I mostly stuck to my plan of buckling down and getting things done to prepare for winter break, our one week off of classes before midterms. On Monday, my host family had to cancel our dinner, so I stayed in and Alison, one of the girls from the program, came over to cook dinner with Carly, and they were kind enough to let me crash it. Alison had a recipe for pasta with this creamy avocado sauce, which was absolutely delicious! I need to look up some stove top recipes to cook here, so if anyone has any good ones that don’t require an oven, please send them my way!
Also some time that week, Carly and I noticed a musty, moldy kind of smell when we used the microwave. We checked the food we’d just taken out and since that all seemed fine, we didn’t think anything of it. Until the next day when we realized the smell was coming from the actual microwave. We took off the glass plate, and I nearly spewed right there. White, green, and blue fuzzy mold covered the underside of the rotating plate. EW is an understatement. It took about an hour, but through the power of Google, we were able to figure out and execute the cleaning of said infected microwave (pour water in with soap, bleach, or a number of other cleaners, microwave for a minute, dump the water, repeat). After I started dry-heaving when we dumped it the first time and the mold slithered out, Carly took over that job on her own. Moral of the story: don’t EVER leave any moisture in the microwave, no matter what, and make sure you clean it meticulously. From now on, you will never find a microwave cleaner than ours in all of Provence.
Anyway, I was doing well and being productive school- and chore-wise. With laundry done and letters and birthday presents in the mail, I was feeling pretty on top of the world by Wednesday afternoon when things took a downward turn. I went to bed early since I was feeling under the weather, then woke up on Thursday with a raging sinus/head cold, feeling weak as can be. I don’t usually stay home sick or even acknowledge the fact that I don’t feel well, but I was incapacitated on Thursday. I slept through my first class, hoping that I would wake up feeling better, but I definitely did not. Instead, I moved from my bed to the couch for a few more hours of sleep and movies before I made it into the shower and out to buy orange juice and flu meds. After that, Roz came over to get our last plans in line, then I went back to bed and skipped my evening class, too. With leaving for vacation the next day and being too stubborn to confront foreign health care, I was praying I’d just start feeling better after my day of rest.
Luckily, when I woke up Friday morning, I did feel loads better, which was good because I didn’t have the choice to skip class – it was time for our midterm for methodology. I went into class armed with tissues and doped up on the French equivalent of Theraflu (which isn’t so effective, actually…it may be my vocabulary, but I haven’t found meds in France that are as good as the ones in the US – hopefully I’ll be healthy the rest of the time here and won’t find out, though). The exam is a bit of a blur, but nothing I can do about that now, so I’m trying not to worry until the exams are handed back to us. That may be this week, or in three weeks, since none of us are quite sure how the French system operates!
By 1pm, Roz, Caitlin, and I were waiting for the bus to the Aix TGV station to go to Paris. Unfortunately, by 1:30, we were still waiting for this bus. Once the bus came, we ended up stuck in traffic, took a different exit, got turned around, and were sitting in front of the train station where the bus driver wouldn’t open the doors. This decision was met with yells from the back of the bus: “Ouvrez la porte!” (open the door) was heard repeatedly along with other French obscenities, but my favorite was “Je sortirai par la fenêtre!” (I’m going to jump out the window!). Why we were being held, I don’t know, but we were eventually let off the bus, and we ran to catch the train, which we made just in time. During the ride, I realized it was the first time I’d taken the trip in daylight, and the French countryside did not disappoint! We saw plenty of small villages tucked into the hills on the west, and the ruins of what may have been castles or towers or maybe military structures – I really don’t know – sprinkled the foothills of the mountains to the east. Roz and I chatted the whole way up to Paris with high hopes for the week ahead of us.
