Peace out study abroad, thanks for the ride of a lifetime

While reading this post, I ask you to play this video and listen to the song as an accompaniment:

I really dont have any idea of what to write to sum up this experience and articulate my final thoughts on my entire semester abroad. I'm going to approach it by just typing and seeing what comes out, so it may be disorganized and hard to follow, but hopefully it will end fairly clear and the impact that this adventure had on me will be evident.

I approached study abroad as something that was an obvious thing that I had to do. What an opportunity it was, what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Every single person that I ever talked to about college said their biggest regret of their four years was not going abroad, and those that did go abroad continuously said it was the best choice they ever made. There you go, I was sold, I was spending my empty semester before PA school abroad; but where? Another easy answer - Rome, Italy. I know Italian fairly well from study in high school and my family is Italian. Its in the center of europe and puts me right in the middle of the biggest travel hub in the world. Its the center of the Catholic church, of the historical Roman empire. Its rich in art and gastronomical delight. Rome it was, with almost no other considerations.

And there it was, I was accepted into the program, and I knew I was now officially studying abroad. But I was also applying to PA school, and saving every single penny, and working for good grades, and working to make more money. I knew Rome was coming, but that was about it, my mind was too busy to contemplate much else. Christmas break hits, all the work I could do towards PA school was done, my bank account was built up as much as it would be. Its time to leave, and I still have no idea whats about to happen to me. I'm there, on my first day looking over Rome from the top of St Peter's Basilica, the highest point in Rome because of the government sanction forbidding any building built higher than it, daydreaming about the life I'd be living for the next few months. I was a wide-eyed child full of delightful animations.

I return home an enlightened adult with a weathered face full of wondrous tales, deep insights, and a diverse knowledge base. I feel like a revolution occurred and I came out the other end, a fully different person within the same body. My appreciation for art and architecture, my exploding ideas of food preparation and culinary creativity, my ever flowing imagination churning out new social ideas to constantly prevent boredom, my curiosity at the goings-on of people and countries around the world: all new things. And I could get as deep as I want about how these changes affect me and how I feel, but in simple terms, its just so much fun. I feel so much more comfortable in this new skin I have, in this new person that I feel like. That in itself made the experience priceless. I feel like I'm constantly buzzing, like I'm consistently on a life high and getting joy out of absolutely everything I see and do. I feel like Shane Falco in the Replacements when Jimmy McGinty tells him "in you I see two men, the man you are and the man you oughta be - and when those two meet, itll be a hell of a football player." I think those two people met for me. I feel as if I maintained the Zach that was but tweaked my social and cultural interests and feelings of responsibility and added a dose of self-confidence and a total recognition of I'm going to do whatever the heck I want if it makes me happy, not in a rebelious sort of way but in a the only opinion I need to worry about is the one I have of myself sort of way.

At this point, I have had so many epiphanies and insights that it would be impossible to share them all or even remember them. I didnt get much into journaling throughout the semester, probably because my outlet was this blog, but it would have been too much anyway because my head never stops running. I do remember one thing though, one thought that comes pretty close to being my biggest epiphany of my time abroad. I learned things about the world, about how to travel, about my preferred style of travel, about how people work and our interactions, and about approaching my future. And one night, probably a night when I was feeling great and totally at home in Rome, I realized: adventure is what makes life amazing and stimulating, but to me nothing will ever be friends and family. It seems like a general thing to realize, but for me it wasnt. I had always had thoughts that I would need to break away for a year or more, feeling suffocated by society and constraints, and because I have this need for adventure and danger and change that if I dont soothe becomes an issue and makes me anxious. I thought that drive is what would run my actions throughout the next stage of my life, and I worried about not seeing my family and friends enough, and thats when I realized I was forcing the issue. I realized that I was subordinating the people in my life to my need for pleasure and it made me uneasy deciding, but when I swapped them I felt so much more at ease, realizing I can live a life surrounded by those I love and fit in my adventure time around there. Nothing makes my life sweeter than those that I love and those that know me and will be able to pick out these differences in me, and that is what will guide my actions through the next stages of my life.

This is something that is going to be hard to communicate to others. I cant summarize it as a whole because too much happened and the details of my trips and time in Rome isnt whats important. Stories will slowly come out as they need to, and once this final reflection is done and my pictures are grouped together and gifts are given out I'll feel like I closed out study abroad and am ready to move on to the rest of my life.

Even though I've only been home for a few days I've started to get out of the mindset I was in so it is making it harder to type and reflect. I remember leaving and getting ready to come home and feeling anguish over having to leave the friends I made, friends I felt so connected to because of our shared experiences. Friends that I love to death and forever hope at our paths crossing in the future and rekindling out connection because these are people that I shared phenomenal conversations with and charming moments in enlightening situations, people that went with me on this roller coaster ride of good and bad that ushered me into the next stage of my life and that were with me as I changed into that new person. Everyone was so open minded and willing to listen to opinions different than theirs and then comment on it, willing to hang out with new people everyday and make new connections. Study abroad made me aware to the fact at how much I appreciate personal actions. I dont enjoy talking to people where the conversation becomes each person reporting on their lives. I dont like watching TV instead of chatting. I like eating slow and spending time together instead of going for a meal and finishing it and leaving right away. Personal connections are what enrich our lives, and these connections are often enough not cultivated. And I knew it before, but now I will lay my life on the line claiming that my life should be defined by the people I know, our connections and interactions, and the way they perceive me.

After going through such an experience, so many things seem trivial, but not in a pretentious way. There seems no point in arguing between loved ones, no point in getting worked up by small obstacles, no point in being lazy and wasting days away. Important things are put in perspective such as family and friends, education, helping others, and personal growth. As happy as I was in Tuscany drinking a glass of wine in the early morning sunshine overlooking the olive groves, I was at that same level when I came home and had family dinner with my parents and brother and sister, then went to see my nephew, and then had a bonfire on the beach and played some euchre. Both things made me happy for different reasons, and maybe that is another thing I learned more strongly is that I control my own happiness. I could have been miserable abroad, but I left saying it changed my life, and I'm pretty sure I'll return back to Marquette saying it was the best summer ever. Traveling and existing on such a grand scale makes you appreciate simple comforts, and just as I said I needed my loved ones and my adventure, I need my simple life and my epic life, but in a ratio where I think I can fit in the epic life into openings in my simple life when I have time. It feels good to be home, especially doing the things I used to and new ideas I've had but in this new skin that I feel I live in now.

So here we go, concluding the post that concludes study abroad. Spring Semester 2010 in Rome - the picture albums, the memories, the friendships there that will always remind me. That semester and year and city that at the mention of the words will forever bring me back into a dream state. The event that came and passed like a few weeks, even though it was something I'd looked forward to for years and will look back on for even longer. That adventure is over now, even though I remember everyone telling me to go and have the experience of a lifetime and come back with abundant stories to share. Well I'm home now, and those stories have been made.

The conclusion to the Zach that was, to my loosely termed childhood is a final chapter that can rival the most famous novels of all time. Part I of the novel is complete, my development from birth through adolescence and into young adulthood. Part II starts with me labeling myself as a young adult waiting for the next experience that changes my life and makes me realize I still am a child with much more to learn and with massive room to grow. But at this point, Part II starts with a sense of contained jubilee, a vibe that can be felt by all involved but only in true capacity by the one that holds it.

Peace out study abroad, I've loved you dearly. I owe you something that I cant repay except through an intangible amount of gratification and respect. Friends and family that have followed this blog all semester, I owe you the same gift. I hope it was enjoyable and I hope you felt connected to what I was physically experiencing and what I was mentally contemplating.

With love and happiness that I wish to all in lavish amounts, I sign one last time under the same alias as the first post, but different in every sense of it other than its simple spelling. Goodbye from the Zach that was before, the Zach that was evolving, and the Zach that exists now -

Zach

Eastern European backpacking adventure - nothing beats no plans!

To finish off this blog that contains my life of the past four months I decided it is best to split everything up into a few posts – one talking about what I’ve been up to since school ended and how my backpacking trip went, one of my official goodbye to study abroad and final thoughts, and probably one of random thoughts and lists that I’ve wanted to compile. So lets get started (good thing I’m on the plane/laying over back home for the next 20-odd hours )…

So I checked in a couple times along the way while I was backpacking, but I didn’t give any details of what I was up to. What a time it was! So so much fun, totally different than I ever would have expected in terms of how we traveled and things we did and the overall feel of the vacation. After I spontaneously decided three days in Krakow was too much and I wanted to see how comfortable the London Stansted airport was, I flew out the next morning and met up with Kristin and Alli at our couch surfers house in Krakow. For that day, we toured around the city with another man staying at her house, seeing some of his favorites and some of the big monuments in the city. At the end, we came across this awesome festival and learned that we were there on the day of their independence, like our Fourth of July, so it was a big celebration and there would be a concert and dance show at night. Our next move was obviously to get perogis and polish kielbasa and watch the dancers and then check out the concert, which we washed down with some lody (Polish ice cream, everyone only eats vanilla, and it’s a more icey vanilla taste but very awesome).

