amsterdam e italia!

Amsterdam was fun; I went two weeks ago with Carrie, just for a weekend. The city is beautiful, with canals and flower markets and the Anne Frank House museum, where we went. Plus the Van Gogh Museum, also cool. Plus tons and tons of coffeehouses everywhere (if you didn't know, small amounts of weed are legal in Amsterdam and they sell it in coffeehouses as joints, loose leafs, or in 'space cakes').

Then last Thursday headed to Italy for five days; with four cities in mind: started in Pisa, then went to Florence, then Venice, and finally Milan. It felt like two days in each city because we traveled in the middle of the day and napped, then stayed out late in each city. Loved it so much! Each city had such a different feeling but everyone was so nice and friendly, literally waving to us from their houses as we walked by or inviting us into their shops to learn about the history of Venetian masks or watch a Pisan woodcutter at work while struggling to communicate in Spanish/Italian/French. Good thing I spent that week in Spain or else communication would've been way harder (Italians and Spanish can understand each others' languages, generally).

I highly recommend couchsurfing. The first night Jes and I had the most delicious pizza and stayed in a tiny guesthouse with a cute little Italian woman. Next day did all the touristy stuff in Pisa, which took about an hour, then shopped and Jes got a haircut- it's a tiny cute university town, not greatly unlike Granada. Then we went out with our fantastic couchsurfing hosts, who also fed us super yummy pasta and prosciutto. Next day, headed to Florence.

Florence is gigantic! Comparatively speaking that is. Tuscan countryside is gorgeous; we stayed in a great hostel and saw Michelangelo's David and some famous bridge, and ate our most delicious meal in Italy (no pictures though): warm calamari salad, prosciutto pizza (as usual), spinach with butter, and panna cotta for dessert. Pasta may have been involved. I love Italian food! The Duomo in Florence was very dramatic and cool.

Then we hit Venice, which might've been my favorite city (although Pisa was my favorite experience b/c of couchsurfing). The first day we wandered around away from our hotel, with the aim of getting lost, and ended up at this mask store with one guy who makes all his masks by hand, and he showed us how to wear the masks, about the history of them, and made us model them too. Went to San Marco, that famous piazza, and heard some live music and danced around with this piano girl who was playing 'Funkytown' and rocking out.

It started raining the next day and didn't stop pouring all day; my French shoes died so I got pretty Italian designer shoes on the way to Milan. Milan was pretty sucky just because it was cold and we were tired. We couchsurfed that night and had a good conversation about Europe from the American perspective, then left early in the a.m. Watched "Leatherheads" in Italian near the Duomo, which was "In Amore Niente Regole" (In love without rules?) to take a nap. Had gelato and delicousness, grabbed our flight out of Milan, and got on a bus back to Paris. The bus broke down but we barely caught the last metro back into town.

Right now I'm on a road trip across France with my mommy who's visiting for a whole week! So of the 30 days in April, I'm spending 11 in Paris. Haha I love travel!

Morocco

By the way, I'm not dead... In case you were worried. It's been a long time since I've written anything here and obviously a lot has happened since then. I spent my spring break ("Semana Santa," Holy Week, it's called here) traveling throughout Spain with friends. We saw Madrid, Segovia, Toledo, Salamanca, Barcelona and Valencia at the rate of about 1-ish cities per day. It was intense. But I'll save that for another post. I promise.

Now I want to talk about where I went last weekend while it's still semi-fresh. I left with a group of about 15 people from my program for Gibraltar last Friday. Gibraltar's a really strange place. It's a big rock in British territory at the tip of the Iberian peninsula, at something like 18 km from Africa. You have to walk across a live runway to get there. And for some reason there are monkeys there. Legend apparently says that as long the monkeys are there the British will be there. Which was apparently a big issue during WWII when there was minimal monkey mating. Churchill had made a big fuss about it. They speak a weird mix of Spanish and English. And all the architecture is British and seems really out of place in southern Spain. But, I got my first view of Africa (see picture, above left, in the distance), and had some authentically mediocre pub fare.

On Saturday we left for Tangier by ferry. It was really cool being able to see Europe and Africa at the same time. The intense waves and people vomiting around me, however, were not as cool. We spent little time in Tangier, but enough to head to a local market and a women's center to talk to some local students. It was really cool to hear Arabic around us and listen to the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosques. Later we headed towards a small town on the Atlantic coast called Asilah. But first our guide surprised us with a camel ride. After a long day, we made our way to Rabat, capital of Morocco.

Rabat was my favorite part of the trip. We stayed with Moroccan families and ate several meals with them. We also went to a Hammam, which is an Arab bath. There were three rooms with three different temperatures. It was basically like a chain of steam rooms. We were able to walk through the city with students, which was amazing. I met a kid named Amine who was a police officer in Marrakesh. He spoke English almost better than me and said he only had taken six months of classes and the rest he had learned from American music and movies. Moroccans have a ridiculous talent for language. It's unbelievable. French and Arabic are everywhere. In the north they speak Spanish as well. And every shop-owner seemed to speak English.

Next we headed to the Rif mountains, famous for their hashish, (pretty sure this is where the term "reefer" comes from). We stopped in a small village and ate couscous with a very traditional farming family and enjoyed amazing mountain views from their backyard. Then we made our way to the town of Chefchaouen, which was really cool because almost all of the houses were painted blue, but seemed a little touristy.

The last day of our trip, we crossed the border from Morocco to Ceuta, which is a Spanish territory in North Africa. The border crossing was insane and disorganized. Apparently a lot of Moroccans cross the border daily, buy Spanish products and then sell them in Morocco. And the government turns a blind eye because it's one of the only means of living for the very poor. When we were there, there was an enormous mass of Moroccans crossing back home with border police beating and chasing them back into Morocco. Our guide told us to flash our American passports to the Moroccan border police, and they let us go ahead of the crowd. It felt really uncomfortable. We caught a ferry from Ceuta back to Spain.

I really liked Morocco, and there is so much that happened that I don't have time/space to write about. And I was only there four days. I would highly recommend going there if you ever get the chance. It's a really interesting place. It's African and Arab, with a lot of French and Spanish influence thrown in there. It's a very poor country, but one of the richest in Africa. We drove by a lot of shanty towns. But the people there are probably the nicest people I have ever met. People would approach in the street, ask us where we from just to say "Welcome to Morocco."I can't wait to go back and explore some more.

alors tout va bien

It took two weeks, but the Bank of America/Visa team finally got their act together and sent me a debit card. Now I just have to go around paying everyone back.

Lots of class and tests lately; I had my math midterm on a Saturday (!) morning. Spent a lot of time in libraries and with secretariats discussing my enrollment in classes, and on the phone with BofA of course.

Last weekend my program went to Normandy. Five hour bus ride up to Mont St Michel (we can pretend from here on out that I'm taking all photos, including the inexplicable aerial shots) and a great two hour tour of this fantastic giant monastery and town on a rock with the highest tides of Europe with our amazing French tour guide. It's by the way the only part of Normany which was never under English hands. A fantastic hostel in Granville, then the next day the Dday beaches (x3 and so damn sobering), museum, American cemetary (the most hallowed ground I've ever felt), the oldest tapestry in ever (depicts William the Conquerer against Harold), and four kinds of precipitation in one day- snow, hail, rain, slush/sleet.

When my mom comes maybe I'll ask her to give me an early birthday present/loan of a camera. It's still beautiful in Paris by the way. Also, for those of you who may read this and don't know, I'm going to Budapest next semester for studies in math. So a whole year away from Yale, bittersweet, but excited. =D