I just remembered that I can use my photos to remember the sequence of events. I'm so smart.

So late Monday night, Mike and I met up with Meghann to go see the Eiffel Tower. We caught the last elevator up, at around 11.45pm, I think, and UP we went. I'm pretty sure I've been up the Tower before, but I definitely forgot how freakin' tall the thing actually is. The night view was gorgeous, but unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries before I could take a satisfying photo. Oh, and by the way, if you ever wondered what the temperature is at the top of the Eiffel Tower at midnight, it's approximately HELLA cold. It hurt.

On Tuesday Chanel, Marija, and Mike spent the day in Versailles. I opted not to go because I didn't want to use up a whole day and Meghann had the day free. We met up and metro'd to Sacré-Coeur and took the elevator thingy up the hill. The only thing I remembered about Sacré-Coeur from years before was that my parents and I got separated and I sat on the stairs in front of the basilica [way to plant, Lauren] and waited for them to find me while I watched all these figures in religious garb walk in and out of the cathedral like it was totally normal and acceptable to spend one's days in such costumes. [By the way, my parents did actually find me. I was a little nervous that they ditched me and I would have to move in with the nuns and shit, which I think for me was a scarier thought than my parents just peacing out. I was like 7 or something - what the hell was I going to talk to a priest about? More on that later, actually...] Anywho, they are very serious about their basilica, and you weren't allowed to take pictures, answer your phone, talk, or breathe audibly inside the thing. All these rules were pissing Meghann and me off, so we decided to rebel. They have those candles in all the cathedrals, you know, where they ask you to donate 10euro for this POS candle that they probably paid some starving person in China 2 cents to make. Well, last time Meghann was at Sacré-Coeur she stole a candle and I was jealous, so she was thoughtful enough to nab me one, too. And then since we felt a little sac religious [not really though] we decided to actually light one of the 2euro tealights - for Britney Spears. Hey - someone's gotta pray for the poor girl. Oh, and I took three pictures. Take THAT, Catholic church! Muahahaha!
After that we decided to walk down Martyr's mountain [Montmartre] into the seedy part of Paris where the Moulin Rouge is. For some reason my parents decided not to make that a destination when they came to Paris with their 7-year-old child. I have no idea why. We giggled at the names of the sex shops and erotica stores [yes I know those are the same thing] and randomly enough ended up eating dinner there, in a Chinese restaurant of all places. It wasn't great, but it was nice to get some protein into our systems. We decided to get out of that neighborhood because it was getting dark, so we bussed back to Meghann's, where Mike joined us a few hours later after his return from Versailles. The three of us went out for dessert at this cafe near Meg's apartment, which was absolutely and ridiculously delicious [read: chocolate cake with hot melty chocolate ganache inside and vanilla bean gelato. Hells yes.] and made friends with our disgruntled waiter who had a remarkably large Hello Kitty tattoo on his arm. The word beuf was definitely used, as well [gonna have to double check with Meghann on the spelling for that one].

Wednesday I took it easy and went back to sleep after breakfast while my three traveling buddies went to Musée d'Orsay. I met up with Meghann at the Arc De Triomphe and we walked down the Champs-Élysées, half-heartedly shopping and whole-heartedly enjoying ourselves. I met up with my people and we got some foodstuffs [French pastries - SO good] and went to Il Musée de l'Orangerie, which I remembered well and loved the second time. I actually regretted not going to Orsay again. Oh well, maybe in May. While in the two Monet rooms in l'Orangerie, I started watching the people who were watching the art, and I made a little project for myself of photographing the art-watchers. I enjoyed myself, and oddly enough the people I took pictures of always seemed to match the painting they were near. You can check out the whole collection on my Flickr page. It's nothing artsy, just amusement.
After we were done in the Museum, I bought myself a sweet lil pill case in the gift shop, to replace the one Meghann bought me a few years ago when she went to Paris, but I lost it somehow. Whoops. We were all supposed to go out clubbing Wednesday night but I was getting sick and Meghann fell asleep way early by accident, so it never happened.

