Ljubljana = Lyubov

Slovenia is the most underrated country in Europe.

Picture this- a country with the Julian Alps, perfect turquoise Alpine lakes with clear water to the bottom, castles perched on jagged cliffs, east-meets-west sort of Austrian, sort of Croatian, sort of Polish/Czech architecture, a language that uses the Latin alphabet but is totally Slavic in roots, and a coffee culture that resembles that of Austria but is as cheap as Ukraina. Slovenia embodies the idea of east-meets-west and it pulls it off so naturally and beautifully. It didn't feel weird or awkward that half of all Slovene words I heard in Ljubljana (which means beloved city, by the way) were exactly the same as their Ukie counterparts but the other half sounded almost Germanic or Italian. People are friendly, but not creepily so like in Italia. The youth is cool, sort of grunge, but there's no graffitti or rowdiness everywhere. It's gorgeous and there is a tourist office and a lot of English-speakers, but there were almost no tourists. It was so COOL. Oh, yea- and cold. We saw ice on the ground, which was a daunting reminder of returning to the Midwest just in time for my favorite season ............ winter. But we're not going to talk about that right now..

Ljubljana. It's in Slovenia. Who goes there? Seriously. Jessie and I booked our train, which leaves and arrives in Slovenia once a day at the most obscure time ever. Per esempio, we departed Roma Termini at 3:00 pm on Thursday and arrived in Venezia (Venice) at 8:30 pm. Well, after an hour layover in Venezia, we caught a train that was Budapest-bound that happened to pass through Ljubljana at...2 am. Ok. So we saw Slovenia for the first time at the most rando time possible. First impressions: wow, this place is quiet. And dead. Even for 2 in the morning. We found our hostel, Hostel Celica- which was voted best hostel in the world 5 years in a row. It's a converted prison.. actually really cool. You have the option to stay in an actual prison cell, with bars on the door and everything!! Haha.. sounds sketch, but we paid less there than we have anywhere else, got a really nice free breakfast, and had comfier beds than here in great old Club Medag.

Friday. Cloudy. We walked around the city, which, by the way, is not very big at all for being a capital city. There's a castle on the side of a mountain (the Julian Alps), several churches, a river, dozens of cafés, a dragon bridge (dragon = the city's symbol, it's everywhere), and plenty of stores. Namely, H&M. Now- some background. Roma lacks H&M. Actually I lied. There is one- however, it is 2 bus rides and a metro stop away from anywhere in the city center. Quindi inaccessible.. so lucky for me, not so lucky for the credit card, there is an H&M right on the main piazza of Ljubljana. We spent a lot of time in there. But don't worry! We did see the city. There's a huge open-air market and a street on which vendors only sell flowers.. there are vendors selling honey, wooden crafty things, and painted plates. I made friends with the honey vendor man, who randomly pulled out a plastic shot glass and poured me some golden liquid- "med"... which was exactly what I thought it was-- honey liquor. POTENT. We sort of communicated using Ukie and Slovenian- most of the words were kind of similar, so we both knew what the other was saying. We ate burek. A lot of burek. It's cheap and a specialty of that corner of the world.. think meat and/or cheese-filled strudel cooked/fried in a ton of butter and grease. Mmmmmmmm. The city is just gorgeous.. look at my pictures to get a slightly better idea, but basically it's pastel-colored, a mix between eastern and western Europe architecturally. We went to a really cute place for dinner (white tablecloths! cheap! yesssss!) and I got a Slovene specialty, think cottage cheese-filled ravioli except chopped in half on the diagonal, all covered in a mushroom cream sauce. AND as a starter I ordered mushroom soup in a BREAD BOWL. That's right. Totally legit traditional Slovene food. A BREAD BOWL. And we got coffee (and sat DOWN for freeeeee) 3 times. Like Viennese café culture mixed with Roman coffee mixed with eastern European cheap.

