It’s finally crunch time. Ricci is due in exactly one week, the streets of Rome are filling up with Christmas decorations and dazzling neon convenience store lights, most of the students at the JFRC are talking about going home and us students’ plans for saving money are becoming more and more creative. Just today my roommate Emily and I realized if we buy and share one cornetto (the Roman version of a “croissant” or “brioche”) we can both get a huge cup of free hot water for our insipid Lipton tea at the café on campus.
As Thanksgiving was yesterday, most students are off traveling to discover the wonders of the world, while Emily, maybe four other students, the really nice cleaning crew, the one guy who does something with construction but I’m not sure what, the porters at the front desk, and I are sharing the almost eerie hallways. But I can’t complain. I finally get a shower to myself, instead of people walking into the bathroom because they’ve NEVER BEEN TAUGHT TO KNOCK. (You know who you are). Also, we found out quite last-minute that the cafeteria does not provide its vital service over this break. Therefore, Emily and I bought one loaf of bread, a little cheese, some salami, and a few pieces of fruit to get us through the next three days. Turns out, we’re running low on all food items (if anyone sees this blog post within the next few hours please send us a care package of non-perishable food items, thank you. We might not make it through the night). Of course I’m kidding. Last night we went out for an amazing Thanksgiving dinner with five other people and ended up spending something like three hours eating.
I realize I have been quite terrible at keeping these blog posts going, but as it’s my first time blogging, I’m actually quite happy I’ve made it so far. Between now and the last blog post, I traveled to Greece through the Loyola study trip, where I consumed a lot of kebabs and met one of the coolest people ever (our tour guide, who completed this amazing peace walk from Athens to Istanbul). I also went to Val d’Aosta, the tiniest, cutest little snow globe of a region in northern Italy, where I have decided to marry an “Alpino” (look it up) to make my great-grandfather proud and will spend the rest of my days milking cows on a farm in the shadows of Monte Rosa. I then traveled to Amsterdam, and basically lived at the Van Gogh Museum for the entire weekend (I’m a tad obsessed).
The last place I visited was Piemonte. It’s another northern region in Italy, where my family is from. I got to stay with cousins and conduct a few interviews with pranotherapists for my Ricci research. Traveling to Piemonte and back were some of my most harrowing travel experiences of my life so let me explain. This all started because I decided to pay less money for a train ticket. I booked an overnight ride under the category “super-economy”. Perks: it came with a cot. I got on the train as it was about to leave, and started making my little bed (of course the most uncomfortable top bunk). A woman came up behind me and said, “That’s my bed”. So we were both really confused until the train conductor showed up. In the meantime, the train had already left the station. He looked at our tickets and told the woman she bought one for the wrong day. She started getting angry and yelling “well, who is going to refund my ticket,” and all I was thinking was, thank God I have my nice little cot, and I can get some much needed sleep. After about five minutes the woman couldn’t be placated. The conductor then took a look at both of our tickets and laughing stated that everything he said to the woman actually counted for me. So all of a sudden the woman decided to go to bed and leave me in this mess. Apparently, I had bought the ticket for the next day, and I still have no idea how. So the conductor brought me to this tiny room where the brotherhood of conductors seemed to be holding a meeting. Each little man was at his own little machine, typing up numbers. It definitely reminded me of The Imitation Game. So anyway, they all started talking to each other as if I wasn’t there. One man was like, “Well, maybe we can find her a cheap ticket,” which got chuckles out of another guy who retorted, “At this hour?” As they went back and forth, I kept thinking, wow, they are going to kick me off the moving train and leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere one hour away from Rome, where I’ll be alone with my bags at 1 am in the morning. Turns out “super-economy” means if you buy the ticket for the wrong day you have to pay full price for a new one. So I bought another ticket (not a cot, but a seat, and it also wasn’t very cheap) and proceeded to the little compartment I was supposed to be sharing with a really frail-looking man. Of course I stayed up all night wondering if he was actually asleep or pretending to be. I somehow got to Piemonte in one piece. On the way back, I had an overnight train with the correct date, but between the violent rocking and pitching of the train and the woman who wouldn’t turn her light off, I barely slept. That morning, once I arrived in Rome, I went directly to my internship (I looked and probably smelled terrible). After eight hours of talking to patients, taking their pressures and preparing doses of radioactive isotopes I returned to campus, took a shower, and presented my Ricci project in front of everyone’s Ricci mentors, our Ricci professor, and a few extra people who came to watch the show. It was quite the exciting day.