Thursday Mike and I set out determinedly to go see Sainte Chappelle. We were a bit late because we let ourselves sleep in, but we made it in time and used our friend the museum pass to get in. I love that chapel. I remember it pretty vividly from my first Paris visit, however many years ago, but I do remember it being much larger than it actually is. I guess when you're much smaller, that happens. Anyway, I'm totally enchanted by it; I feel like I'm in some mythical fairytale setting, and I like to pretend that the incredible stained glass makes out scenes from tales of yore, you know, knights and dragons and stuff instead of saints and baptisms. I took about a billion pictures and Mike caught me staring in awe at my surroundings on his camera. We stayed in there essentially just sitting and looking until they closed.

Friday was our last day in Paris. We had our lovely breakfast and went back upstairs to pack up and check out at 11. Meghann offered to house our things for the rest of the day while we enjoyed our last few hours in the city, so we metro'd over to her apartment, stopped at a pastry shop to buy her a big box of coffee macaroons to thank her for all her trouble, dropped off our stuff, and decided to just explore her neighborhood some more. The most important goal of the day was buying ourselves some French pastries to take with us on the plane to Florence. That day was absolutely freezing, by the way; I'm pretty sure it was in the 30s midday. We found this delicious-looking pastry shop and bought ourselves plenty of macaroons, and got our last meal - what else but kebabs - and then followed up the huge bun of greasy chicken with dessert crepes. I have to shamefully admit that I was too full to finish my nutella and hazelnut crepe. I don't want to talk about it.

By the time we got to Firenze, Mike and I were pretty much over it and were ready to go back home. This feeling was intensified when we learned we would be sleeping on a tile floor. Chanel's friend, Kevin, who is studying in Firenze, offered to let us sleep at his apartment free of charge, which was really nice of him, but after one night on that floor Mike and I decided to switch our early morning Sunday train tickets to Saturday evening so we could sleep in our own beds in our Roma. We had a fun dinner Friday night and then Saturday we spent the day being touristy - seeing the Duomo and going to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo's David, and then Mike and I chilled in a bar and had ourselves some delicious 1euro cappuccinos before doing a little bit of shopping and then leaving for home.

[my photos are taking a while to upload so i'm just going to post this and add more later. ciao!]

Monday, February 11th:

I haven't yet mentioned how we started out every day in Paris. Our lovely little budget hotel included an even more lovely little breakfast for the excellent price of about 25euro/night. Each morning we would make sure we were up around 9am, throw some clothes on, and head to the room in which breakfast was served. Upon arrival, we would be handed a lovely little tray on which our meal sat: a mini-baguette, a large croissant, little things of butter, jam, and spreadable cheese, and our choice of coffee or tea. It sounds plain, I know, and the first time we saw it we were disappointed, but it was way more delicious than American bread and butter could ever be. Yum. I miss that place. Oh and apparently you have to be richer than god to drink espresso beverages in Paris, because we were literally speechless [for a second before we started mumbling profanities] when we saw that no cappuccino in the city was less than 4 or 4,50euro. It was hard news to swallow [In Rome you can get a cappuccino pretty much anywhere for around 80 cents].
Anyway, I believe it was on Monday morning when we met up with some fellow EAP kids at the Louvre, where I was maliciously conned into buying an expensive museum pass that I didn't really want. Okay, that's kind of a bold-faced lie, but I was grumpy after I decided to buy the 4-day pass instead of the much cheaper 2-day pass. That's what I get for giving in to peer pressure. [Damnit, why must I try so hard to fit in? I just want to be normal, okay?! God. I'm going to go write some angsty poetry in a corner now and listen to some Dashboard. No one understands me. (if you don't get it, don't worry about it).] The pass lets you skip the lines and enter about 60 museums and churches and things around Paris as many times as you want within your chosen time limit. Our first use of this sort of handy-dandy little device was in the Louvre, which was another kind of bad decision on my part. [I'm all about the definitive statements today, aren't I?] I hate the Louvre, and I really don't mean to come off as some art-history elitist or anything, I just think it's a terrible idea. Everyone tries to see as much of it as they can in as little time as possible, and when you stop to look at EVERYTHING, I don't believe you really appreciate any of it. You have to pick and choose. And even then it all starts to look the same. The one cool part was that a lot of the art I studied last quarter now resides in the Louvre, so I got too see it up close and made Mike listen to my expert knowledge of all the Panini paintings and such. He was a good sport. I felt so cultured.
Anyway, after several hours of being bombarded with ART from all sides, I was super-hungry, and those of you who know me well know that when I get super-hungry, I put my over-sized grumpypants on. And they were draggin' all over that museum, let me tell you. We finally left [thank god] and took way too long to find some vittles, which I don't actually remember. But I was determined to see Notre Dame and Saint Chappell, so we went onto the island and went into the Notre Dame. It's much cooler than I remembered it. But I felt like a little kid again in the cathedral; I don't know what it is about that place but to me it's literally awesome. I took my time checking out every detail and taking photos from every angle I could, then met my friends outside where we waited in the cold to go up on top of the cathedral. Have I mentioned lately how much I just adore this awesome little thing called the endless spiral staircase? Seriously, I can't escape them, ever. And apparently, Europe is all about them. Everyone here must have buns of steel. Back to Notre Dame...we climbed 400 steps to the top and a few of us girls gawked at the unreasonably attractive Italian men behind us in line. We blatantly ignored the 5-minute maximum and took our time checking out the incredible 360 degree view of the city.
After we tried not to fall to our deaths on the same 400 spiraling steps, it was dusk and therefore too late to see Saint Chappell. I was kind of bitter, and someone we ended up all separating, but Mike and I did some light shopping [read: I bought an awesome pair of bright red gloves] and had an adventure finding the closest metro stop to take home.