Saturday. Daytrip to Bled. What's in Bled, you ask? Lake Bled is in Bled. And it's beautiful. I had seen pictures of it, and Let's Go! Europe had a whole page on it, and it's only an hour bus ride from the city, so why not? We took the bus through the most gorgeous mountains EVER, the Julian Alps-- totally snow-covered because of how cold it's been lately-- and pulled into Bled. So... there's a lake. It's really, really BIG, and in the summertime it's apparently a resort town..but in the winter it is a ghost town. Jessie and I walked around the whole lake, which took us a solid 2 hours to do. It wasn't boring, though, because the landscape kept changing. First it starts off as a cute town, then it turns into a slight uphill incline with views of the huge lake and the island with a church on it. You keep walking, and you hit these docks, where there were tons of waterfowl squawking and hanging out.. and you see how huge the lake is. Keep walking, and OH HEY- there are HUGE mountains behind you that you couldn't see for the first half of the walk! Go around the bend, see tons of pine trees climbing up the mountains, and get closer to the island with the church on it. Talk about panoramas. Stunning. Eventually we got hot chocolate at the one lakeside café (we sat inside. it was snowing.) and took in the view. Bused home, ate more burek, sat in a rando basement of a rando building talking because it was SO COLD, and drank coffee at a few more cafés. Excellent conversation.

buon viaggio!

I CAN'T WAIT TO GO TO LJUBLJANA. AND BLED. AND SALZBURG. AND VIENNA.
If you google image Ljubljana, you find a land that looks a little bit more like a magical fairy tale than Bavaria or Switzerland did. It's crazy, and I can't wait to photograph the hell out of it. Lake Bled looks incredible. Slovenia isn't on the Euro. It is going to be stunning, beautiful. And I can't wait. Gorges, castles, turquoise lakes, mountains, canals. YES.

Roman life has been nice lately- sort of filled with papers and homework, but mostly filled with wandering, eating, visiting with MICHELLE who came to Roma this past weekend!! and topping my gelato record. But perhaps I should backtrack and update on my trip to London, the past week a Roma, and other fun things.

36 hours in London: Caroline and I got on our RyanAir flight to London in the afternoon of my 21st birthday, ready to be in London, see our friends, and celebrate properly! So we get to London, take the [way freaking overpriced] Tube to wherever the ND flats are located, and realize.... oh, crap. We lost the paper with the Kamen House codes on it. And no one knows exactly when we're showing up .................crap. haha. So we sit outside on the curb, very frustrated and amused (HUNGRY) until her boyfriend happens to randomly pop outside to see if we're there [much happiness]. Finally we get inside, I see some friends, get some food [BEST chicken caesar wrap I've ever eaten in my life ever, probably because I was starving], and a big group goes out to O'Neill's. It was a nice 21st :) not too crazy, but fun. I slept on Flat 13's couch [WAY more comfy than Medag's beds..........] and saw London that Friday. Nice city, reminded me a lot of ..a European America. Weird comparison, I know. It just did. Oh yea, and everyone had crazy accents. It was honestly the weirdest feeling in the world to be in an English-speaking country again- I haven't been in one since I left home!

I'd been sick-ish since Paris, and by London I'd say that I was mostly over it, but 2 days after having gotten back from London, I came down with an excellent cough/fever combo. Fun. So I was feeling icky all week, hoping that by Friday night it would all fade in time for Michelle's Roma trip. On Friday I went shopping at the san Giovanni market near Via Appia//south Roma, went back to San Giovanni in Laterano, and visited the Galleria Corsini, an old cardinal palazzo-turned museum. Then my apartment-mate Jacqueline's parents took us out to dinner at what happens to be one of my two favorite restaurants in alllllll of Roma- Piacere Molise, on via Candia. I ordered a new kind of pasta, which ended up being sort of like a thicker fettucine, sort of square-ish in form, which had gambieri, zucchini, pancetta, some kind of wine sauce, and tomatoes in it. AMAZING. I think it was one of the best plates of pasta I've had in Roma. EVER. We also had this incredible secondo, a layered eggplant/cheese/pepper/tomato dish. Really good. So after this affair, I metro-ed over to Termini to meet Michelle. We did a night walk in Roma and soon after, I experienced the most harrowing night bus episode of my life, which I do not care to ever repeat. Little pretend-Italian me, piazza Venezia, night bus 4, 18, 5, 7, 8.... not 6..., sketchball creeps, 3 am. I lived. N6 arrived an hour behind schedule. But I'm alive. We had a lovely weekend, ate SO MUCH. I topped my gelato record and ate THREE coni in a span of like 12 hours- one from Della Palma, one from Giolitti, one from Old Bridge. I still need to try Fiocco di Neve and that little one next door to the Pantheon. Some exciting stuff happened last night and today, but I'll save that for another post. Ciao a tutti!