So that has been my reality for the past few weeks. I have one more interview I need to conduct, and then I will be able to say that that part of my Ricci project is over. With one week left, I only need to write the entire paper and analyze most of my data. I can’t wait. But actually. This is one of those rare moments when I’m not being sarcastic. Yes, I don’t have much time, and the pressure is on, but I love my project with all of its flaws and limitations, and I can’t wait to have it be somewhat put together.
As this is the last full blog entry I will be writing for my semester in Italy (stay tuned for the special final entry), I wanted to leave readers with some tidbits of knowledge I have gained:
- Don’t take the top bunk in the dorms. Just don’t. If your roommate forces you to do it because she’s a klutz and might actually get injured climbing up and down, do it, but complain to her about it constantly.
- If you are a future Ricci Scholar, or if you will do research of any type at any point in your life, get ready to be rejected on the phone, to your face, and over email correspondence by a lot of possible interviewees. It does make you so much happier when someone actually listens to your whole spiel about who you are and what your project is before they hang up on you.
- Play calcio at the JFRC (soccer). WARNING: I’m about to brag about my team. Celeste [cheh-lest-eh]. You’re the best, eh? (That should rhyme). Also, we’re playing in the semi-finals next Wednesday. ESPN wanted to show our game on live television, but we decided we didn’t want to lose the integrity of the community feel during the JFRC Calcio Championship by selling out to such a huge corporation.
- I had a really good fourth point a few days ago, but I forgot it.
As per usual, the pictures. Enjoy.
This is my dearest fiction writing class. We took a picture to remember the good old times, when we were all really confused about fiction writing. We still have no idea if our professor likes what we write. He is a really nice guy, so I’m hoping that that transfers over to his fiction grading. (To be continued…)
This is us city-dwellers, night-livers and believers in resting-on-escalators-when-using-them. We were going to either a fancy dinner or a wine tasting. Honestly, this picture is really old, but I forgot to post it earlier. Woops.
This was the night I left for Val d’Aosta with my friend Matt (not in the picture) and his cousin. A bunch of us ate at Emily’s favorite restaurant to bid each other adieu for a painstakingly long and arduous three days apart.
This is Val d’Aosta. If we seem rattled it’s because we had just been horseback riding and Matt’s cousin Jackie (Matt is depicted in the above photo) was on this one horse that got spooked and came after our two horses with a vengeance. I’m pretty sure I screamed and Matt did too. Anyway, somehow we clung on for dear life and survived the whole ordeal. We then decided we wanted to ride on the back of this pick-up truck because both of us are real rebels. If you look closely, the vehicle does not have a a windowpane. The owners punched it out because it gets hot in the summer.
Matt and I did quite a bit of climbing during our weekend in Aosta. We neither had the shoes nor the clothing for it. I ripped my jeans to take this picture. Your welcome.
This is Amsterdam. It was cold, actually, it was freezing. In fact, in this picture I am seeking shelter from the wind and rain between these enormous red letters whose meaning I have yet to understand. I’m kidding. I just didn’t know what to do with my hands so I did that. It’s mostly Roohi’s fault (she came with me to the Dam) since she only took this one picture. So there you have it. (P.s. It really was cold).
Sorry for the bad quality of this last picture, but this website won’t let me upload pictures over a certain weight. For every one, it takes 5 minutes to figure out what size will work. I got annoyed after messing with this picture for 10 minutes and put up a really bad quality version of it. This is Emily with our dwindling resources of food (I took this yesterday). This was before we realized we can’t count so we don’t have enough slices of salami to last us through Sunday. Also, the yogurts will be sorely missed as they were the last ones I managed to grab from our cafeteria before they closed it down for break. (I was only half joking about the care packages).