Okay, I'm going to be straightforward with you and tell you I don't remember the order of things that happened for the rest of the trip, so I'm going to punk out on the day-by-day reports and just summarize the rest. Believe me, it's for the best.

Oh, and Flickr e-mailed me back, and if my flatmate Gilli keeps lets me keep using her computer for the next hour or so, next time you look here these posts will be studded with photos. [Thank you, Gilli!]

[NOTE: pictures are up for the previous post. Have a look, will ya?]

Howdy, folks! I am back in lovely [and very cold] Roma, and very happy to be home. My first vacation in Europe was a huge success and I have much to tell you about - a week's worth of stuff, actually, which will probably take me about 7 years to write, so excuse my slowness and bear with me as I do this in parts and try to write about only the most interesting stuff.
Oh, and I have about 300 photos to show you, but Flickr is still being a prick so I just e-mailed Yahoo and hopefully all of those issues will be resolved soon so you can see all the photographic evidence of my awesomeness.
Let's begin, shall we?

Friday, February 8th/Saturday, February 9th:

After way, way, WAY too much drama about figuring out how to get to the airport at 4 in the morning [and I would just like to say that if people listened to me from the start, all of that trouble could have been completely avoided. I am good at planning. Everyone should know this, damnit], all 3 of my traveling partners [pictured to the left, with Meghann] and myself got a couple short hours of sleep in my apartment before a cab picked us up and drove us all 15 minutes of the way to Ciampino, where we had to wait for about half an hour to check in because the airport doesn't actually open until 4.45. Go figure. We did check in successfully, and even though our plane was a little bit late, the flight was a success. Let me tell you a bit about RyanAir, though. It's one of the 2 really cheap airlines in Europe right now, and the reason the flights are so cheap is because for the entire duration of the plane ride you are bombarded with advertisements. It's ridiculous. And the inside of the plane is so-bright-it-gives-you-a-headache yellow. Which I'm assuming some study said would make people buy more shit. I bought the most expensive tiny water bottle of my life [the whole no liquids on airplanes thing is so incredibly stupid it makes me want to cry. Let's face it, people. If someone really wants to do something badly enough, they're going to find a way to make it happen. Making us throw out bottles of hair gel isn't saving lives, it's just causing migraines. Stepping off the soapbox now...] for 3 euro. Anyway, we landed, we all clapped and cheered wildly [one of my favorite Italian customs], and we were in Paris.
Except we weren't actually in Paris. The airport has the word "Paris" in it to fool us innocent cheap customers, but it's actually about an hour away. So we bought 13euro bus tickets while waiting in the freezing cold, hopped on the bus, and slept through the 40 minute ride. My dear and lovely friend Meghann was kind enough to meet us at the bus station and take us to our hotel. Turns out even the bus station wasn't really in Paris. We had to take many a-Metro to get to where we wanted to be. We found our hotel, checked in, unpacked a bit, and were off. Meghann took us to get some vittles, because we were all famished, and we all delighted in our very first kebab [see picture below]. I don't even know how to describe the wonderfulness that is a kebab. I have photos of kebaby-glory but I can't show you yet. Let's just put it this way: you get a tasty bun with whatever sauces and condiments and vegetables you want [or don't want], and then they shave off about a pound of chicken from the twirly meat-cooker thing and pile it up in the bun and serve it to you with a large amount of fresh frites. The rest of the world seriously needs to get up on this kebab thing. It's glorious.