forse che si fa quello che si puo'

More reasons I love Roma:

1) free concert in celebration of Italian veterans and Andrea Bocelli's 50th birthday in Piazza del Popolo Sunday night. Thousands of people, Italian flags, glitter, disco lights, and ANDREA BOCELLI singing his operatic heart out. We sat on the back wall of the piazza, equivalent to the back row, and it was just so cool. Roman night, Romans, Roman concert. Beautiful.

2) torta di ricotta e cioccolato from the nameless Kosher corner bakery in the Jewish Ghetto. I think it really is my favorite single thing I've ever eaten.. and I have about 30 favorite foods and top food experiences including but not limited to the gnocchi in Sulmona, gelato a Napoli, carrot cake at that one bakery in the States, white hot chocolate at Civilization near the ukie muzej, etc, etc, etc. It's like a well-done white cake, except less cakey and a little bit more like a cookie, sort of, filled with tons of ricotta and melty chocolate-- like a cannoli filling, really. The best cannoli filling I've ever tasted. YUMMM.

home sweet Roma

Diakuyu to everyone for the birthday wishes! Every single "mnohaya lita!" made me smile and miss everyone even more! I love you all.

Caroline and I went to London to celebrate my 21st birthday and to visit our ND friends who are studying in London. I'll update on that one later- it was lots of fun and so, so nice to see some familiar faces and some of my best friends.. who I hadn't seen in 6 months! London is a great city, too. But coming back to Roma... that is the point of this post.

I always feel it, but I felt it most strongly this weekend. Traveling and discovering new cities is glorious and I always love it. All of our travels so far have been so different but incredible. Visiting towns and regions within Italia is awesome because even though the regional differences are so pronounced, there are always uniting factors/common themes/threads linking foods/customs/the language. Going international, you lose some of those things and the trips become more defined from one another- the vibe I got from Svizzera was that the Swiss are efficient, economical, practical, sleek, refined, and happen to live in one of the most gorgeous places in the world. In Paris I felt like the French were very refined, somewhat snooty, all about appreciating food and beauty, sophisticated, and just COOL by nature. The Germans are really fun. They are incredibly friendly, hospitable, enjoy life, love children, love their bier, and are very youth-oriented. They seem the happiest. London is so modern. I feel like they're not stuck in any past-- I did spend only 36 hours there, but it seemed the most "western" to me. Almost American in feel, maybe a little more quaint and European (duh, I know- but that's the only way to describe it haha). ANYWAY. Italiani.

