After giving a quick glance to past posts, I've realized something rather embarrassing. While I now blog from my fancy laptop instead of ancient cellphone, and have all the conveniences of a true full keyboard and mouse, my spelling and grammatical errors have not been dramatically reduced on this blog. I hereby declare, as my New Year's resolution for 2013, to spend just a few more seconds reviewing my work before I hit the every-tempting "Publish" button.
Regardless, I'm just back from my holiday adventuring and I'd like to share a bit with you before I retreat into piles of case studies, problem sets and lecture notes in advance of my impending final exams.
I really didn't have any special plans for the holidays. Really. No plans. I was going to stay home and study. Alas, my roommate thought that plan pathetic and sad, so she invited me along with a friend to her home for Christmas. We intended to take the train down and back, but our hasty preparations were foiled when we realized all the cheap tickets were taken and our only options were to spend 9 hours standing or pay a quarter of my rent for a one-way ticket. "No thanks," said we. But did we stay home? Hardly. We found an Italian ride-sharing site on the internet, called up a stranger and met him on a street corner. He was an hour late, but aside from that, we had no problems. He drove us 800 kilometres to Lecce and we booked into a guesthouse at 3 a.m. (my roommate's house was crowded and her village boring, the guesthouse belonged to her friend).
We slept in the next day, then hit the town to explore. Lecce was gorgeous. The sun was bright, the sky blue, the weather warm and the buildings dated back to ancient Greece. It was heaven. It also featured some interesting juxtapositions of Italian history. For instance, one piazza was home to an ancient coliseum bordered by a giant block from the Fascist school of architecture from which Mussolini used to give speeches. Perhaps even more disconcerting was that the coliseum was playing host to the town creche scene, complete with tiny houses and large, creepy dolls. In terms of holiday decorations, I much preferred the standard strings of lights that hung across the alleys.
My roommate fetched us early the next day, on the morning of Christmas Eve, to bring us to a family volleyball tournament in her hometown. I've never had so much fun getting hit in the face. Her family quickly realized how poor my hand-eye coordination and upper-body strength are, so I was relegated to the back row to serve. I managed this position reasonably well, but by the end of the tournament my right hand was red, swollen and felt broken. I was happy my team emerged victorious, but I was more happy that the whole debacle was over and my injuries were limited.
The game was followed by a trip to my roommate's country house, in the olive groves just outside of town. She and her American boyfriend (from, unbelievably, Buffalo) made a Mexican feast for a huge crowd of friends and family. It was great fun to get to know everyone, play some parlor games, ride around on a mini-ATV, work on my Italian and share a few hearty laughs over all the things that get lost in translation. All that was almost as fun as sunning myself up on the roof. It is so cloudy and foggy here in the north, I had almost forgotten what the sun felt like.
Back in the city that night, I went to midnight mass at the duomo (main cathedral). It was all in Italian, so I barely understood it, but the beauty of Catholicism is that the mass is always the same, so regardless of the language barrier it was still pretty familiar. The building was also spectacular, so much so that I didn't really mind having stand way off in a corner. That just gave me more freedom to look around and inspect all the amazing artwork.
Christmas Day was spent back in Veglia, my roommate's hometown. We had an enormous lunch at her grandmother's, followed by some very bad caroling and other shenanigans.
The next day, I could practically hear my textbooks calling out to me, so we left the pretty city of the South to head north. Again, we hitchhiked. This time it did not go as smoothly as hoped for. Our first lift was just a terrible driver, so we abandoned ship. Our second failed to stop at our destination. Our third and final ride was lovely. They have a daughter in America right now, so we bonded a little bit before they dropped us off in home, sweet Bologna.
I was back in town for just a couple nights before I got a call from the same woman I had just traveled to Lecce with.
"Want to go to the mountains?"
"Sure. When?"
"Tomorrow."
...
"Okay."
And that's how I found myself in the Dolomites. We wised up and took the train this time. A friend of hers met us at the station and took us to his home in Predazzo. My friend wasn't up for skiing, but I thought it might be fun. In fact, it was more terrifying than fun, but I'm glad I did it. I'm a terrible downhill skier, but I finally graduated to the red trails on this expedition. Maybe if I don't wait another decade between ski trips in the future I will someday advance to the black. Maybe. Maybe I'll fall off a chairlift before I get the chance. One disconcerting element of the ski trip was a patch of blood on the snow directly underneath a main lift. Thank heavens it wasn't mine, but it was good reminder that skiing is really a dangerous sport and people are crazy to do it. Crazy.
Back at the ranch in Predazzo, we had homemade pumpkin tortelli that sorely tempted me to stay in the Alps for another day or so, but once again, finals lured me home to Bologna.
I spent New Year's Eve in Piazza Maggiore, watching a giant mechanical monkey burn. It was bizarre, but apparently an Italian tradition. Actually, the tradition is to burn a witch. Bologna burnt a monkey. There are some things I cannot explain.
To back up a bit, my birthday was right before all the holiday madness. It was lovely. I got dressed up and went to a fancy dinner the night before with some good friends, then had a delightful lunch the day of with another friend, gave a presentation in my international law class, feasted on a homemade pumpkin pie from yet another friend, attended a lecture and then skedaddled off to the opera house to see Verdi's Il Trovatore. The day ended with wine, prosciutto and chocolate at a nearby ostaria. Each year is becoming more and more difficult to top!