Anyway, after our first kebab, Meghann took us to her apartment [which, including bedroom, kitchen, toilet room, and bathroom, measures about 9ft by 9ft] in the Latin Quarter, which is this ridiculously awesome neighborhood in which we walked around for a while and marveled at all the cheeses and pastries. Meghann introduced us to our second Parisian addiction, the macaroon, which has little to nothing in common with the American macaroon except for the fact that both are varieties of a wonderful little thing we call a cookie.
I don't really exactly remember what happened after that, but we went back to our hotel eventually, where Mike and I changed and got ready to go to a concert, which was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. Very convenient. It was at this awesome venue: it was underground, very small, and had a cool bar/restaurant thing attached to it. The band that was supposed to open, Apostle of Hustle, actually didn't show up, which I was super disappointed about because I love that band and wasn't particularly excited about the headliner, Stars. But all turned out quite well. The replacement openers were really, really awesome, Stars was about a billion times better than I expected them to be, and I got officially smashed for the first time on the European continent, thanks to a very stiff screwdriver and a large amount of beer, which I actually enjoyed, which is a miracle in itself. Drunk and extremely satisfied, what else was there to do on the way home except get food? Mike wanted a kebab [obv] so we found an open kebab place where I used the restroom and drunkenly broke their soap dispenser [I'm classy]. About 30 seconds after we left with his food, I decided I was hungry and I, too, wanted a kebab. So we found another kebab place, which made the best kebabs we had in Paris. We ran home to our hotel room and gorged ourselves. It was way more fun that it should have been, and then we passed the hell out.

Sunday, February 10th:

This glorious day we had planned in advance, and the plan was the unique and highly cultural experience that is Disneyland Paris. Meghann, Mike, and myself met up with my lovely, ladylike, and loud flatmate Emily [pictured with me, to the left] and her friend Eddie, and we took the RER to Disneyland. It was a wonderful, wonderful day. Pictures to come, of course. Let's see... highlights.. Space Mountain definitely kicks the black spacey ass of Space Mountain in Anaheim. Pitch black, upside down, so fast we were all crying when we got off. It was excellent. It was pretty much the best ride ever. We also went on their Haunted House [eh], Indiana Jones [eh], Pirates of the Caribbean [chill], and other things which I cannot remember at the moment. For lunch, we went to this all-American barbeque place where one could purchase the mysterious food item known as the Magic Cheeseburger. For a mere ten euro, you could experience magic of the meat-and-cheese variety. Or if you were a cheap punk-ass wimp, you could buy the simple cheeseburger for simpler people for 2 euro. What was the difference? I'm sure you're asking yourself by now. Well, lovely people, I will tell you: besides the magic, obviously, the difference, my dear friends, were two rare and elusive things we like to call lettuce and tomato.
I swear to god.
Magic.

Anyway, we split up not too long after lunch because Emily and Eddie bought park-hopper tickets while Mike, Meg, and me just wanted to explore Disneyland. We adventured around Fantasyland and went through Alice's Curious Labyrinth, which was quite scary, let me tell you, and ended up going on my favorite ride, the teacups, which ended up being way more fun than it had any right to be. Whatevs. We bought the obligatory parting candy and headed back home on the RER. Mike and I, instead of actually going home, went to another concert. This venue was really funky. It looked like your typical high-school theater, with a ghetto stage and risers and wings and stuff, but it also ended up being pretty cool. The band we saw, British Sea Power, rocked pretty damn hard, and the opener, some French acoustic guitarist, sang a cover of some ridiculous song which I am forgetting the name of right now but will ask Mike and correct this later. Yes. Another Parisian day, well-spent.

