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...