see and he'll get in trouble. so i spent the night in this big chair sitting in the dark waiting for 6 o clock to roll around and telling myself what an idiot i am.
i take the train to venice. arrive around 2 pm, i go straight to this last minute hotel booking booth in the station, and they found me a cheap room right by san marco square. thank god. i slept the rest of the day and then the next day i just wandered everywhere. i loved it, even though it feels like such a tourist attraction like disneyland, and there's just couples all over the place. so i felt like a loser a bit. but whatever.
after two nights in venice i met brandon and erin in florence and we stayed there for a night. i don't really like florence much, i never get a good feeling from it, but it was fun to be there with them. got chinese food. oh the first time i was there during the trip with tiff, i got attacked by a mime...no joke. 
next day we go to spend 2 nights in the cinque terre. did you go here? it is so beautiful, and the food was soooo good here. i had so much focaccia and pesto. mmmmmmmm. ugh, and i ate so much gelato during the entire trip. anyway, in cinque terre you can just show up and ask people in the bars if they know of a room available and then they call their friends and ask around. really cool. so the first night we get like a room and bathroom to ourselves for 20 euros each which was pretty sweet, and the next night we found another place in someone's house for 25 euros altogether! pretty sweet. during our full day there, we did the 5 hour hike between the 5 towns along the coast. pretty fun stuff.
and then back to toulouse, blablabla. strike's still on. i just sit on my butt all day, go to the park when it's hot and sunny out, and if it's not hot and sunny out, i go to a cafe. it's a good life.
hope you're doing well. sorry i wrote so much, but hey you asked.
bye vica love.