I'm going to end here for now, because I need to go to class kind of soon, and I've had enough typing for the hour. Look for the second installment soon.

Happy Hallmark Holiday to all!

Love,
Lauren
















.

Hi all! I'm alive and in beautiful, beautiful Paris. [This is going to be very short because this keyboard is way whack and it takes me five times longer to type than normal.]
I arrived here on Saturday and so far it has been a wonderful stay, especially because Meghann lives here. I am meeting up with her pretty soon so I need to get going but I will try to update as soon as possible, before I forget everything I've seen and done. Paris really is amazing.

au revoir!

Hello. Sorry I haven't finished the Carnival update - it's been a very busy week and I am still without a working computer. Today was the last day of Intensive Italian - thank god - and everyone is leaving for winter break. 

So a week or two ago, I fought tooth and nail to be able to buy a ticket on this Carnival trip that EAP put together. For a mere 150euro, they transported us to three locations, put us in a hotel for a night, provided two multi-course meals, and got us entry into some interesting places.



We left Saturday morning, very early for Lucca. What can I say about Lucca? Well, it was raining. Lucca is one happening place. The excitement never ends. How can I describe this to you... let's see.... oh I know! Lucca is about as exciting as an ugly pet rock that you got from some asshole friend in a really pretty box [for those of you who are still working on understanding my humor, that translates into: Lucca fucking sucks].

We had about an hour or so to wander around in this sad little place, without any background on what was so special about Lucca, besides that it's supposedly some hidden gem of a Medieval town. Anyway, nothing was open, and you could walk from one end of town to the other in five minutes. The only exciting thing was that were was a carousel in one of the piazze, but it was closed because of the rain. They did, however, feed us a nice hefty 3 or 4 course meal.

I just typed about a hundred words too many on the subject. Moving on...



Our excursions in Lucca were so overwhelming that we all slept on the bus ride to Pisa. Pisa was pretty unimpressive, and for a little while I was almost convinced that the leaning tower was an urban legend. But then we turn a corner and went under a bridge and there it was, about half as big and twice as leaning as we all expected. We a couple hours to explore Pisa [read: the Piazza that the Duomo and tower are in]. So of course we all spent the first hour competing to see who could look like the biggest douchebag trying to take a picture of themselves holding up the tower or pushing it over or sitting on it or in some cases, pretending like it was a very flattering part of the male anatomy.

We were divided into two groups to go up into the tower, and I was in the latter group with Mike, so we walked around the piazza, and after those five minutes were burned up, went on a trek to find the restrooms, which turned out not only to take longer and be much more challenging, but also to cost me 0,30euro. Those Pisa bastards are tricky folk. After my costly pee, we took a closer look at the venders lined up along one side of the piazza, who sold pretty much every single thing you could possibly shape like a leaning tower, including but not limited to: leaning espresso cups, leaning mugs, leaning flasks, leaning nightlights, leaning lightsabers, leaning keychains, leaning posters, leaning kitchen aprons, leaning magnets, and leaning sculptures. We stopped in a Bar to buy Mike a leaning cappuccino, and then met up with the rest of the group for our tour of the tower.

First of all, you're not allowed to take anything up into the tower except a camera. You have to check all of your belongings into these electronically locking lockers, which took way longer than it should take 25 people to put a bag in a box, but whatever. Then you get to go to the top of the tower. Let me summarize my feelings about this experience for you: the leaning tower of Pisa is the worst invention EVER.

Maybe I was just being naive, but I was totally unprepared for the task I was about to take on. The tower really looks much smaller than you'd expect, but when you're climbing an increasingly narrow, windowless, handrail-less, airless spiral staircase that seems to never end, when you're dizzy and nauseas from going in circles at an angle and your thighs and butt are burning from the three billion steps you've already gone up and you think you're going to pass out, it really seems to exponentially expand in size.

