“Bibelot” – Week IV

“Bibelot” : a small object of curiosity, beauty, or rarity.

This past weekend I went on my first study trip. I use the word “bibelot” here to describe this trip because I never would have thought I would have the experiences that I had there, during my semester in Italy. SLA Chandni (further known as Slandni) promoted this trip as best she could and yet we weren’t sure if we would get enough people to go. Luckily, we ended up with 18 students (the perfect amount), Slandni and our very own professor Grazia. Instead of going into a long rant about how amazing the trip was, I will just make some bullet points of memories that I have and will always want to keep with me.

• Hiking 1,500 kilometers to the top of Monte Porco (shown above) to the point where you can see the island of Capri in the distance
• “Basta Billy” – naming the dog at the hostel where we stayed because he was so cute but so annoying – in the end we turned him into an imaginary person so that it was funny every time someone reprimanded him because we imagined they were reprimanding an actual human being (“Billy stop licking your butt!”)
• Teaching the entire town of Cusano Mutri how to do the YMCA dance the correct way instead of forming the “Y” and then waving your arms in the air back and forth
• Staying up until 1am and 2am to have group bonding with games of “spoons” and “mafia”
• Eating every meal overflowing  with mushrooms because, of course, we were at the Sagra dei Funghi (Mushroom Festival)
• Telling everyone my embarrassing story about the fact that I told my mom and the SLAs back at Rome that I was going to “Funghi, Italy” not realizing that that was not a real place – I then became founder of said “Funghi, Italy”
• Learning how to make gnocci and other pastas along with tasting the (best) wine from Cusano Mutri

All in all, these study trips have shown me that there are people out there in the world that you will meet and bond with that you would have never encountered otherwise in your life time. These were people that I shared similar interests and hobbies with, who enjoyed hiking for half of a day only to be drenched in sweat and exhausted before you had to go to the festival, or who loved to drink wine at dinner and then go dance it all off in the middle of the street while getting the attention of the entire town.

To sum up the weekend, the most memorable part was when, on Saturday night we had finished our dancing around midnight and we all gathered to leave. As we were walking away from the festival, the DJ got on his microphone and bid the “americani” a farewell and the entire town clapped for us. It was nice to see that americans really aren’t hated by the europeans the way we might think.

On our last Sunday there we went to the surrounding area where we saw fossilized dinosaur and fish bones and then took one last shopping trip through the small town of Cusano Mutri. We bought Chandni a spoon to hang on her wall that has places to hang keys, etc. just to show her how grateful we were for all of her planning.

As you can see, we were all an incredibly happy group:

I dedicate this post to my fellow Funghi-ians, to forever remembering when we took that mushroom trip together!

Cheers,

Megan