pictures!
blake took some fabulous shots
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2283648&l=ca276&id=2709650 (general roma)
and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2283669&l=e2067&id=2709650 (5lb sparkle shirt photo shoot)

do not worry, AK, i am definitely coming home for christmas. i have a first class ticket for a delta flight from rome to atlanta on dec.15. you and the kids can pick me up from the airport! sure you're thrilled i designated you to do that job

anywhoo

ok, so udine is kind of lame. i have decided to take the day (or...evening at this point) and go to gorizia, that town about half an hour from here where they had the food festival i.e. i met cute boys.
i am hoping that the people there, who seemed a bit more edgy and lively then the people in udine, will befriend me. because i am getting very bored.
ok, ill write later, i promise

gah, everything has been going so fast!
blake came and visited me in udine and we had a blast. the myth here in this city is that there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to see...
we totally proved everyone wrong. our night out friday in udine was classic...we made friends with french boys (one whom i adore), a russian, kids from spain and portugal, one guy from italy who was born in north carolina, more italians, and a romanian girl. this wild, wonderlust-filled pack of udine pirates roamed the streets until 7am. blake fell in love with a girl from spain and picked her entire plants out of a flower pot, i sang songs to the french boy in massacred italian. we walked home finally at 7am, starving and desperately in need of water. we walked over to the wonderful cafe by my dorm, where the man from positano and the romanian girl work. benji was inside, setting up for the day. i banged on the windows and cried, "benji, ho fame! ho sette!", and he laughed, and opened the door, and made us warm paninis and gave us asprin and diet coke and let us watch MTV2 until we felt sleepy enough to go home. we slept latish saturday, and then made our way to venice for the customary one-night-stop in that city. blake and i agreed that venice is really a fantastic place, but definitely the best place to end your trip to italy, because you dont want to stay there. one night is quite enough, thank you.
i left blake at the venezia bus station that morning, and i boarded a train to casarsa, a town about 30 minutes from udine where simone lives. simone was having a bar b q with his family at his house, and i had been invited, which was exciting. his house was adorable, right on a main road through the little town. there were tents set up in his back yard and his mother and aunts were in the kitchen making fabulous baked goods and polenta cakes and pastas, while his dad and uncles were outside drinking homemade grappa and cooking like 10 different types of meat over the grill. we drank white wine that simone made himself, and listened to fun music that im sure he picked up in california, and the italians were all incredibly jovial and adorable, and the ones who could speak english tried to engage me, and i tried horribly to engage the italians in their language. really ends up being so stupid, because when i do finally attenpt to talk to someone in italian, they end up staring at me, and then repeating what i asked them in english. like, the only time i talk to someone they had known english all along, and then the whole thing is just ridiculous. but i am trying, damnit, and i will succeed.
the party was great, the food was INCREDIBLE, the homemade grappa was superb.
on the way home i got a call from frederic, the french boy, who asked me to come out with him and his friend that evening. i went and met them and we had so much fun and i learned a few french phrases and now i am sad that frederic does not live in udine, but in AIX-IN-PROVENCE...totally unfair, all the way around...
interesting things are going on in my program. for one, no call was made alerting the people who own the organic farm that i was coming. as a result, i cannot come, becuase someone else is already there. when i found this out, i was shocked. what would i do?? naturally, simone took the reins. he made about 8 phone calls, and then finally walked me down to some man named zerbi's office. zerbi listened to why i was there, and scrtached his head and then said, "ok. this will we ok. come see me tomorrow". when i returned today, zerbi took me all over the campus, introducing me to about 10 different people, all of them somehow related to what it was i wanted to do: people who make cheese, people who make prosciutto, people who conduct classes on the traditions of italy, someone who teaches a class of food and culture in italy, horticulturalists, food scientists, etc. each one of them said of course, i was welcome to come work with them. so now i am set! really was mindblowing. also...i have been offered a position on an organic farm in TUSCANY in february, and another organic farm outside of venice in january...these will be live-on situations and will count as continuing my internship. i think, definitely, i am going to accept the offer.
also...i am speaking with someone tomorrow about signing up for spring semester, which runs from february until july, and taking my mandatory math and science, plus my last italian and another final elective, here in udine. i dont see why not. i only see why definitely. so, as long as i can work this out...im staying in italy! wish me luck...all my credits will transfer fine and ill get my loans and HOPE still...and i am not ready to leave. i am just getting started. i want to master this language and this culture and the opportunities that i have been presented with are just not something that i could pass up.
um...pictures!!!!
we have great great photos from roma, but i will have to post them in a bit...and heres some from udine...beware, they are pretty much just blake acting like a crazy person, uprooting flowers and breaking into cars...and the bar b q, etc
www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2439605&l=ac061&id=4913936