Whenever I come back to Roma, I always call it home. And it's quirky- it's wild, totally full of attitude, a little dirty, loud, Eurotrashy, crazy, unpredictable, and old. It's layered with history and with italiani who think the world revolves around them. It's dramatic and always a spectacle. It always makes me laugh-- you can be walking around on any average day and see 10 things that will make you kind of laugh and say, "oh ROME.." you're ridic. But I've come to love this city so much, to appreciate it for what it is. I've gotten past that initial fantasy Roma that most guidebooks try to sell.. that of raven-haired people, cyprus trees, sunsets, pasta, romantic strolls along peaceful cobblestoned sidewalks, strolling violinists, and Lizzie McGuire Movie-esque adventures with hot Italian ragazzi on motorini. Italia is sexy. It's sultry. It's hectic, probably overtouristed, way too dramatic sometimes, random as hell with its public transportation strikes and protests.. but so, so endearing. People here love to be Italian. Everything is a spectacle and italiani take the time to live. Four-hour lunch breaks during which businessmen, students, and shopkeepers alike stroll along the cobblestone streets at the slowest pace IMAGINABLE-- hardly walking, mostly just casually putting one foot in front of the other gradually as they have conversations with their colleagues. Sloooowww walks late at night. Shoes and sunglasses, scarves and tight jeans. Where the Parisians enjoy their food, where the Germans love their children, where the Swiss have their clean efficiency, the Romans know how to hang out. They hang out in their gorgeous city and exude a kind of confidence I haven't found anywhere. They are the greatest, they are the chicest, they are so very fabulously Italian. With every cigarette puff, with every sisisisisisi, with every last stream of rapidfire music-language, and with every single cIAooo I fall way more in love with bella Roma.

Gut Bier!

I came to Munchen knowing..8 words of German.

1) gut
2) bier
3) ja
4) nien
5) danke scheun
6) guten tag

Gut and Bier ended up being the most helpful.


Caroline, Jessie, and I (after having been home in Roma for all of 3.5 days) hopped onto our overnight train to Munich on Thursday totally pumped for some meat, beer, and pretty city-seeing. Check, CHECK, check. I LOOOOVE MUNCHEN, and all of Germany for that matter.

So we roll into Munich at 6,30 on Friday morning and decide that we are going to milk our Eurails and go to Fussen to see King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle! If you are not aware, this castle in Bavaria was THE inspiration for Cinderella's castle in Disney World. Ohhhh YEA. So we spent Halloween training through Bavaria early in the morning, during which tons of thick forests, spiky white snowcapped mountains, rolling fields of grass, and bright yellow and orange fall leaves appeared from the fog. Stunning. So then we got to Fussen, the town where the castle is located, and we were kind of shocked. It looked fake. Disney World fake. Except it was legit, totally REAL. Nothing fake about it... straight out of a fairy tale. I kept looking around, half-expecting to see some prince on a white horse gallop past us up to the castle.. or for dwarves to peek through the trees at us, or for a princess to be locked in the tall, tall, taaaaaallllll tower that topped the castle on the side of that mountain. So cool. It looked like Happy Valley or some crazy made-up storybook land. Every little girl's dream is to be a princess.. and I totally felt like I had stepped into a fairy tale. So I was a princess for Halloween this year :)

We stayed for a few hours and trained back to Munchen in time to walk around a bit and find dinner. We wandered (with our hostel's map and recommendation) toward a restaurant that they said was off the beaten tourist track called Augustiner Brau Stuben. OMG. So there are 6 kinds of German beer, and sub-beers under the 6 main beers' umbrellas. Augustiner is one of the 6, so by the name we could tell that that was the house specialty. We go inside this place and it is PACKED. With GERMANS. It was soo loud and boisterous and completely chaotic with waiters and waitresses wearing Bavarian clothes juggling liter steins of bier as they weaved through wooden tables and benches full of 15-20 people each. The food smelled incredible and we were shooed toward the bar by a large German woman.. so the 3 of us are standing there and somehow end up with half-liters of a light wheat beer in front of us. YESSS. And it was so good, and so smooth, and delightful. Finally another large German woman communicates to us that we should follow her so we can sit down and eat! We follow, pick up the menu.. everything is in German... so we point to rando things on the menu and ask the friendly white-haired man sitting next to us if this is "GUT??" or if that is "GUT??" and somehow end up with the most amazing food in the world in front of us. Sauerkraut, 3 kinds of meat/wursts, potatoes, grease, yesssssss. All with bier (gut bier- at this point I'm on my second 0.5L) and brezen (soft prezels). :D

That night was slightly fuzzy but so so so so so so SOO much fun. The bier hall was just so fun and friendly and loud and happy. And delicious. And it ended up being very cheap. SUCCESS.