That was day one. Coming into this trip, we had shelter figured out in each destination and where we would be on each day, but we had no plans in the cities, and that’s what made the trip so awesome. We spent some time talking about what travel is all about and how different people travel and how to approach this trip. What was nice about no plans was that there were no disappointments. If we got lost, it was an adventure, if we stumbled across a festival or sweet exhibition, we did it without worrying about sacrificing something else. We slept if we were becoming exhausted. We got into so many random activities that totally defined the trip. Ultimately, it was exactly as if the three of us were just hanging out in a new awesome place, but just like we would back home. It wasn’t as much about getting to these cities and trying to get everything done that we should have; it was a vacation, and it was relaxing, and it helped me realize how I need to travel and it really helped me find my niche, which I had felt disconnected to at times on other trips this semester.

The next day we went to Auschwitz. We visited the Birkenau concentration camp, which was left in its exact state and you’re free to just walk around. The barracks, railroad, gas chambers, cremation areas, holding cells, ponds with ashes, and many other things were there to see, and it was a very odd experience, very emotional. Afterwards we visited the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was turned into more of a museum. All the buildings and the layout of the camp were preserved, but inside the buildings were exhibitions. The exhibitions though were powerful and informative and went a long way to putting things into perspective – like the room filled with human hair from when prisoners were shaved upon arrival, the room of everyone’s shoes, of their luggage, things like that. It was amazing how the regime wasn’t doing this out of pure anger and hatred (to an extent). Obviously, Hitler hated the Jews, but he more so was purely convinced that they were poison to human nature and needed to be exterminated, more of the hate for termites than for an enemy. The gas chambers were used to kill people by the hundreds. People were totally stripped of their identities upon arrival by being shaved and clothed in a striped suit like all the others. Someone could have been walking next to their brother and have no idea. A lot of our reason to start up in Poland was to be able to see Auschwitz, and its something I’m extremely happy I can say I’ve seen for the massive historical implications and totally powerful experience.

That night we boarded a night train to Prague and found ourselves there the next morning. We spent our first day in Prague finding the hostel, doing our general walk-around/acclamation with the city, going crazy over eating Subway, and checking in early due to dreary weather. Day two of Prague found us up and out early for an extremely long, but extremely awesome, free walking tour of the city. Followed by some Czech beers and goulash, we went to a drama theatre performance, and allow it was in Czech it rocked. It was fun to try and guess what was going on, and it was extremely cheap so it was a nice thing to do to change it up a little bit. Day three of Prague found us out early again to explore the market and Prague castle. Following that, we went to a park and were hanging out walking around when we got lost beyond all belief. The park swallowed us up just in time for the start of a storm and we literally for the life of us could not find the way out of this park. Hours later, we were back in town, and on our way to check out a Salvador Dali exhibit. Prague finished with some laundry and another night train to Budapest, which was delayed five hours but we had nowhere else to go but the station!

Prague was by far my favorite place, and easily one of the best places I’ve been this semester. It was a combination of so many things – compact, walkable city, great exchange rate for cheap food and crazy cheap awesome beer, a hip mix of eastern European culture and western European modernity, and of course cake architecture. No other city will ever be as much fun to walk through as Prague. The architecture rocks, it has tons of these big elegant Victorian buildings that look like cakes, and with different colors and decorations we kept exclaiming at how it felt like we were in cake world. The one bad part: we got scammed on the subway. We didn’t validate our tickets and got off and these guys pulled us aside, asked for passports, and made us pay a fine. Looking back, it was definitely a scam, but we were not in a position to argue at the time. There were so many parks within the city and we spent tons of time just exploring them and hanging out, another reason Prague was just a great place. I really cant describe its feel, but here goes an analogy – Prague knows it is the place to be in Eastern Europe, but it also knows that it is still not Western Europe, and it accepts and flourishes in that role.

Next was Budapest, and talk about a random three-day visit to a city. After arriving so much later than expected because of the train delay, we met up with Feri our couch surfing host and he gave us a tour of the Buda side of the river and some interesting things to see there. He was having a house party at night for his roommate’s birthday, so we spent hours and hours drinking Hungarian drinks and chatting with everyone and getting way too hammered because they just kept giving the interesting foreigners free booze. The next day, we went to check out a set of natural caves in the Buda hills, an adventure that turned into an afternoon long excursion. It was far out of the city and hard to find with public transit, but after about four hours combined travel time there and back, the caves were totally worth it. We came back into the city and went to the Pest side of the river, checked out some sights, bought ballet tickets for the next day, walked around a park, and finished off the day with one of the best meals I’ve ever had: a falafel pita.

The ballet the next morning was insanely good. First time I’ve ever seen a ballet and now I totally need to see more. Once again, it was pretty cheap, and by far worth so much more than what we paid. We walked around the local flea market afterwards for a while, and then had to go get bus tickets to Vienna which turned into another classic three-hour adventure because of bad public transit. Afterwards, we came back to the Pest area and went to a bar to get Absinth because Ali and I had never had it. I loved it, and it was prepared in the classic way, which is by melting sugar into it and pouring water over it all to stir. After chatting there for three hours, we met up with Feri, got another falafel pita, and called it our last day in Budapest. Budapest was an interesting place because the city itself was not overly stimulating in the fact that it appeared very much like a normal city, but there was more to do there than any other city I’ve been to. It had amazing museums, baths, and music scene but we didn’t even get to touch that.

The next morning we headed out to Vienna and met our couch surfers. We stayed with a group of six female students and it rocked. They had this totally awesome homely lifestyle – they cooked and ate together and had an awesome atmosphere in their flat. They invited us to eat with them and they cooked amazing food. They lent us their bikes that first day to get around the city better which was amazing, no better way to tour a city. It was a beautiful day and we were cruising around Vienna, stopping in parks to climb trees, locking up the bikes when there was an interesting area to check out. That ended when we got caught in a hailstorm and were stranded in a gelato shop for two hours because we didn’t have umbrellas before we decided to make a run for it. We got absolutely soaked on the ride home which strongly motivated us to eat, change into warm clothes, and call it a night. The next day we headed out on the town to get them a gift, go to a hookah bar, and go to the opera! The opera was absolutely fantastic, and a great way to close out the trip.

Vienna was a gorgeous place, but the total opposite of Budapest. The city itself was fascinating with its layout and it was incredibly gorgeous, but there wasn’t much to do. It definitely was a place to relax and hang out, which we let ourselves do. Plus, we were back on the Euro for the first time, and we were all running out of money, so our options were cut. It was a really nice way to end the trip though, with some great couch surfers and in a gorgeous place. We ate wiener schnitzel, which apparently is just a phrase referring to how the meat is prepared, which is flattened, breaded, and fried, but it rocked. Vienna was covered in parks and beautiful little areas, but it was also more of a swanky, expensive, upscale city.

The next day found me flying back to Rome through Bratislava, and hanging out with my couch surfer and his other guests at night. I was psyched for the next day because I had time to do things in Rome that I had been wanting to do one last time – check out the Avantine hill, eat Old Bridge gelato, spend a ton of time in St Peter’s square and basilica, get apertivo with a huge group of Roman couch surfers, and go to a Beatles cover band at Big Mama. Then things started to get interesting after the concert because I lacked a place to sleep, so I wandered the streets till 6 AM. I took some awesome night photos as I literally walked around the entire city and ended up back in Monte Mario near our school in a nature observatory falling sleep and watching the sunrise over the city. That day, I did something I’ve been looking forward to for a while…one last picnic in Villa Borghese. I splurged and got a lot of supplies at the market, went to the park and found my perfect spot, and caught up on sleep and finished my book while eating bread, cheeses, salami, strawberries, olives, and wine. After the day there, I went to JFRC and repacked my bags, went to the airport for the night, and here I am now on a plane to London on the first leg of my trip back home.

We perused through Poland, played in Prague, bopped in Budapest, and viener-schnitzeled in Vienna. We saw a drama in Prague, ballet in Budapest, and opera in Vienna. We ate perogis, kielbasa, and schnitzel; we drank Czech beers and Hungarian pilanka. I had my European backpacking adventure that everyone talks about and hopes they get to do at some point in their lives. I learned how I need to travel: I cant treat it like a mission, I need to treat it like vacation, because I’m too relaxed to try and force things in just because a book tells me its important. I prefer to see the nuances and the people of an area than all the famous sights, and traveling with no plans lends itself to so many more random stories.

This was a trip that I was not overly excited for coming in. It was hard to plan, I was looking forward to going home, and I was running out of money. It turned out to be the most spectacular way to end my adventure abroad and start my summer, and since it was so relaxing and so much fun and hanging out it became the perfect transition between the two. I’m ecstatic at how it turned out, how much fun it was, and all the stories I’ll have from such an adventure.