"puicitade" is friulian for "pig killing celebration"

oh my heavens, it is actually HOT in udine today! how wonderful. first day ive actually felt justified in wearing my flip flops; the looks i am getting now are envious.
i had the final exam for my italian course today...i hope i did ok. i studied all last night at the pizzeria down the block. the sweet man from positano, benji, helped me all evening, bringing me cups of tea and tasty snacks and correcting my work over my shoulder. i think he enjoyed helping me, and this morning when i went in to grab a cup of coffee on the way to school he gave me a capuccino for free, and wished me "fortuna" on my exam.
yesterday i started to buck up about being back in udine.
i went to the dentist yesterday morning, to get my tooth situation fixed. the dentist was a very kind man with salt and pepper hair and blue eyes. he spoke wonderful english, and refered to my tooth as "you're tiny problem", in an effort, i think, to help me remain calm. i felt very safe in his hands, i think because he reminded me of dr. gentry...good smelling and gentle and obviously loaded but in a way that assures you that he makes lots of money for a reason. instead of numbing my mouth out with a six foot needle like they do in the states, they used this tiny little gun, about the size of a glue gun, with a needle maybe 2 centimeters long. the needle was put into my gum and then the gun used like, vibrations to send the novicane out to the rest of my mouth. i lost all feeling in about 5 seconds.
so now i can eat again and it doesnt even look like theres a filling, hoorah!
i spent the rest of the day yesterday sipping coffee and doing busy work for simone, positively mind-numbing grape math.
i was suppose to help barbara in the lab today, but simone and luigi and gabrielle all decided that it was much more important for me to go with them to the vineyards for the harvest. ive kind of been taken under the wing of these sweet grape scientists. i go with them to eat in the cafeteria (the awesome italian cafeteria, mind you, with a full bar and carpaccio and other fancy things), and i feel super cool sitting with a bunch of cute italian boys. i am trying to get them to speak italian at all times, but they are too sweet and forget and ask me adorable questions about america or music or food in their perfectly butchered english (simone speaks nearly perfect english, though).
turns out the one guy gabrielle, who i think is kind of a higher-up around here, has a big party at the end of every november at his parents house, where everyone comes togetehr for the slaughtering of a pig, and then they make salami and prosciutto, etc!! simone told me about this and i squealed with delight and told them that such a thing was my main goal in italy. today on the way to lunch, luigi pointed to me and said to gabrielle, "she want to keel your pig". turns out the killing of the pig is actually kind of an event. you have to actaully capture the pig by hand and strangle it or something (definitely, as the swiss boys told me, not as humane a killing as they do in switzerland). simone said his family does their pig killing party in january, and i am so so tempted to just stick it out over here through christmas to participate in that.
blake is here in udine now...he just called me from a taxi cab to have me tell the taxi driver where to take him...
im hoping that we can go out tonight and find some fun people in this town. the boys here are incredibly good looking but so so shy, no one will talk to me. am determinded to make friends...
anyway, all is well. ill have blake upload the fabulous pictures from roma!!!