Saturday was November 1. November 1 is a national/religious holiday for ALL OF EUROPE. Everything is closed on November 1. Haha. Totally neglected to note that. Oh well- Caroline and I walked around alllll of Munchen, popped into some gorgeous churches and gardens, and window shopped almost all morning and early afternoon while Jessie toured the Dachau Concentration Camp nearby. So whoever said German food is terrible has obviously NOT been to Germany. It's been one of my favorites so far. I've been sick since midway through Paris, so in the morning we went to a bakery (Muller) near our hostel for pastries and tee, and the mamdgoiehdhrys0ussss that I pointed to and got was amazing. Kind of like a streusel-frosting-cranberry danish thing. Saw the Glockenspiel, which is a very famous clocktower performance in Marienplatz during which little cuckoo-clock type figures dance around to pretty belltower chimes. And then mid-afternoon we decided that a snack was necessary, so we went to another bakery that was totally packed with people speaking (yelling) German and ordered a huge breze and a white chocolate raspberry mousse cake thing (Caroline) and a chocolate covered mousse cake looking thing (me)..... and, acclimated to the Italian concept of no free table seating EVER, took everything "to go" and snuck our way into the outdoor seating furthest away from the door.... and ate these glorious cakes with our FINGERS. So hilarious, so delicious. I bet we didn't even need to pay extra to get forks. I bet all the Germans were laughing at us, the dumb Americans. But it was so fun and I would do it ten more times. Mmmmmmmm.

That night we went to Haufbrauhaus. Umm. It's a biergarten. We ordered our 0.5L of Haufbrau and then the evening continued into
1) Americans joining us and buying us 90E of alcohol and food
2) Our table and the surrounding tables noticing that I had over half of my bier left and demanding that I chug it in a race [against some Mexican guy, for 50 Euro]... so I did, and I WON. It was epic- there were about 30-ish people [some French guys, some South Africans, a lot of Germans] screaming and cheering when I won. Peer pressure at its finest.
3) much love
4) cheese noodles, kuchensomethingsomething- very delicious
5) new friendship with 2 girls, Alana and Lizzy, who we had hung out with all evening before the biergarten. Alana is Australian and is dating a ukie guy who lives in London and Lizzy is an American au pair currently living in Switzerland.

Sunday- I found the Ukie church in Munchen and checked out their hromada. Pretty awesome. I miss my people a LOT. For the rest of Sunday we hung out with Lizzy and went to Café Trachtenvogl, which has no fewer than 35 flavors of hot chocolate. <3 mmm. I ordered the darkest dark hot chocolate on the menu... and a real chocolate chip cookie. First one since leaving the States. YUM. Then, since in Munchen all state-owned museums are 1E on Sundays, we went to the Deutsch Museum-- of science and technology!! Then we walked around Munchen, then went to dinner, where I tried a Radler, which is light bier mixed with lemonade soda....actually really good. We walked around some more, enjoyed Bavaria, sat in Marienplatz eating real German apfelstrudel at night, and then hopped on the overnight train back to Roma.

YAY GERMANY. I LOVE YOU.

Bonne Soir!!

Sono andata a Parigi lo scorso weekend. Paris- I wasn't sure what to expect on a lot of levels. Parigi.. you hear about it a lot, you hear that the French are snooty, that the food is good, and that it's gorgeous. Stereotypes are true, but in a good way for Paris. It's kind of weird- I've spent the last few weekends in countries whose languages are totally foreign to my ukie-italiano-english speaking self. Now normal people would book a train ticket, read up on the foreign city in question, learn a few key phrases, learn about local customs......... nope. Team 123 Medaglie d'Oro picks up, grabs cameras and passports and..... goes. E basta. Ecco i nostri viaggi..