I know this was a pretty straightforward depiction of what happened, but it was too much information to remember a lot of the little oddities and insights. Either way, hope it was a good recap of my European backpacking adventure ☺

Zach

PS – was anyone else around when airplane food got awesome? It may be just me, but the meals I’ve had on a plane this semester were fantastic…

Perogis in Krakow

Cake architecture in Prague

Grabbing a beer before the theatre in Prague

Sun setting over Budapest

First Absinth - awesome!

Soaked after biking through Vienna

Why are the words so long?!

One Last Foreign Post!

Headed to the airport soon for the night, then start the travel marathon at 8 AM tomorrow morning, arriving into Syracuse at night. See all soon!

Tons and tons of love and excitement at the idea of coming home -

Zach

Checkin' in from Prague!

Hey All!

Travels are well. Prague is amazing, might be my favorite place ever. Last day here tomorrow before an overnight train to Budapest. Everything is going smoothly now and its been an awesome trip up to this point :-)

Check in when I can ---

Zach

PS - Welcome baby Avery Jordan D'Arienzo to the family! Excited to meet you!

Is it this difficult for anyone else?

Why do I suck at traveling? I'm gonna take it as a sign that its not meant to be, and therefore not attempt it ever again. Does the mood of this post look familiar. Because.....it should! Remember the last big trip I went on and started it off on a terrible note, spring break? There, I boarded the train in the wrong direction and missed my flight. In this strikingly similar and stupid case, I booked my flight for 6 AM instead of 6 PM, an error completely unaware to me until I was kicked off the 6 PM flight.

So here I am, stuck in London Stansted airport. My friends are in Krakow. Paying out of my butt in British pounds to use a computer to book a flight and print off a boarding pass. There is one gleam of silver in here - I'll get into Krakow at 9:30 in the morning and should be able to meet up with my friends and not miss any of what we had planned. But would I normally pay multiples of hundreds of dollars for such a small gleam of silver? Not at all.

I understand its money, and I should be thankful ultimately that I'm in a situation where I can screw things up like this and just book another flight even if it messes some things up, but hey, at least it was a possibility. I understand there are alot of other things to worry about and much worse situations to be in, but I'm just sick of this. What am I doing wrong? I thought I prepared well for travel, but I refuse to come back to the states and call myself an experienced traveler, because with the amount of costly mistakes I've made I'm anything but.

I don't want to bitch and moan, so I'll log off. I'll be hanging in the airport for the night and grabbing the flight to Krakow at 6 in the morning. It'll be a fun trip and I'm excited that I wont miss much. I miss my family right now though, I miss the comfort of home and being settled. I'll be right back in London in exactly two weeks laying over waiting to fly back to the USA. I'll go off and make some good stories in that period of time to make my next post, one of my lasts posts, a joyous post full of adventure (the kind of adventure that Hobbits hate).

Peace, Zach

PS - Damn those exchange rates! 140 pounds turns into like 220 dollars

Concluding JFRC, starting summer, and vagabond backpacking

Schools out for summer :-D. I didnt even think about the fact that it was summer until somebody else told me, since I'm still over here I just grouped it together with this semester. But can you kick off a summer in a better way than a couple weeks of backpacking through Europe with friends? That sounds too ideal, the type of thing your older sibling did when you were younger and you always dreamed of doing if you could somehow finagle it. Well, I guess its not too ideal, cause its happening!

School is done, people are slowly leaving, and the mass of people leaves early tomorrow morning. Tonight is one last night for everyone to spend some time in the city they've called home and has come to very much feel that way. I'm going to a jazz bar with some friends, probably splitting a bottle of wine at the Trevi Fountain afterwards, and maybe hitting up the 24-hour bakery before heading home. Leaving Rome hasnt hit me yet because I'll be back for a few days.

What has hit me is leaving my friends, but it didnt hit me hard till last night. I've made absolutely amazing connections with friends here, and I know those are connections that will last. But I'll miss the people I wont stay connected with, and I'll miss the atmosphere of being able to hang out with anyone at any time even if you've never spoken before. I'll miss the intellectual talks, the talks about God and the human race, the open-mindedness that almost every person here lives by. Sure, it was a little like high school, and it was cliquey, but I'll deal with that for the fabulous community that was formed. And the use of that word isnt cliche; JFRC did become a community, you could have inside jokes about teachers, you always drunkenly stumbled upon a fellow student on the night bus back up the mountain to the campus and recapped your evenings together, everybody together watched the school play/poetry class performance/voice class performance/film class presentations/sculpture class presentations. It may sound corny and unnecessary, but it added alot to this experience, and gave all of us a much different feel for study abroad than most people got.

But anyway - HERE I COME FRANCE AND EASTERN EUROPE. I'm excited to hang out with our couch surfers, meet up with other ones who couldnt host because they have other surfers but invited us to party, travel in places where the Euro isnt destroying my wallet, and travel for the longest period of my life. I'm excited that I get to end it on my own for about 3 days. I need the time to reflect and get closure in my head, and I need those last couple days in Rome to say goodbye.

The mood now though is joyful, its not sad. Tomorrow will be tough to say goodbye to friends, but I'll be excited to head out on my own adventure. And summer is underway, and I can start to daydream about what awaits me at home. Life is good, just like it has been for the last three and a half months, and its a life that I dont want to let go of. While packing up, I came across pictures and cards I brought that family gave me before I came and I had the biggest deja-vu of my life. I read of them telling me to take in this experience of a lifetime and that they were excited to hear the stories when I got home. I looked at the pictures I brought and remembered packing them so I wouldnt feel so isolated. I remembered all those things like it was January. And now I've made those stories to share with others, I'm almost headed back home, this experience that I was told would be life-changing is almost over. And the most amazing thing about it is what it does to you. I feel so comfortable in this new skin I have and the person I've become as a result of study abroad, a change that is impossible to articulate but is totally priceless.

I'll close with a quote that they use here alot at JFRC - "Not all who wander are lost." I wandered, and I found myself, I found this beautiful life. Goodbye friends and my lovely Roman home. I'll see you when I see you, and I can promise no more, so please know that the memories I have and the feelings I've felt are more valuable to me than any picture or souvenir I could take away.

I'll check back in when I return to Rome on May 12. Wishing everyone health, happiness, and safety (wishing myself the same thing), see you in a couple weeks!

Zach

Random Thoughts

- These are the kids I tutor, coolest kids ever.

- Impressionism just adds happiness to the world. Its just massively idealized drawings of nature, and in the best way possible. Awesome traveling impressionist art exhibit that I visited, seen below was my favorite painting.

- I always thought that the Beatles Anthology collection was a greatest hits disc series, like a final collection of their favorites. Little did I know that its a crazy collection of new songs, variant recordings, obscure versions of old favorites, mess-ups, interviews, and demos of songs. I got it from a friend, and it is completely life-changing.

- So, what about the Bills draft? I see what was going on with the Spiller pick, that the best way to hide a bad line is with a player that can create on his own. But fancy players like that arent for the Buffalo Bills' of the league, and I dont know when they'll realize that. Ultimately, I'm buying into whatever this Nix/Gailey combo is going for, so I'll tough it out through this upcoming 3-13 season, and I'm hoping Ralph will to, because I think their goals are long-sighted but I think it will work.

- I leave on Thursday for my long trip, and its pretty much official now, so I'll fill you guys in....

April 29 - Fly to Nice and meet up with the friends I'll be traveling with. Explore the French Riviera while they finish up school
April 30 - Hang around Nice/Antibes/Riviera
May 1 - Fly to Krakow
May 2 - Day trip to Auschwitz, back to Krakow
May 3 - Explore Krakow
May 4 - Train to Prague
May 5 - Prague
May 6 - Prague
May 7 - Train to Budapest
May 8 - Budapest
May 9 - Budapest
May 10 - Train to Vienna
May 11 - Vienna
May 12 - Leave Vienna and train to Bratislava, explore the city for a while, fly from Bratislava to Rome at night
May 13 - One last full day in Rome on my own, finish out some things I want to do
May 14 - Last day in Rome, get to airport at night to sleep
May 15 - Fly out in the morning, transfer in Heathrow, transfer in Chicago, finish in Syracuse

I'll update one more time before I head out on this trip! Winding down finals right now and getting ready to head out. I'm so happy I have that last couple days in Rome to reflect on it all and spend some time in the city I've grown to love so so much. Its been a hectic week of studying and paper writing, trip planning, final Rome adventuring, and immune system failing.

Can you get much more bittersweet than having to say goodbye to this majestic city that fascinates me and stimulates my senses to the extreme and will forever remind of an almost dream like period of my life, but at the same time being able to say hello to family and friends that I'm closest with combined with totally idealized thoughts of one last childhood summer back home?

Goodbye for now :-)

Anyone been feeling lucky lately?