my 5-day vaca to roma with blake was just...priceless. that city is my happy place, my heart, my favorite thing about earth (other then annabelle).
god, what did we even do? what do you do in roma? blake and i walked the city, sipped espressos, made friends, saw the sistine chapel, ate fantastic food, laughed constantly, contemplated higher powers, considered catholicism, made campari a regular fixture (as all good romans do), had lessons in roman slang, spent a bit more money then we had, and sang moulin rouge love songs, as promised, to the wonderful antonio.
i thought blake was going to have a heart attack around every turn. the city took his breath away, as it does mine, every time. and the italians are just so so wonderful. they are alot more...chatty then i had realised. they are very sweet and encouraging and eager to talk and help. and more then that, theyre just cool. blake and i decided that even the sort of sleazy ones were awesome, with they fancy levis and cigarettes, and its just such a joy and a privledge to be in so different a society, with people so genuinely foreign but absolutely relatable.
i'm just so frustrated with my italian. i want to speak it so badly, but i have such a hard time understanding it when it is spoken to me in a regular pace. my brain still tries to grasp at each individual word, conjugating and translating, and by the time im through figuring out what was said its been like, 5 minutes, and whoever it is im talking to just starts speaking in english. i need to get some tapes or something, or just refuse to be pampered by the always-kind italians and force them to just speak to me in italian and leave it at that. i dont think i realised how badly i would want to know the language, how desperate i am to be able to actually speak to these people. my respect for italians overall is enormous; my respect for their culture grows everyday. and at first i wanted to know the language because its was beautiful and fun, but now i want to know it because i want to know IT. whatever IT is. i want to know it all, all about everything.
on sunday night blake and i had a roman fashion shoot. i lugged that amazingly ridiculous copper-sequined shirt of my mothers (the one she wore to fancy dinner parties around 1986)all the way to rome in my purse (sacrificing space for other, more practical clothes i.e. sweaters). blake had brought his fancy camera and tripod to europe with him, an endeavour i admire him for. i let him take the reigns as photographer for this trip, and his shots were great. anyway, sunday night i got all dressed up in that shirt and we went around rome, me posing this way and that, blake taking shot after shot. the quote of the night was "people think im marc jacobs and youre a starlett", because, with the tripod and my bizarre shirt, we looked like professionals, and people were stopping to watch us, staring at us, clearly thinking that we were doing something important (we were!). we got shots in campo de fiori, the pantheon, the trevi fountains, etc, and by the end of the night i didnt feel so much like i did in kindergarten at the thanksgiving play, i felt kind of free and excited, and we had such fun just roaming the city documenting ourselves.
monday we went to the sistine chapel, which, of course, was terrific. i remembered the actual SC, but not that fantastic hallway that leads to it, full of all those painted maps of the different regions of italy. now that i know the area a little better, i found the maps fascinating! how could they even conceive a visual so acurate and lifelike? i found udine and had blake take my picture pointing to it.
in the mornings we would wake up in antonios glorious apartment, and hear the sounds from the street and see the sun shining across the yellow stucco walls of the building next door, and no matter how late we had been out, we got up out of bed bright and early. we woke up happy there, excited for the day, and i would literally walk to the window, and stick my head out, and say "buongiorno, roma!". then wed go out, and have a coffee, and take a walk...
in the evenings we cooked in antonios kitchen...the first night i made indian food with spices that i had bought at the market in venice. the second, we very frugally had left overs.
i took blake (like, every night) to the cookbook bar, which is full of wonderful roman boys who make my heart flutter. blake and i would hang out for hours, discussing politics and cinema with the romans, being goofy and singing songs and watching the locals and tourists alike walk the tangly, cobblestone streets of trastevere. the owner of the cookbook bar, alessio, who is a licensed somellier and a roman by birth, was so, so incredible to us. he recommended places for us to eat (sadly, when we went to the restaurant, it was necessary to have a reservation, at least for tourists), and told us all about the mafia, and introduced us to all the friends of his who straggle into the tiny bar throughout the night. we had such fun in trastevere, that without even trying wed suddenly find that it was 3am, and everyone else in the streets had gone home, and we had the place to ourselves.
antonio came back to rome from siene monday night, which was really exciting because hes fantastic, and i wanted blake to meet him. we took him out to dinner at a little restaurant in the jewish ghetto, where we had fried artichokes (note: sheryl! friend artichokes are the best. we will make some immediately upon my return to suwanee. so excited!) and linguine with clams in manner of john gotti and a house wine from montepulciano. the streets of the jewish ghetto were quiet and sparse and dark, and it felt very authentic and roman. the last night i cooked dinner at the apartment, which is something that i promised to do for antonio as totally-less-then-adequate repayment for his kindness. i made chicken breasts stuffed with marinated carcioffi (artichokes), blue cheese, and parsley, wrapped in prosciutto and lemon, cooked in white wine, parsley, and butter...i served it with pan tossed zucchini and oricchiette with arugula and frech tomatoes. antonio ate all of his dinner, which was wonderful- i love boys with big appetites.
antonio is so increidble, i really cant get over what i gift he is, how fated finding him on craigslist has been. hes so genuine and smart and peaceful, and he loves books and music and history, and hes one of the sweetest people i have ever known. we took him out to the cookbook bar, which was fun, and we ran through the streets singing 'blue moon'.
my flight for venice left at 6:30am this morning. blake and i stayed out in trastevere till 3. i was suppose to leave the apartment at 4. at 5am, blake rolled over and said, "um. its 5. dont you need to go?". silently, not in a panic what so ever, i got dressed, grabbed my bag, and left the apartment. it was still pitch black outside. i ran full speed to the taxi stand on via emanuelle, exclaimed "Ciampino! molto tardi! pronto!" to the taxi driver, and that man drove like a bat out of hell through the night streets of rome, going probobly 75mph, making it to ciampino airport in record time, but still managing to swing me by the colluseum, which was lit up grandly in the pre-dawn light. best taxi ride of my life, despite the sadness that comes over me everytime i leave that city.
so now i am back in udine. im trying to not sink into gloom. i do love it here, but roma...roma! anyway, simone and the wonderful friends i made at the pizzeria down the street make this place worthwhile. theres work to be done, and my italian course is finished on friday (??)and blake and i will go to slovenia this weekend, and then on suday i am going to a barbq at simones parents house which will be great.
i love you all...

