After only receiving a 15 day visa from the immigration official in Costa Rica after my trip to Colombia I have to admit I was a little irritated with the stress of having to leave the country again in 2 weeks. However, now I have realized that what I thought would be an inconvenient border …
Welcome to my mother, 2 aunts, uncle and grandma and grandpa. They arrived this morning to begin their Italian vacation, and of course to see me. Since my dad was already here, we headed over to the airport bright and early to greet the travelers. There was not a whole lot of time for chit …
So this past weekend we went to Oman’s second city, Salalah. It’s a pretty small city, only about 150,000 or so, but it has had major significance in both the past and the present. The culture of Salalah, and the rest of the Dhofar region (the area in the south of Oman, bordering Yemen) has …
So our program assistant, Vien, who is also Rylan’s personal assistant has become very close to us Loyola students. She is after all only twenty-two and all of us on the program are twenty or twenty-one. Its only natural that she has bonded with us. She is also a graduate of USSH, where we Loyola …
It’s a different dynamic in Oman. Here families aren’t just the people you see during holidays – they’re basically the only people you do anything with. I found out a little while ago that all of the kids that are always running around my house are actually all cousins of my host family’s kids. Also …
Yesterday we had a surprise party for one of the girl’s 21st birthday. While we were at her house I found out that her host brother is a bodybuilder. He was big, but since he was fully clothed it was hard for me to judge just how bodybuilt he actually was. After the party he …
For my religious studies class in Vietnamese Religions, Fr. Julio invited Gabe and I on a day trip to Da Lat, a city nestled in the mountains of Vietnam’s central highlands, called Tay Nguyen in Vietnamese. For our trip we would go to Da Lat’s famous Zen monastery and pagoda to get more hands on …
As promised I have written about Cambodia before the week was out, but this is only a dent and not even the ‘cool stuff’ yet. Stay tuned for more! It was Ash Wednesday and I had no ashes on my head, but I did have a plane ticket to Cambodia. I had a legitimate claim …
Lets dive right into this post shall we? As I mention in my last post, my family had arrived in Italia, last weekend and they got back into Roma on thursday evening. So after class I went down to meet them at the apartment that they rented for the long weekend near Villa Borghese. It …
So this week is crunch time. Tomorrow all the papers for the semester are due and on top of that, the – cough 50% of our grade cough – Arabic final is the same day. Now I am a man who likes to plan things like this out, so when something unanticipated happens I get …