These are the steps that led up to Pontious (spelling?) Pilate's house (throne? palace? courtroom?) that Jesus walked up to receive his judgement before Pilate ordered him to be crucified. They were relocated from Jerusalem to Rome thousands of years ago and now they are a huge holy spot in the city. Everybody walks up them on their knees and prays as they go, and you arent even allowed to walk up them on your feet if you wanted to. So parents, brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends - all of you got a personal prayer, a different step for each person. Hope its been working out well for you!

Tuscany - My future retirement abode

Normally, written details of the accounts that I want to share with you are followed up by some of my favorite pictures. I'm going to invert that a little today, lead off with one picture so that you can maybe get in the mood I was in all weekend. Therefore, youll be able to read about my adventures through Tuscany while your mind can be daydreaming about it, sort of this ipso-facto virtual reality.

Now I'm not saying that rainbows over the olive groves of Tuscany at sunset are something that happens everyday, but the magic of it all is that it was there to greet me when I was there. This place is astonishing. Its incomprehensible unless you can exist in it for a few days and then hopefully a few weeks after that point. I got the cliche "bite from the travel bug" - I need to go back there, I need to visit with my family, I need to have pleasures in my life as simple and as delicate as absolutely everything is treated in Tuscany.

I was a little (very) skeptical of this trip going in. It was through the school, it was 350 Euro for a weekend, it was with a group of students which can get invasive. The price was so high because we stay in high class places and eat high class food, two things I normally dont pay for and dont feel necessary. Regardless, I signed up for it in the beginning of the year not realizing how expensive it was - and giddyup am I happy I did. I couldnt have visited Tuscany on a budget and gotten the same experience. Staying where we did, eating and drinking what we did was what made me have an epiphany about the region and about Italy and thus be able to feel so much more connected to this country that I just lived in for four months. It was the most perfect way to wind down the semester, relax before finals and lengthy travel, and sum everything up culturally and mentally in my head.

Alot of these stories I would prefer to tell in person so I'm not going to go into too much detail. We stayed at a family owned resort with villas on their own olive farm up in the mountains with views over everything. There was room to stroll through the groves, lounge in chairs overlooking the hillsides, take in the absolute quietness, take pictures of the old red-brown Italian villas. We did a wine tasting on Friday and a meat sampling of a variety of cuts that this man manufactures from the pigs he raises on his own farm that we visited. We napped in our villa suite and woke up to the best meal I've had abroad and more wine that I could possibly drink. We shut down the night with hours of chatting and more wine, and woke up and pressed repeat.

Saturday we visited a nearby little town - toured the market, got a tour of the Etruscan history around the town, had an overwhelming lunch, bought some totally authentic balsamic vinegar and olive oil. We returned back to the villa resort and had cooking lessons with the professional chef that prepared all the food. I'm now an expert (would anyone really believe that?) at making homemade pasta and gnocchi and focaccia. I had a grape tomato that changed my life and permanently morphed my palate into a snob-machine that cannot settle for anything that tasted less amazing than that single grape tomato. With some time to kill before eating the food we made for dinner, I gazed out into this rainbow for a while, and snapped back into it with another meal of more food and wine than I could handle. Once again we closed out the night with hours of chatting by the fire with some wine.

Sunday we did an olive oil tasting, I found my favorite spot where I proceeded to kick back and put my feet up with a box of wine and my iPod and the sun raining down. I got chatting with this Brazilian man and Italian woman couple and they invited me back to their villa where they offered more wine and a delicious array of nuts and cheeses. We talked about traveling, pharmaceuticals, life, emotions, school, and a pretty amazing array of things that a 19 year old American kid and 50 year old foreign couple can relate on. Closed out the weekend with an epic lunch and, again, more wine than you could imagine.

In every single thing I said there I wanted to describe it - exactly what we ate and why it was so good, what I learned about different wines and how I know how to taste them, the absurd differences between olive produced on this family's farm and supermarket olive oil, little anecdotes into the reasons I love Tuscany. But it will all be so much better as the stories slowly come out in person. Its too hard to describe how the son of the owner of this high-class resort built a fire for four hours so that it could burn down to perfect coals for him to toast us bread on to eat at our olive oil tasting. Four hours to toast bread?!

Everything about this place grabbed your emotions and your sentimentality and caressed it to a point that you would imagine could not be possible. Its just that people throw around these phrases of a slower life, of a more delicate and appreciative life, of people welcoming you to their home and going too far out of their way to be nice, of a world run by so much less logistics than the one that we are used to. And when things like that get thrown around, it can take away from the purity of it. But in reality, nothing about those phrases are cliche. They perfectly describe the life I just experienced in Tuscany. I really cant imagine a better place in the world to go to take a break from life - every single aspect of it is meant to be pleasurable, almost as if no negative things or energies are allowed to enter into the area, and thus only engulfing amounts of positive feelings enter your body, clean your soul of all its toxins, and leave you in almost a dream state.

Rereading that, I'm pretty satisfied with how that was articulated. I'm excited to come home and share my olive oil with you all and explain how its to be tasted and all the intricate aspects of its production. Once you get to this point, a few themes may have hit you about my weekend - wine, food, and happiness. And thats what it was, thats what Tuscany is, and thats what I know it will be when I return at some point later in my life.

Wishing everyone the same good fortune and totally cleansed spirit as I'm feeling right now -

Zach, ZLoo, Zach-man, Snack-man, Little bud, Poopskeyuns, Beezins, Lovebug, Sonny boy

So this is what Jason Bourne feels like...

Quick little story. I was walking around downtown the other day - which is so cramped now with tourists that its literally not even worth it to try and do anything - and as I'm aimlessly squandering through the streets I made eye contact with this man. Nothing out of the ordinary, but his face registered in my mind and I moved on. Then I proceeded to wander through more streets, and mind you I was totally lost so the route I was taking was the farthest from logical. Then I notice this guy behind me again as I approach a fork in the road; I choose one, walk down a few paces, rethink it, and choose the other. Greasy sunglass wearing man agrees with my first choice, kills time by looking at his phone when I change, and keeps it going by choosing the other fork after I do.

So he is keeping his distance, but it felt like he was trying not to be noticed and therefore he was being noticed. I let it be for a while but tried to be aware. Without going into too much detail, after wandering through more neighborhoods and after losing track of him a couple times, he kept popping up. He was always in front of me or behind me, everywhere I went, but I went into a store to shop and he went to, what I thought was, board the tram. There we go - odd interaction, but it was over with.

NOT SO FAST. After spending time in the store and walking another five minutes to a random bus stop, CREEPY MAN APPEARS OVER MY SHOULDER. He stands there for a while, then walks away out of sight, then comes back to the stop and resumes waiting for the bus. At this time, I'm totally freaking out. I dont think I would analyze this on this level unless it was really this scary, so please know I'm not exaggerating.

My mind started running wild. Was this guy tracking me? Did I do something wrong? Was he going to follow me back home? Was he just a crazy guy who was going to kill me cause I looked at him bad in the street? Was I going to be a classic case of traveling far away from home and dying without saying goodbye to my family?

I took my iPod off and tried to think about it logically, but none of it made sense, and it had this totally eerie feeling that exactly what I thought could be happening, that I was being followed for some vendetta reason, was actually happening. He ended up boarding another bus, but I knew where it ran. So I got on mine, and I was waiting for the stop where the two bus routes overlapped. Here it was: if he was at this stop, I'm a dead man, if not, well I needed to change my pants at that point anyway. Greasy curly haired middle aged Italian man with dark sunglasses wasnt there...I would live.

It may seem like a totally pointless story, but it isnt. It may sound totally irrational, but whether it does or not, I had to face 100% genuine feelings of such a scenario. I had to run through scenarios in my head of how to out smart this guy and how to lose his trail. I had to think of weapons I could grab if I was attacked. I had to ponder the fact that I could possibly die. Up to this point in my life, I've never honestly been faced with a situation that forced me to think of my own death, thats why its so interesting. I had to make myself reason through the idea that I could die on that day and be tortured or something and go through excruciating pain and nobody may know how I died.

Totally random story, but I think its so interesting that whether irrational or not I realistically contemplated my chance of death in that situation. Kind of like a good movie or something - it makes you feel things that arent true, but that doesnt mean the feelings arent as pure as the feelings would be in the actual situation.

Either way, I'm alive! And I now can connect with Jason Bourne on a new level.

Curse that creepy man...

Pictures from the last couple weekends

I never put up Cinque Terre pictures! They're on Picasa now, but I'll show you some of my favorites. The WWII pictures are on there as well, but I suppose I should explain what those are first!

