European Introspections

Random blurbs written when my fingers find the keyboard...
 
Sunday, November 4, 2012

It's been a long while, but I'm finally back on the blog train. Ironically, I'm for once not spending my time on a train and am instead taking a lazy, but hopefully productive, day in Riva San Vitale. After a long twelve day break full of traveling, topped off with the final 38 hours traveling back home and being homeless people on Halloween, most of us decided to stay at our Riva home for this rainy weekend. On Friday, Tim, Kacey, Alice, Holland, David and I took a short train ride north to Monte Tamero. Here we took a ski lift up 1,962 meters up the mountain to ride a roller coaster on a snowy mountain. Yesterday, after Sam, Alice, and I attempted to ride bikes to Lugano to find there were no bikes left, we hopped on a train with Cody and bought reservations for our train to Rome and sat by the lake. A different experience than my other trip to Lugano, the weather was dreary. However, that didn't stop us from returning later that night with some other friends to explore.

 

Monday, September 3, 2012 - Virginia Tech vs. Georgia Tech

It was hard to be in another country when all forms of social media were blowing up about Virginia Tech’s opening game back in Blacksburg. We made a great night out of it by forcing our eyes to stay open so we could watch the Hokies premiere from 2:00 to 5:00 A.M., our time. We all assembled in our classroom and watched the game on a projector and sat in chairs initially, and as the night went on,  mattresses that were pulled out onto the floor. It was confirmed that staying up with everyone was definitely worth it as we witnessed Lane Stadium host, somehow, its very first overtime and then field goal kick to win the game. The game was probably the only one we will be able to watch this season, and I’m happy that it was a winning event. 

Friday, August 24, 2012

I have now caught up to present day. Currently, I'm sitting on our fourth train of the day en route to Nice, France. This past week has been the most grueling school week I think I've had to date, in the classroom. The temperature has been unbearably hot every single day, never dipping below 90, and there is no air conditioning anywhere in Riva San Vitale. In three days we learned six weeks of finance material in addition to two Italian classes. Both of our professors are really good at keeping our attention thought finance has managed to make me worry even while in a foreign country. Running has been a great way to clear my head and so to say, stop and smell the roses. The scenery while running along Lake Lugano is absolutely breath taking.

This morning we took our finance midterm. The way classes here are structured define the saying "working for the weekend." We go hard during the week and have a stress free break for two days. I'll turn 21 on Sunday! The hype is definitely weakened because I became legal the second I sat in my British Airlines seat. With three hours to go I'm bidding adieu and hoping to arrive at the hostel in Nice as soon as possible!  

Sunday, August 18, 2012

Ain't no rest for college students in Europe! We had the choice to either go to Milan or take a 2.5 hour hike up to the top of San Georgio. The view was absolutely amazing. Across the  view was another mountain that is a 4 hour hike. A group of us want to do this by the end of the trip. I plan to hike as much as I can.

Saturday, August 17, 2012

A long day of orientation was followed by a really fun night. But before we could have fun my roommate, Melanie and I, went to the Mendrisio train station 20 minutes away to make train reservations for our first planned weekend trip, Nice, France! It felt like an experience out of The Amazing Race as we navigated our way with minimal directions and asked for help using our basic knowledge of Italian.

Our first night out, we started at the Mini Bar and then went to a festival a few minutes down the road. The party was the end to a week long festival that none of us are sure what we were celebrating. Nonetheless, we danced on tables and cherished the few dance songs that reminded us of home.

Meeting people at bars has been so much fun to try and speak broken Italian and English with them. I've been learning phrases from our kitchen assistant, Guytano.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Thursday and Friday blended all into one day. After arriving at the villa on Friday, we unpacked and jumped into orientation then had our very first, delicious dinner. After dinner we had another meeting then finally were able to hit the town and start making our friendships with the local bars. We only went to Mini Bar, but the mini bar and its three locals, and new classmates to meet were enough entertainment for us. 

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Left Dulles at 6:40 PM arrived Heathrow at 6:50 (time to switch over to 24 hour scale). Cloudy the whole trip but was offered free wine with my dinner for the first time ever (something that won't happen for a few years at least in the U.S.). We left Heathrow at 9:10 and landed in Milan at 12:05, jumping an hour ahead, at a very old airport, Milano Linate.