I did make it to the top, and panting, I gratefully went up the last stair and looked around. For someone not afraid of heights, I was fairly nervous. When you come out of those stairs, the level that you're on isn't actually flat. The tower is circular, and on the top there's a raised platform with bells on it, and then stairs descending around it, like concentric circles. It's pretty scary to not have level ground to walk on. Not to mention that you're at a pretty sharp angle. It was quite a view, though, I have to give them that. We discovered that you could actually go up one more level on top of the belled platform in this ridiculously narrow staircase, and so we figured we might as well. At least that level was flat. It started to rain pretty much as soon as we got up there, which made it all the more scary because the entire thing is made of slippery marble. I forgot to say that all the stairs have serious one to two inch dips in them from years and years of millions of people going up and down every day. So factor together the height, the angle, the very smooth slipper marble, the rain, and the nausea, and boy you're got a good time. Going down was actually worse than going up, mostly because of the dizzy/slippery wet stairs/trying not to fall to my death/eyesight getting screwy because of going around on circles thing. I was less than a happy camper when we made it down, and even though it was cold and raining, I stripped down to my shirt because I felt to suffy and nauseas. Then it was back to the bus and on our way to Viareggio.

We arrived in Viareggio around 6pm, checked into our hotel, got our room assignments and keys, and were left to find ourselves dinner. They kind of lied to us in that we weren't really in Viareggio, we were on the outskirts where there's nothing to do and nowhere to go. But we were actually right on the beach [not that we saw it at night], so it was far better than Lucca. It was a difficult task to find dinner. There were very few restaurants and the ones we stopped by were too expensive. There were no open supermarkets, either. We finally found this pretty big restaurant that was just opening for dinner that had margherita pizzas for 4,50euro each, so pizza it was. We ended up taking over three tables, and we were the only people in the place, so the cooks and waitstaff were really nice to us. The chefs saw us dancing to the music they were playing so they turned it up real loud and that was fun. The pizza was delicious - very similar to the pizza place across the piazza from our apartment in Rome - very thin crust, very little sauce, a little cheese - delicious. Most of us got beer or wine and our own pizzas and were quite satisfied. Some other friends who had no luck finding a restaurant in the opposite direction met up with us, so it was a fun meal. My table in particular invented some new drinking games involving a salt shaker, a pack of sugar, and wind. Don't ask [I wasn't drinking because I was still sick from my illness and from Pisa, but I still had fun].

Everyone went back to the hotel, where most got ready to go out and look for a discoteque or party or something. My roommate Sasha [who was not my roommate at the hotel] stayed in with me, and we ended up talking the night away while everyone else found this enormous Carnival festival a couple kilometers away, where the night was much more eventful. My sources say this festival was like Halloween in IV times 5 on acid. I was glad I didn't go.

Mike's housemate Mike [yes there are two Mikes] went out, got drunk, then hitchiked back to the hotel where he was locked out. His room was on the fourth floor but somehow, after chucking rocks at the wrong window, he decided it would be a good idea to scale the wall by stacking tables on top of each other, stepping up on a floodlight onto a balcony on the first floor. He then walked into some random woman's hotel room, freaked the hell out of her, jumped off the balcony, and snuck into the hotel through some back kitchen room or something. He ended up having to pay a fine for security damages or some such things. Kids these days. They never remember to bring their rocketship shoes anywhere.



Wow, this is the longest blog post ever, and I'm not even on Sunday yet... sorry about that. So let's do Sunday:

JK. Because this post is so long I'm going to break it up into a couple parts. And Flickr is down [damnit, Yahoo!] so I can't post new pictures. And I've had to retype this part three times now because Blogger isn't saving my edits. What is going on, internet?! I apologize if there are a lot of mistakes that need correcting. I'll try again later. Poop.

Someone somewhere with a lot of power is pissed at me. Or something like that. Or maybe I just shouldn't cuddle with my computer at night. I guess I'll never know.