So this weekend I went on the school organized World War II trip. It was one of the trips we could sign up for in the beginning of the year, and it was pretty cheap because it was subsidized by the professor that runs it because he loves it so much. So for 30 Euro we did awesome stuff on Friday and Saturday. Friday, we went out to the country a little to this museum called Piana Delle Orme where a farmer would collect the old war artifacts he would find in the countryside fields the years after the war. Well, the collection got massive, and so it became an awesome museum. It was just like rows of warehouses with the collections organized into eras and battles. There were recreations of what it looked like animated with sight and sound and such. It reminded me of when I used to love the Oregon Trail period and the covered wagons. My mom and I visited a bunch of museums in Arizona and other places that recreated these scenes and I loved it. It was kind of cheesy like that, but that in no way was a bad thing. All the tanks and guns and stuff was real, but they would like make people figures and paint the scenes on the wall and add in nature things to complement the diorama. It was really interesting, and the artifacts were really cool, and I learned a ton about the goings on of WWII in Italy. There were also a few of these warehouses filled with non-war things: farming equipment from the time, kids toys from the time. Walking into the toy exhibit was just an explosion of happiness, sans the creepy Italian fascist toys.

Afterwards we went to an American cemetery. Theres 15 American cemeteries outside the country, and it was a pretty cool spot to visit. Very well kept up, very interesting shrines, and very respectful atmosphere. It was nice to wander around there for a little while after learning just how the Americans were used within Italy during the war and knowing the reasons they died, tactical and sentimental.

Last on Friday, we visited Anzio Port, where the Americans landed when coming into Italy. It was totally destroyed back then, so now its modern and built up just like any other port, but I got to hang on the rocks for a while and catch a quick snooze. We finished there and went to dinner at a fantastic wine bar - cous-cous (the food so nice they named it twice) with veggies, potato and arthichoke ravioli with lamb on top (first time I had lamb, great), roast beef with wild arugula and balsamic (why is lettuce so popular? It has no flavor compared to the pretty exotic arugula flavor which is awesome), and dense chocolate cake.

On Saturday, we started at Fosse Ardeatine. Here, 335 Jews were massacred. They were led into a cave and shot one by one as the pile kept building up. Later, it was discovered with the help of some witnesses, and the man who led it was brought to trial because he only had permission to kill 320. At the memorial, you can see the cave as it used to exist and all the graves they made for the people, some young as 14. I really enjoy (wrong word) WWII Jewish history, maybe because its so repulsive and hard to believe. But it was odd to see the graves of over 300 innocent people, I cant imagine what its going to be like when I visit Auschwitz in May.

Next we visited the Museum of the Liberation that had old artifacts and stuff from the war dating to the time when the Germans were forced out. And after that we visited the road where Italian teenagers formed a surprise attack on the marching German fleet. 32 German soldiers died, and it was ordered that 10 Italians would be killed for every soldier. Fosse Ardeatine was the response to this attack, thats where that number came from, so the extra 15 were just random killings for no reason. Not that it was justified in the first place, but it went beyond following orders, thats why he was convicted in court. The buildings around the area of the attack still had shrapnel and bullet holes.

Our tour guides were awesome, two professors flown in from America that lead this trip every year. They helped alot with laying out for us what it would have looked like at that time. Like on the road of the sneak attack, it was just a normal road but it was easy to imagine how it was all planned out and how it happened after they ran through it all in detail. Afterwards we had lunch at a spot that has 100 different sauce combinations for their spaghetti. Imagine me trying to decide between all those. I did not have nearly enough time to deliberate and thus had to choose without being at all certain, and I ended up with artichokes in a creamy tomato sauce over spaghetti. It was awesome. In addition to the wine and appetizers we got, it was another great meal. However, I would have liked to systematically write down my top 20 choices and then slowly wittle down the list by imagining myself eating each kind to ensure I got the best choice.....

The trip in whole was fantastic, especially for how cheap it was. The two meals itself were worth that much, plus bus transportation everywhere, plus tour guides, and entrance fees everywhere. Learned alot of interesting things - it was a nice little thing to do on one of the last weekends here.

On Sunday, I went to a Roma futbol game. IT WAS WILD! It wasnt a big game at all so it was easy to get tickets but it ended being sold out anyway. The fans are as crazy as I expected and more. Firstly, its European soccer which is like our football times ten. Secondly, its crazy Italians. It was singing songs, overreacting to calls, and joyous celebration when a goal was scored all game long. It was one of the coolest things I've ever done. They have one more home game while we are here, but its Roma vs. Lazio (Lazio is to Italy what a state is to the US, so like Buffalo vs New York). Only Italian citizens are allowed to buy tickets because it can get so dangerous at the stadium. Isnt that crazy?!! Still gonna see if I can get a ticket somehow, but either way I'm really happy I was able to see a game.

So once again, you're all up to date on whats been going on over here. I'm happy I've had a few down weekends recently and until I leave for the end of the semester trip. Traveling got a little old for me. And I realize thats why I was feeling in a little bit of a funk lately and not on that high anymore. Its obviously so much fun, but the last thing it is is relaxing. After trying to plan endless weekend trips on an extremely tight budget and all weekends hoping to make it through under that budget, it gets pretty stressful and exhausting. Its nice to just hang out around here, take day trips places, enjoy life and exist in Rome. I'm happy that I feel centered again and will be rested up for the end. I'm going to Tuscany this weekend, another school trip. Its all weekend but its 100% planned and paid for and it'll be extremely relaxing in the Tuscan hillsides. I'll update on that trip next week! Wine, olive oil, and goat cheese all weekend long....

Hope everyone is getting excited for summer! And I'll close out with some pictures...

One of my absolute favorites - Eating a fresh bread/salami/pecorino sandwich while watching the sunset over the Mediterranean from a terrace in Cinque Terre

The second of five towns - theyre really just small towns laid out on the coast that you hike between

Fast motorcyceeee for Alex in the toy museum at Piana Delle Orme

The American cemetery, about 1/8 of it

The best 60 minute Beatles playlist you'll ever hear

So I made this earlier in the semester. Its not a collection of their greatest hits and its not a collection of my favorite songs. Its a collection that needs to be listened to in order from top to bottom. I dont know how I constructed it, but there was thought behind it, and it came together perfectly, I love listening to it. Whether you are a massive fan or not one at all, please compile this playlist and then the Beatles will click for you. And even if you dont, I wanted to blog about it anyway, because I'm pretty psyched about how this playlist came out and perfectly sums up the wide-ranges of the Beatles:

1 - Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey
2 - It's All Too Much
3 - I'm Looking Through You
4 - Good Day Sunshine
5 - One After 909
6 - I'm So Tired
7 - I Need You
8 - We Can Work It Out
9 - Run For Your Life
10 - Dear Prudence
11 - Her Majesty
12 - Fool on the Hill
13 - For You Blue
14 - I Want to Tell You
15 - Strawberry Fields Forever
16 - Girl
17 - Getting Better
18 - Don't Pass Me By
19 - Across the Universe
20 - Tomorrow Never Knows
21 - Revolution 1
22 - Come Together

There it is, the best 60 minutes of Beatles you can listen to. Give it a try....

Someone told me theres a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair

I always debate what to name my blog posts. Since they are so few and far between now, which I feel terrible about, the debates aren’t as frequent, but hey they’re brain-racking. I feel like there are a few alleys I generally head towards – lyrics from the song I’m listening to, a quote that has been stuck in my head, a quick word preview, or a random summation of the blog post to follow. Here, it happens to be from the song I’m listening to. I’m actually in the process of slowly compiling my annual summer playlist – you know, that one that you instinctively reach for in the car when you cant really decide what you wanna jam to and then it always turns out to be a wonderful choice. Dad for you these days its probably crude humor Sirius channels, Mom for you it’s the same as it was 35 years ago, Butterfly Kisses, Britt for you its, and everyone knows this one, Mike “No Diggity” Doughty, Alicia it’s the siblings weekend mixes you always plan to create that never happen, Damon its “mmmmmmmmmmmmmm what-ya-say”, and I cant really get a read for anyone else on this one. I’ll move on…

I’m typing this in my room where I don’t have internet so I cant remember where I left off with my last post. The logical idea would be to walk a few steps down the hall where I get wifi and log on real quick and check, but I couldn’t down the glass(es) of wine like I’m currently doing out there. Following a lengthy conversation with my dad the other day, I’ve been trying to ease myself into a somewhat vegetarian/vegan diet to prepare for the summer which appears to have forecasted such a menu. And while we’re on the topic of food, I’ll tell you what I want right now – a gallon of ice cold skim milk, four pounds of mundel bread, and Wegmans, anything made by/endorsed by/sold by/touched by Wegmans. I hate to reiterate, but I am totally ready to come home. I’m not down about it, but I’m not on that high that I was all semester. I don’t think I’m complaining, I’m just living differently than I was during the rest of this experience. I was trying to take in and get the most out of every second of it all, and it got kind of exhausting. I’m ready to relax, live life simply. Trips are getting stressful to plan and I hate having to worry about a budget every single day. I’m ready for summer life to start, I’m ready to interact with my family and friends again when I feel like I’ve changed so much.