Once in Paris, Caitlin went to find her French friend who she was staying the night with, and Roz and I went to meet her friend, Alex, who was kind enough to put us up for the night. We went straight to dinner with him, a few of his friends, his dad Tim, and a friend of his dad’s. I don’t remember the name of the restaurant, but I had one of the best burgers ever! (I wish I’d been journaling all week, because now that I’m sitting down to write about this, I’m having quite a bit of trouble remembering it all.) It was this incredible little place on the corner in the gay district in Paris, and the food was amazing, just like the service – our waiter is a friend of Tim’s and talked to us about his break dancing while showing us his “fresh” dance moves! Afterward, we went down the street to a club called Sept Étages (I think that was the name…) where we had a drink and talked before going next door to a really cool place called Yono. It’s a gay bar owned by this incredibly fun couple that can make the best Long Island iced tea I’ve ever had. The next time I go out in Paris, I would love to go back, because all the staff was friendly, the drinks were great, and the atmosphere and music were fun and welcoming, too.
Roz and I got talking to a few guys that sat down at our table, and it was nice to speak French in a social, non-academic setting. We probably spent a good solid thirty minutes talking with them until the group decided it was time to leave. At that point, we went followed every outside, and the guys followed us – which was when we saw that they had motorized scooters! And they let us ride them up and down the street. It was AWESOME. I believe the two guys we’d been talking to worked for the scooter company and were promoting the scooters, but we got to try one out, so I was a very happy camper. The last stop of the night was this snazzy little bistro/diner-type place where I had my first Croque monsieur, basically an open-faced grilled cheese with ham under the cheese. Delicious! And this was only the first night of encounters with incredible food.
Roz and I crashed at Alex’s and ended up sleeping in a bit later than we had planned. Our morning then consisted of brunch at another bistro kind of restaurant where I had an incredible chicken sandwich. It sounds simple, but the chucks of chicken, Dijon mustard, and fresh veggies on the sandwich, along with the fries, were a magical combination. After eating, we went straight to the Arc de Triomphe where we went up to the top to appreciate the view of all of Paris. The weather was much, much better than the last time I was in Paris with Ole, Leelou, and Max (thank goodness!), but it was still a bit cloudy and foggy. Even still, we could look out and see Montmartre, the highest point in Paris, and the Eiffel Tower. Sometimes the top of the Eiffel Tower was blurred by the clouds, and it looked kind of creepy and cool as the clouds passed over it. We had to part with Alex, his friends, and Tim when we came down from the tower to catch our flight, but I can’t tell them thanks enough for putting us up and for taking us to so many cool places in such a short amount of time! I’m so appreciative of everything!
Roz, Caitlin, and I caught the métro to the bus to the airport and thus the second leg of our epic journey began! We touched down in Trapani, Sicily around 10pm, and it was one of the roughest landings I’ve ever experienced. Good grief. Since we flew Ryan air, the tickets were really, really cheap. The tradeoff? There are no free snacks or drinks, you’re only allowed a single carry-on bag, the landing frankly scared the crap out of me, and I’ve heard from friends that they’ve been on planes with duck-taped windows. The baggage proved to be difficult for me to handle, but I managed to get a week’s worth of clothes and toiletries into my LLBean backpack and keep it under 10kilos. Whew. The plane we got on seemed to be in pretty good shape, and the seats were rather comfortable even. Still, that landing was frightening. But not so frightening that I’ll cough up the extra hundred+ Euros to fly a different airline. Oh the priorities of a traveling college student.
We took a taxi from the airport to Paceco where we were actually staying, and we got our first taste of Italian driving. Again, good grief! It felt like we were in a racecar with how fast he drove, and there were little Vespas zipping around us. He paused where there were stop signs, just enough to make sure there was no one coming up the cross streets. We did make it to the bed and breakfast, the Aldebaran, in one piece, and we were pleasantly surprised to find a very nice room for three! There were sweet, fruity biscuits left for us on the desk, and the guy at the counter told us how to get into town to find food.