I fell asleep two nights ago with my computer on my bed, and when I woke up the next morning it was on the floor. Unless little leprechauns snuck into my room and decided to be oh-so-sneaky and move my computer two feet below its resting place, it fell off my bed during the night, and now when I plug it into the wall, it doesn't detect that it's plugged in, therefore the battery doesn't charge and it won't run. So I am without a working computer at the moment. I'm hoping the IT guy at the Study Center will have some brilliant solution for me, but until then my computer use is at the mercy of my housemates, who have been extremely kind.

Just thought you should know, so you have an explanation if I'm slow responding to e-mails or comments or anything.

LK

...is a wonderful, wonderful thing and I strongly suggest a petition be started in the US to make it an official holiday.

Hi, I went away for the weekend. I'm back now, I'm almost 100% better, and I am exhausted. Details and awesome pictures to be posted soon.

Should I have gone? Maybe, maybe not.
Should I have stayed at home alone and slept and studied for 2 days instead? Probably.
Was it worth it? Definitely.

Aloha! [Boy am I tricky or what?]
I am actually in bed at the moment, about to take a much-needed nap. I am sick. I always get sick at times like this. Always. Seriously, if me getting sick in a foreign country right before a test and a weekend excursion was a racehorse, it would be named Stupid Fucking Immune System and it would be the safest bet ever.
I went to see a doctor yesterday because Wednesday I was trying not to vomit internal organs so I could not go to school. [Poor Christine was still here and unfortunately I was a terrible host. To her I apologize and hope you'll come back and give Lauren in Rome another chance. We're pretty cool.] Thursday I dragged my ass to the Study Center and coughed and snuffled my way through class. The staff helped me find an English-speaking doctor and made an appointment for me [thank god they're really nice] so yesterday Sasha [my roommate] and I navigated the undergrounds of Rome, also known as the Metro, to get me to the doctor. The best word I could use to describe him is "loopy," because that's what he was. He was really nice and spoke English completely fluently, and is actually a well-known wine connoisseur in Italy [he puts on the wine-tasting classes at our school]. Random enough for you? He would make really terrible jokes and laugh really enthusiastically at himself while Sasha and I gave each other looks and haha-ed along. Example: while asking me to open my mouth and say "ahhh," he makes me do it like three times and then he tells me, "Okay stay like that. We [himself and Sasha]'re going to get some coffee, we'll be back in 20 minutes. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
So I officially have a "severe upper respiratory tract infection of probably viral origin." If I don't get better in two days, it's probably not a virus and I need to take anti-bacterials or whatever they're called. I'm tired and sick, leave me alone. Oh, antibiotics. There we go. Hah!

Every cloud has a silver lining, right? WRONG.

The doctor's office doesn't take credit or debit cards, which I, being a stupid American, didn't anticipate, and I was out of cash. Sasha saved my ass by lending me 50euro, I paid, and we were out of there. It was ridiculous. I'm in a foreign country with some weird-ass insurance, this was my first time seeing this doctor, and all I had to do before I saw him was fill out a form giving them my name, address, phone number, gender, name of my insurance company, and birthplace and date. Afterward, they told me the price, I handed them the cash, they gave me a very large receipt stamped and signed by the doctor, and I was on my way. It was unreasonably simple. Except that really, medical care SHOULD be that simple. Fucking America.

On the way home from the metro stop, Sasha and I stopped to look at this huge shoe store [we're all on frantic hunts for boots before the sales end], and we ended up finding a great pair of boots. We both got the same shoe, except in different colors; mine black and hers brown. The price? 22euro each [They gave us some serious glares when we each paid with a 50euro bill. Really, half the ATMS will only give you cash in multiples of 50, and almost no one will break them for you]. Awesome. They're the cute slouchy kind that look like they're suede that you tuck your jeans into. I want to buy a solid pair of actual leather boots that lace up, and then right before I go back to the good ol' US of A, if I have any money left I want to buy a pair of heeled boots, because they're SO good-looking but there's no point in getting them now because I refuse to break my neck on the cobblestone streets.

Okay it's naptime. I'm missing a cooking class tonight because of my damn lack-of-health. Send me get-well wishes! Grazie!

[Oh, PS - I will start putting up photos with each post again soon. I now have a Pro Flickr account so I can host as many photos as I want, all for your viewing please. Check it out: CLICKY, CLICKY.]