I don’t have too much to update on right now. It was a normal week. I got out and did some stuff that was fun, and this weekend I went to Cinque Terre with my buddy Chris. Its five little towns on the northern Italian coastline that lie on the rocky beaches of the area and are connected by like a 5 hour hike. So you can hike between the towns and stop in each town and explore. I’ve been dying to do it since I knew I was coming to Italy, and it was pretty wild. There was the main trail, but we surely diverged off it, grappled down along the rocks on the coast, took high roads to other inland towns, found random burial sights in the backwoods. The second night, we didn’t have a place to stay so we slept outside. We were scoping out the best spot the first two days while we were hiking and we knew when we found it – a closed off trail that led to an island ditched out in the water. We waited for night cover and everyone to leave, hopped the fence into the trail, and set up shop. We laid down garbage bags, put on every single piece of clothing we had, and wrapped ourselves in another garbage bag for “warmth.” Then we proceeded to drug ourselves with allergy pills to try and knock ourselves out.

I was very surprised at how well it went, but I mean that in the most relative terms. I was expecting to sleep terribly, but I’d say I in-and-out got a total of four hours. It was absolutely freezing, but just as a flower grows toward the sun, we subconsciously had rolled towards each other in the night to conserve warmth. It was a totally new experience and something that I know how to approach now. We saved about 30 Euro with the choice, and it made the weekend so much more epic. I don’t have tons of pictures from the weekend, which shouldn’t have happened because it was so picturesque, but it got annoying to carry my camera as I was hiking, but I think I captured some good things.

This weekend also just clarified for me that I cant exist in the cold. I totally shut down, go into self-preservation mode, and can only think about all the possibly ways to keep myself warm. I don’t talk, I don’t care about anything but warmth, I don’t make decisions, and I cannot feel extensively happy. As soon as we got hiking and warm again, I was right back with it, but its like I think by shutting down completely I can Zen my mind into keeping myself warmer.

I crossed three things off my list though of things to eat while in Italy – bologna, pesto, and gnocchi. The bologna here is amazing, mostly because its not treated is that crap of all meats (Hot dogs! You know what those things are made of? Lips and assholes!). Pesto is something I’ll probably never order again. I’ll eat it again, but never go out of my way to choose it over any other Italian dish. Its great, but its very rich, and I only need a few tastes of it and I’m good. The gnocchi (not gnoncchi) was phenomenal, basically melt in your mouth softness (like fresh out of the oven Mundel bread…).

When we woke up on the island on Sunday it was weird to realize that it was Easter. I was kind of sad of the fact that I didn’t even remember and I wasn’t so bummed out about not being home that it hadn’t even crossed my mind. We went to mass in a nice little local church and it was really enjoyable, but I just daydreamed about family the entire time. I was looking forward to coming home and Skyping with everyone, just to learn that the party was already disbanded! I hope everyones Easter was wonderful though, and that the time spent with family was celebrated and cherished.

So theres the weekly post. This weekend I’m in town but going on an organized World War II excursion. Its all day Friday and most of the day Saturday and they take us to several different WWII things (monuments, exhibits, historical areas) dealing with the time period, which I’m pretty psyched for because it’s a part of history that never ceases to intrigue me. Sunday I’m going to a Roma soccer game, my first European futbol experience!!

In addition to the summer playlist, the Summer List 2010 word document has been created – all signs of where my head is at. I think I’m stressing a little about my end of the semester trip because its tough to plan and hard to guess if I’ll stay within my budget, but I’m trying to not let that bother me too much. Nostalgia is so bittersweet…

Love everyone to death that’s still reading this, it means so much to know that you’re interested in whats going on with me. Hope the writing is still entertaining and I’ve shared some good stories.

Zach

The Adventures of The End of March - old friends in new places, corn nuts, and an insight into the Jewish religion

Hey everybody! I'll accept criticism for the distance between blog updates, but I'll respond with, not equal, but slightly less force when saying I dont know if anybody is reading if I dont get any comments. How do you feel about that? Valid? Not valid? I'm gonna run with it.

I got an entire week to update on now. I left everyone last Sunday after an entertaining, mojo-revigorating weekend hanging around Rome. I pick up now, Tuesday morning trudging through another 9-5 workday in the library (its actually only 9-1, and I can sit on my computer the entire time), with March passing by, April saying hello, spring looking delicious, and summer 2010 teasingly close. Life is good, and I find myself wondering constantly if I'm actually living real life. I feel like life can almost never be this good again, and I mean that in a positive way not in a my-life-sucks kind of way. I'm living in Rome, I basically don't have school, I have two of the easiest jobs ever and am making money, I can travel around Europe every weekend, I allow myself to spend all my money without feeling guilty, I can stay up late and sleep in, the weather is already high 60s, and I feel as liberated as ever. Once school and even summer work starts up again, there will be nowhere near as much time to just relax and life will be much more hectic. Part of me is ready for that, I'm having a hard time sitting around alot and just enjoying it; I keep trying to find things to do to fill my time, but then I realize I have a month left of the easiest livin' ever and I should just exist in it.

Theres less than a month left of school, and I dont enjoy thinking about this experience ending, but for the first time I feel like I'm ready to come home. I've started thinking about family and friends more and the summer life, and maybe thats just what I'm idealizing, but either way I was not thinking about it often until now (maybe cause mom and dad answer my phone calls once a month). I've finally started booking my end of the semester trip - I'll be spending a couple days in the French Riviera with my friends studying there until they finish exams and we can fly out. Then we are probably going to try and hit Prague and Budapest and hopefully Krakow/Auschwitz or Bratislava, and then hike through the Alps into Italy and camp for 4 days. I'm happy I'm ending it on a big long trip, for several reasons. One, its going to be good closure, I wouldnt be able to just pack my bag and get on the plane after my exams and feel fulfilled. Two, after living without a central home for two weeks I'll be dying to settle down and I'll be craving the comfort of loved ones badly. Three, did you see that itinerary, its going to be amazing.

So I was in Rome again this weekend but I'll run through some of the details of the week that led up to it. I went to one of the big local markets for the first time. Markets are one of the most visually pleasing experiences, with fresh fruits/veggies/meats/cheeses/breads/dried goods lining vendors by the row. There were wine vendors with homemade wine in massive jugs and you gave them your own container and they filled it. I went in search of dried corn kernels (Damon, aka corn nuts) because I felt like destroying my jaw and having something to snack on at school. Magically, I found them in a little crevice, and with some salt on those babies, man they're the best snack ever. And if you dont wanna listen to someone? Just eat corn nuts, loudest/crunchiest food ever.

I was supposed to see a Doors cover band at Big Mama, that blues club I keep referring to, but I digressed and stayed in to prep my fantasy baseball draft, still regretting that a little bit (Beez I know youll lay into me for this one). I did see a band that did a Beatles vs. Rolling Stones night on Friday and they were incredible, by far the tightest sounding cover band I've ever heard, it was a totally jamming show. My friend Alli from home, studying in France, was visiting Rome with her boyfriend and we met up Wednesday night downtown and chatted and wandered the city for a few hours. It was really nice to see someone from home and chat for a while and show them some sights. Theres alot of tour groups here, like high school and college and such, because its around spring break time for most people. Also, tourist season in general is officially underway. Its pretty annoying, but I guess I'm a tourist so I cant complain. All the attractions are always packed and you cant even walk and its just not as peaceful anyway, and its so over the top that you cant even hang and people watch.

At dinner on Thursday, the school held a small Seder dinner, the meal kicking off Jewish Passover, but most people that signed up didnt show so some friends and I got to tag along. It was really interesting, considering I knew nothing about the Jewish religion and this specific holiday, and especially because I had just visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem which were continuously mentioned. I found myself being able to buy into the Jewish religion much easier than the Catholic religion. Its much more grounded, more like stories of normal people who worked to change something they didnt like. When you take a step back from the Catholic religion, its pretty fantastical and is kind of alot to fully buy into. Its like Jewish is the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, somewhat down to earth and believable, and then Jonny Depp comes in and the remake (which I love) things go crazy and it is off the wall and that is more like the Catholic religion. It was just so interesting to hear the story of their people, eat their food, and relate to it all now that I had visited their holy lands.

My other friend from home but studying in France, Kristin, was visiting this weekend with one of her friends and it was a great time. Everything we did together was luckily all stuff I hadnt done yet around the city. Friday we explored the Roman Forum, Colosseum, and Palatine Hill. Saturday we went to the market and got a lunch of fresh meat/cheese/bread/wine and went to the Borghese gardens and relaxed and ate our picnic. Sunday we went to mass in St. Peters Square for Palm Sunday and went to the catachombs down the Appian Way. I'll run through each of the events for everyone:

The Colosseum events were literally just a massive party. People would grill, apply makeup, get hammered, fight, pass out, and gamble in the stands where they would hang out all day before and after the events. I knew the Colosseum was made for the poor proliferate by the government so that they wouldnt get into as much trouble on the streets, but I'm always amazed at how advanced the Romans were to be able to cook and such like a modern day tailgate while waiting for the fights. There was a traveling exhibit that had model armor and diagrams of the paths beneath the floor and that was mind-blowing. The fact that they built this amazing ampitheatre to entertain their citizens is one thing, but they were so bad-ass that they went further: lets make a maze beneath the floor, trap doors where people can fall and animals can come up through, lets fill it with water and hold naval battles. Everything they did was above and beyond, apparently they felt in no way limited by the fact that they existed 2000 years ago.