PARIS: Caroline and I got on our 15-hour overnight train (don't worry, abbiamo prenotato le cuchette-hooray for beds) and woke up to rolling French countryside complete with sheep dotting the green grass, misty morning dew, cozy-looking chalets, and gorgeous scenery speeding past our window. The train ended up being not one, but 2.5 hours LATE getting to Paris-Bercy, so technically we are eligible for refunds.. but wait, it didn't drop us off at Bercy. We were dropped off at GARE DE LYON, which is the main train station in Paris. Usually not a problem, but the two of us (blonde...non-French-speaking... lost) had specific directions from Bercy, not Lyon, to our respective places to stay for the weekend. Ummm ok.. haha, so Caroline gets on the Paris metro to go to her hotel on the north end of Paris and I get on the metro in the Porte d'Orleans direcion so I could go find my friend Kolya's apartment on the south side of Paris. Ummmm ok, so at this point I'm alone on the Paris metro with a skype convo printout at my aid. Haha. Happy ending, though- I made it! Funny twist- Caroline's UK cell didn't work in France? And as I later found out, she couldn't call Kolya's? Oh, so another long story made short- didn't meet up with my ND friends that weekend because we played Life Before Cell Phones.. in Paris. But so anyway.. all day Friday Kolya and I hung out, walking around the city and going to Notre Dame, some Jardins, and Musee d'Orsay. There was an AWESOME exhibit in d'Orsay- Picasso copied this one painting by Manet like 50 times, but each time it looked completely different. Really trippy but really cool. Then that night we went out to a club for an Erasmus night and I met a bunch of his American friends studying in Paris. So fun!! Haha aand I practiced my italiano on some guys who were having none of it. LAME. All in all- awesome. On Friday I ended up finding Team ND's hotel, so we hung out for part of Friday until I went shopping with Kolya (aka I played stylist). Then we went to this ridic Halloween party that ended up being pretty short-lived but fun all the same. Saturday was San Chappelle/Jardins/walking around/rando churches/French Pantheon day. San Chappelle was stunning- walls of stained glass windows that were just too gorgeous to believe!! That was another thing I loved about Francia. They have stained glass! There is NONE in Roma. The weather all weekend was pretty chilly and gray, but France has autumn! The leaves were changing! Sweaters and jackets didn't just take up space! The city was remarkably beautiful, too. So clean and quaint- kind of like out of a movie, just better because it was REAL. Ok, so Saturday night. Kolya and I went out to dinner in the Latin quarter of Paris. We (ok, I lied. He. Because I am devoid of French speaking/reading skills) found a really pretty little bistro (a reaaaaaaaal french bistrooooo-so excited) and were there for a few hours.. I had an incredible cheese-walnut-greens salat for the entreé [appetizer in French] with really great cheese, veal with mushroom-cream sauce and pommes frites, and a "mandatory" creme bruleé. O, the French know their food. It was so memorable. And so, so good. Oh yea, and the bistro was called Le Tango du Chat :) Afterwards we went to the Eiffel Tower because I still hadn't seen it, and when we got out of the metro, I saw it! For the first time- and it was SPARKLING. This year the tower is lit up blue at night, and for the last ten minutes of every hour at night it SPARKLES. So pretty!!!!!!!! So then we just hung out for the rest of the night and eventually went to bed and daylight savings happened and I had to go to Lyon to catch the train back to Roma bright and early. Actually it wasn't even bright yet. Just early. All in all, era un weekend fantastico. It was really nice to visit a friend and just hang out and see the city as a sort-of not tourist. Oh yea, and eat croissants, eclairs, crepes, and all other French goodness that no one in the world has successfully imitated and/or perfected. Also- I am in LOVE with the way the French say bonne soir. So cheery and HAPPY- bonne SOIR!!!! Our version is the ever-sexy buona sera, which, when said correctly is definitely sexy. It was nice to hear the happy version after getting so used to the sultry version, haha.