So, we ventured into the town square where nearly everything was closed up, even though it was a Saturday night. We ended up finding a small pizzeria where we all ordered our own pizza and of course traded pieces with each other. I’ll never look at pizza the same way. My salmon, tomato, and multiple cheese pizza was SO good. We don’t speak any Italian, and the waiter didn’t speak English, but we were able to communicate that we wanted a red wine too, so he brought the house wine, which was also incredible, though I couldn’t tell you what kind it was. The cheese was perfectly melty, the ingredients – especially the tomatoes – were fresh and crisp, and the bread was fluffy but crunchy and delicious. I mean, wow. Prepare for some more raving and drooling over the food.
We went home to the Aldebaran full and completely happy with the first night of the Sicilian beginning of our vacation. On Sunday morning, we got directions to the bus stop, though between our lack of Italian and the man’s lack of English at the desk of the B&B, it was difficult to understand where to go, though he was incredibly kind and eager to help. We eventually got to the square, which was also just beautiful, right there in the middle of this small, quiet town. We'd gone through it the night before, but without proper lighting, it was hard to appreciate it.
Unfortunately, the bus stop we found didn’t seem to go to Palermo like we wanted. We approached a few older men walking through the square and were discouraged when we first realized they didn’t speak any English whatsoever, but they were so unbelievably helpful. They walked with us to the bus stop and explained to the other man waiting there where we wanted to go. Through basically gestures and sign language, they let us know that we had to go to Trapani to catch a bus to Palermo and that it would arrive in forty minutes. We sat waiting with the other man who didn’t speak English either, and when the bus came, the group of older men came back to speak to the bus driver to make sure that we would get where we were going. How nice and kind to go out of your way to help traveling strangers!
We arrived in Trapani around midday, and the bus driver directed us to the bus stop to Palermo. We waited again before eventually boarding and making it into Palermo a few hours later. During the ride, however, we were treated to some of the prettiest countryside and mountains I've ever seen. While some of the terrain we saw could have been fields in Indiana or Ohio, the mountains in the background and the tidy long rows of what we assumed to be olive trees in some of the fields couldn't have been more different!
It wasn't until we pulled into Palermo city proper that we realized we had no idea which stop we wanted, nor where in the world our B&B would be from where we got off the bus. Roz was the trooper and made her way up to the bus driver (who didn’t speak English either) and found a wonderful Italian woman who not only told us which stop to take, but got off the bus with us and walked us a good half-mile toward our destination. The genuine kindness of people truly amazes me at times.
Thank you, Italy, for renewing my faith in the human race. Not that I'd been particularly doubting it, but it’s always nice to be reassured. After being in France where we’re told to be cautious about making eye contact (because it makes people uncomfortable and makes us potential targets, since we’re American), it was so refreshing to be in such an openly friendly country where people are eager to help, regardless of whether you speak any of the language at all. It’s not that French people are unfriendly (as a lot of stereotypes may lead you to believe), but the culture does seem to be less inviting and less open to strangers in the community, as far as I can tell. The few times that I’ve managed to break the initial barrier and get talking to someone in France, they’ve been just as friendly and welcoming as anyone we met in Italy, that I met in Australia, or you might meet in the US, it’s just that first chance to talk to someone that is a little harder to come by in France.
I’ll leave my story here in Palermo, on Day Three of our Italian adventure, since this is getting to be rather lengthy and because I have a midterm on Thursday to study for! I know, who can think about midterms when there are beaches, Italian police officer interactions, sunrises over mountains and monuments, and more to tell about from the rest of the week? I allowed myself the night to catch up on letters back to Abby, BRoy, and Kathleen, and this post, but tomorrow is all business. Thursday brings my first lit. midterm, as well as my Expression Orale midterm-recitation, but I’ll do my best to catch up on the rest of the break after that! Then of course, I’ll be in Toulouse this coming weekend visiting a friend from high school, I have two more midterms Monday and Tuesday, and then Jenn and Brooke will be arriving Thursday, but somewhere in there, I’ll get cracking on the rest of winter break. Thanks in advance for bearing with me, and I hope this finds you all as happily busy as I am! Love and miss you all, wherever you may be!
Here and there,
Kiley
Sounds like you're having a wonderful time, Kiley! I'm enjoying your posts.
ReplyDelete:-)
Nancy