The Borghese gardens are one place I've been dying to get to all semester, and now that I went, I honestly felt sad that I had wasted so much time and not been hanging out there longer. Its just a massive park with tons of different areas - statues, fountains, old Horse racing areas, all different types of trees, the city zoo, a modern art museum, other wild museums. There are food vendors, bike and roller blade vendors, people relaxing everywhere. I kept getting the most fantastic nostalgic thoughts because I so purely felt like I had been there before, and I realized it felt exactly like a combo of all the Irondequoit parks - Charlotte, Seneca Park, Maplewood, Durand. We had that totally authentic Italian lunch while lounging on one of the hills in the sun and just chatted the afternoon away. Talk about getting ready for some summertime.

Mass is not held in St. Peter's every Sunday, I thought it was going to be, so it was a huge deal for Palm Sunday. We got tickets through JFRC and got there early in the morning to get pretty good seats in the upper half. It was about a 3 hour mass, but thats alright because I napped for about half of it - come on, they went through the entire Passion in Italian, I had no idea what was going on. But when it came to hymns and singing I joined in, and its crazy to realize everyone there, thousands of people, are singing the same thing at the same time for the same reason, thats pretty powerful. The square was absolutely packed but they still distributed Communion to everyone, and when he did his procession out, I was about 2 feet from the Pope. A sunny mass outdoors in St. Peter's Square on Palm Sunday - one thing to cross off my bucket list. Afterwards we visited the Roman catachombs. There are a few around the city but we went to this one on suggestion from my art history teacher. To get there, it was fairly far outside the city, we walked down the Appian Way, which was the main road running through ancient Rome. It was really cool, and my friend and I are going back next weekend to explore alot of the area and the side roads off it. Catachombs are underground cemeteries which is where they used to bury the dead, this one held about 500,000 people.

So I'd say you're pretty much caught up. It was a great week and weekend. Relaxing but productive. I crossed alot off my list of things left to do in Rome and now its almost complete with only a few things to do here and there when I get the time. Now that its nice, I'll be making a much larger effort to get out and about. I'll be going to Big Mama multiple nights a week for some great blues music. I'll be heading to Borghese to relax and read my book whenever possible. I'll probably wander through the historic center a couple more times but now with the crowds its not as nice. I want to try and get to a Roma soccer game. The last month is going to fly by with trying to take everything in one final time.

I'm going to Cinque Terre this weekend with my friend Chris. Its an area up on the northern Italian coast where five coastal towns are built right into the rocks and you can hike between the five. The views are going to be awesome, the hiking even better, the little towns intriguing, and the adventure immeasurable. Both of us are way too curious and imaginative, and we said we actually will have to pace ourseleves or else every single trail we see we will have to do it and we'll tire ourselves out. We have a hostel Friday night but not Saturday, so we'll be looking for a place to pass out for the night on the mountain or the beach. I'm liking the sounds of that.

I'll check back in when I get home from that, probably next Monday. I hope everyone has a happy Easter and enjoys it with their families. I'll be there in spirit! Someone (Nickbo or Jon) take down an extra chocolate bunny for me, preferably peanut butter filled, although a Krackel or caramel filled would do the trick as well.

Friends (my names Forest Gump, my friends call me...Forest Gump), family (this is crazy Herb, bringing him in this late...we're a family!), and loved ones that dont fall under either of those categories, I send my love and best wishes for good times. Drink a glass of wine for me!

Zach

PS - Damon and Inna, I hope the shower went great and you guys are getting ready for the arrival of Avery Jordan! Give her a shimmy so she knows I'm saying hello.

Roman Forum

Colosseum

Packed St. Peter's Square

Hanging in the Catacombs

Gettin' the Mojo Back

I found myself on a bad spring break hangover. I was on a life high for over a week filled with massive adventure and all week I just felt rundown and lazy. I didnt do anything all week, I was completely unproductive, and I didnt feel motivated to do anything whatsoever. A rockin' weekend in Rome got rid of that, and some adventuring in Ostia got the adventuring mojo back and kicking.

I remember blogging in the past about this blues club I found called Big Mama. I'd been wanting to go to it for a while now and finally got the chance to on Thursday night when a Beatles cover band was playing. I thought it was free, but turns out we needed to buy a yearly membership when we got there, but it was only 14 Euro. Now though, we have access to all the shows for the rest of the season included in that original price. Theres no extra cover charge and they dont compel you to buy a drink, so its a cheap night out and some awesome live music! The cover band was awesome - didnt play the classic motown hits like I expected, but instead broke it down with some lengthy jam sessions and really worked the crowd with some unexpected songs. We went to another show on Saturday night, a local blues band - drums, lead guitar, bass, three saxophones, keys, trumpet, guy and girl vocals. It was great, totally authentic and my absolute perfect idea of a night out. I wish we'd had these passes all semester, I could have seen so many different shows by now. Its like a basement bar/club with low ceilings and great acoustics. I can do with the drinking age when I come home, but not being able to get into places like this or jazz clubs for some nice nights out is gonna be obnoxious. Some more awesome shows coming up in the next few weeks that I'm psyched for, definitely gonna get the moneys worth from that membership.

On Friday, Chris and I got up early in an official quest to get the mojo back. We went to an old Roman port town outside of the city a little ways that was deserted and is a massive excavation of the ruins, kind of like Pompeii, but with a totally different feel. We wandered the ruins for like 5 hours and got the adventuring spirit back when we broke into the sewer system and stumbled across an underground statue that people probably havent seen in years. Literally, we took the grate off, lowered ourselves in, and put it back on to cover us down there. I was freaking out but it was a nice adventure and it was a wild statue. From that point on, the spring break hangover was officially slayed.

Saturday there was a school sponsored trip to Orvieto, a mountain town north of Rome. Theres been a lot of issues with the school this year and it was there way of making reparations by offering us this free excursion. It wasnt much, but it was a free day out of the city and a day trip to a new place. A guide showed us some cool spots in the city and explained stuff to us but the best part was the five course meal: first was a different assortment of salami and proscuitto and olive spreads, second was a ridiculous risotto dish, third was homemade pasta with mushrooms and squid, four was some sausage, beef, and chicken with potatoes, and five was a kind of ice cream cake. With wine and water included it was probably close to the best meal I've had here, so all in all the Orvieto trip was a nice little Saturday, especially when closed with the blues concert.

This morning I went downtown with some friends to check out the massive Sunday morning market that I havent been to yet, but we realized the busses were running new routes for the day because the Rome marathon was going on. So instead of trying to figure out the busses, we watched the marathon. I always wondered how people watched marathons, it sounded so boring to me - it was so awesome. We just stood there and watched and chatted for like an hour and a half, i dont know what about it was so entertaining.

So yeah, its one of my last weekends here in Rome and it was a great time overall with alot of different stuff going on. My friends from home that are studying in France are visiting this week and weekend so I'll be traveling around the city and such with them. It sucks thinking about how close this is to ending, only about a month left at JFRC. I just cant get over how awesome the people are, everyone pretty much is open minded and fairly intellectual. I think the best way to phrase it is that life over here is just so much more stimulating - theres so much more adventure, so many new things, so much to do but also so relaxing. You know what I'm definitely ready for though? Crushing some bike rides.

Nothing overly entertaining about this post but wanted to keep everyone updated! Didnt get many great pictures from any of the events this weekend so I'll have them on my computer but probably not even gonna bother uploading them. Hopin everyone is feeling well back home! I'm still peeling from spring break sunburn and trying to get rid of the random dots and irritations all over my body from crazy African germs.

Zach

PS - Family, I had a great thought this weekend. When I'm home, that week I'm gonna make a dinner for you all as a sampler of what I've been eating all semester. I'm pretty excited for it, gonna be great (this is not gonna be a rice krispie bar christmas eve repeat; I'm actually all about the cooking now).

You dont need no gypsy to tell you why you cant let one precious day slip by

Spring break 2010 was probably the single most enlightening experience of my entire lifetime up to this point. I'm going to try and break it down for everyone with some of my favorite memories and stories and in the meantime I'm also uploading my photos to Picasa, so you can head on over that direction afterwards ;-). At this point, I'll admit alot of the stuff I wanted to share has probably fallen by the wayside, but I think once I start writing some things will come back, so please excuse me if alot of this is extremely unorganized cause I'm just gonna start typing away

So to start, COUCH SURFING. I've explained couch surfing before and I was pretty excited going into my first experience with it but I totally underestimated it. Our couch surfers met us at the train station, walked around with us all the first night and got us some food and drinks cause we were too cheap to buy any. We continually insisted to not buy us anything and we just didnt have the money but they then insisted they wanted to and it was about culture, and this continued all through the second day. That day, Deniz spent the entire day showing us the sights and Cem met up later. They continued to buy us little things, narrate about their lives, run the public transportation, and lead us on trips to their favorite spots. Both nights we spent at their apartment hanging with them and two of their friends. We ate their food, drank coffee and Raki, played cards, talked about life, watched soccer. It was unbelievable. In so many different instances they went so far out of their way to make us comfortable and give us such a unique experience and it was hard to understand why complete strangers would do that for you. This theme followed us throughout the rest of the trip, which I'll explain more later. This wasnt a "I met someone cool while traveling" type story; they felt like buddies, I missed them the rest of the trip because they made us feel so at home and welcome that I wanted to hang with them forever.

Turkish people are the most gorgeous people on the planet, I could have people watched there forever, men and women. Heres how I explained it to a friend - the men are the classic look of George Clooney in a tuxedo and the women are Marilyn Monroe in a moderate black wine dress, sexual but in a contained, secretive way. They are all dark skinned and hair, but they dont wear flashy clothes. Nice shoes with jeans and a sweater, but everyone looks so classically beautiful that its astonishing. The food too is the closest I would say I've ever come to my ideal collaboration of food. Its basically a mish-mash of all cultures in the area thrown together so its tough to describe. But it was so eclectic, so tasty, so encompassing - so phenomenal. Istanbul itself is massive, 16 million people, and the city just keeps stretching and stretching and stretching as you drive through it and look at it from above. Its split in the middle by a river which divides it into half Europe and half Asia, so in some of those pictures I'm standing in Europe looking into Asia. The new style of architecture was a nice break from Italy as well. Catholic architecture is based around massive interior space so many of the churches around here have a massive Baroque interior, but in Turkey mosques and their towers graced the skyline and the insides were more succinct.

We went to the Grand Bazzar, which is basically a market, but your classic market on massive steroids, something like 4000 shops or something. It was fascinating, I could have spent hours wandering around there. It was like sensory overload with all the colors and shops and things and people and salesmen and food. I had wanted to buy a tobacco pipe while studying abroad and I knew this trip would be a good time to buy one. After stepping into the Bazzar, I knew it was the right place to get it, and it was that type of thing where once you know you have to shop for something its liberating cause then you just take your time and shop. Like all things, I knew when I found the right one, and I love it. Its going to be my only souvenir from study abroad and I'm psyched for it.

Next the adventures takes us to Cairo, where we stayed at a hostel, and from the minute we arrived in Cairo we knew our trip was about to take a massive turn in intensity and epicness. Our hostel was incredible and continued the pattern of amazing people going out of their way for us which I'll expand on at the end. Everywhere you go in Egypt you're offered a welcome drink, which was hard for us to get used to because we'd always refuse it not wanting to pay and they would assure us its free. Even if youre just shopping in a store, they offer you tea or juice. Egyptians are absolutely fascinated by Americans, and thats a massive understatement. The women I was with obviously were a huge draw for the Egyptian men, but I was treated like a king because they thought I had 4 wives. We would walk down the street and it felt like we were in an entourage - every person would stop what they were doing and stare at us. Men at dinner asked if they could take pictures of us on their cameras. Men commented on the beauty of the women and on the prowess of me any place we went. The entire time I had an image of two women on either side of me arm-in-arm with James Brown "Get on Up" playing and winking and waving to the locals, thats exactly how it felt. It was intriguing at first and then frustrating because we just wanted to hang and not be bothered by everyone. But there is only men on the street, and only male stores, and the streets were flooded at 2 AM on a Tuesday, and its totally different nightlife because none of the Muslims drink so everyone just shops and street pedals. I cant even begin to describe how different of a life it was.

But driving around the next day towards and around the Pyramids was mind blowing because they are a little outside of Cairo in Giza. You go from massive city Cairo to Giza where the donkeys are delivering the days feed for the horses, fruit is distributed on the streets on donkey carts, goats wander through the streets and eat garbage, and canals are built to drain water from the Nile for the residents to use to sustain life. I thought these places only existed in the movies, I really cant explain how it made me feel. And I can even articulate much less how the Pyramids were. And the Sphinx. We watched the sunset on the Great Pyramids from the back of a camel in the Sahara desert. We took our camels through the back roads of Giza where Egyptian children looked up at us like Gods. We touched the Pyramid rocks that have been sitting in the same place since BC times.

Snorkeling in Sharm was my favorite part of the trip even though I feel like it shouldnt be. I've never snorkeled somewhere tropical before and the Red Sea is supposed to have the most beautiful coral in the world. We saw dolphins swimming in the distance and right under our boat, we saw them dive and frolic. We pet non-dangerous jellyfish. Under the water is hidden the most visually pleasing place in the entire world - its never ending random colors, patterns, designs, fish, depths of water. Coral doesnt make sense, its classified as an animal but it has no organization, it seems like completely random collaborations of material and colors, and I saw some of the most random fish ever and it makes you wonder what is the biological advantage for all these fish looking and functioning the way that they do. Without the insane sunburn, the day would have been perfect, but it was hardly a setback.

Jerusalem was intense, albeit not what I expected. Honestly I dont know what I was expecting, but somehow it wasnt that. The pictures wont mean much to you, or me for that matter, but in the moment its absolutely mind blowing to realize where the hell you are. I touched the rock that Jesus was crucified on. I saw the stone he laid on after death and was cleaned from the crucifixion. I visited the church that was built over the stable he was born in in Bethlehem. I drove through Palestine and the West Bank, the biggest area of conflict in the world during my lifetime. I swam in the Dead Sea, the saltiest place on the planet. It is also the lowest place above sea level in the world, 400 meters below. So at the shore, you are at the lowest spot in the world where you can stand. Its so low that the suns rays dont harm you or tan you, its just pure heat. Like my Great Salt Lake experience, you dont have to swim, its so salty that you just float.

Now onto how I want to conclude this story session: my trip was completely defined by the people I met throughout. To start off, Deniz and Cem and their want to host us like lifelong friends and try and show us their culture as much as possible. Second, the "Good Mafia" that ran the hostel in Cairo. We referred to them as this because they had all the hook ups, they made everything so easy, they helped us out in so many ways, and they were known all around town. You could just tell they were the most legit people ever. So besides hooking us up with deals for the Nile cruise, a tour guide and transport to the Pyramids all day and all those entrance fees, the main man Atif taught me a great lesson. We checked out of that hostel on Wednesday morning, did our Pyramid tours all day for which he let us keep our bags at the hostel, then let us return to shower, then gave us a ride to the bus station to get to Sharm. Furthermore, when we returned to Cairo on Saturday to fly out Sunday, he kept texting us to find what we were doing. Once we were in, he sent someone to pick us up, and had him bring us around to a couple more sights we didnt get to see in Cairo before. Then he let us crash in the lobby area of the hostel. Our plan was to sleep in the airport, but he would not let that happen. We didnt ask him for any of this, but he wouldnt let it be any other way. We owed him nothing and he was gaining nothing financially from it. He just kept insisting that he wanted his friends to have the absolute best experience possible in Cairo, and he would help in whatever way he could. Thirdly, every single person along the course of this trip went our of their way to help us. For extremely little things, but without approaching others, we would be approached and asked if we needed help. People would walk us places, help us with machines, wait with us for transport, help us buy things. Every person was amazingly kind and went out of their way to help us, but they did it in a way that seemed so natural, like they would do it instinctively for anyone, like its just their way of life. Its terrible that thats shocking to me and I always wondered if they were after something else, but they werent. And its terrible that the world doesnt know that about these people and actually has a totally different view of them. But I'm so grateful for all the help I received and for these people that taught me something beautiful about mankind.

I saw some great sights, I ate some great food, I met some great people. I explored culture, I explored ruins, I explored the Sea. I dove into history, I touched one of the most holy places in the world, and I drank with 20 year old Turkish friends. I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and hoped I liked it, and I always did. I saw the world from a different perspective than I ever thought I would. I know whats out there now, and I need to see more.

I'm so so grateful that I was able to take a trip such as this. I'm happy we went off on our own and planned such a crazy trip and, for the most part, did it fluently. I feel like I grew up 15 years in that week and it felt like it lasted 3 weeks. I feel enlightened about so many different things, and its surely the most amazing time I've ever had. I hope this post helped you connect to me. I think I filled it mostly with my thoughts and random stories versus crazy amounts of detail from the trip, and I hope thats a good thing. The pictures are up, so feel free to check them out.

I wanted to close with a quote, but its weird - writing about this in such detail has totally brought me back into the moment and I feel lost in the clouds. I'm feeling everything again and I'm getting back that life high that I was on for 8 days. So considering nothing is coming to mind, I wish peace and love to all, and pray that everyone gets to experience something of this magnitude in their lifetime.

Love always,

Zach