roma ti amo

yesterday was a truly marvelous day.
as i said, i ran into rachael ray and her hubby in campo de fiori. shortly after i got over my fit of giggles at this unlikely encounter, i turned around to face the La Carbonara building, and there was blake, weighed down by his 70lb backpack, looking flushed and exhausted. we embraced and i took his camera bag and led him toward antonios apartment, the whole while blake exclaiming, "this is incredible! look at this place!". i was thirlled with his positive response to rome so far, and my mood went from jubilent to ecstatic.
once we got to antonios,we had a celebratory campari, and blake settled onto the futon for a brief nap (his plane had left berlin at 6am, so he had not slept the night before). while he was sleeping,i went out to the market to shop for vegetables for dinner. the cooking situation at my dorm in udine is dismal at best. there is a ginormous kitchen in the basement,a huge warehouse sized room, that contains 2 tiny electric stove burners, a spaghetti pot, a collander, and a small wooden spoon that one might,say, serve an hourdeurve-sized tasting of caviar in. this is all. oh, and a tiny sink with no soap or sponge. needless to say, despite my best efforts, i have not been able to cook very much over the last month. even though antonios kitchen is the size of a broom closet and also only has 2 small electric stove tops, it is equipped with sharp knives of all sized, cutting boards, silverware, and everything else necessary to make a great meal. at the market i bought lots of fresh vegetables: eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, snow peas, carrots, parsley and cilantro. i went to the butchers and got two huge chicken breasts, went to the cheese shop and bought a bit of parmesean, and at the grocery store i bought a 3euro bottle of delicious white wine from montepulciano.
i woke blake up when i got home,and we went out exploring. it was a rainy stormy day in rome, the first one i think i have ever experienced. we decided that such weather in rome is a treat, as the dark sky makes the city look even more daunting,even more severe and beautiful. we went to the pantheon and saw the rain falling in through the hole in the ceiling, and to the spanish steps, where we huddled under an umbrella and watched the tourists skitter through the puddles at the foot of the stairs.
that evening we hung out at the apartment, waiting for the rain to clear, watching moulin rouge and cooking dinner. when the stars began to show through the clouds, we began to get ourselves dressed for a night out in trastevere. it was during this period of after-dinner wine glasses and outkast-on-the-stereo and lipstick application (for me, not blake), that i decided that seeing racheal ray in campo de fiori was funny enough to warrant ntoifying my favorite celebrity gossip sight, dlisted.com. dlisted is written by this vicious young queen in new york city, a guy named michael k, whose positively hilarious, mercilous attack on celebrities and commentary about the entertainment world is one of my truest pleasures in life. i read dlisted almost every day. i went to the website, got his address, and wrote in an email: sighted! rachael ray and her husband in campo de fiori etc etc. rachael ray is on michael k's "dispise list" (most everyone is; the only nice things ive heard him say were in regards to paul newman, REM, natalie portman, brad pitt,etc...good, or at least not totally obnoxious, celebrities). anyway, i wrote him about my celebrity sighting, and about 45 minutes when i went to check my email before leaving the apartment, i found that MICHAEL K FROM DLISTED HAD WRITTEN ME BACK!!!!!!!! it was a brief, bitchy message, and one that i will cherish forever:

In Italy? UGH! Gross. Thanks Eleanor!

x

when i read it i shreiked loudly, frightening a pigeon that had been resting on the roof of the building across from ours. i yelled, "oh my god,he wrote me back, i just got an email from michael k! hes my most favorite homo!"
blake thought this was hilarious.
i was hopping around the apartment in excitement, clapping my hands and giggling madly when my cell phone rang. it said 'private number' so i assumed that it was john or someone. i answered "hello!!!!!" ready to relay the news of my double brush with fame, but the person on the other end of the line said, "oh, uh, hello!! this is brian!" at first i thought it was my father. was confused. finally figured out that it was my old friend brian davies, who had been blakes very good friend when he was living in beijing. when i came to stay with blake in beijing, brian had hung out with us all the time, and he became one of blake and my most colorful life characters, and someone who we will both love forever and speak of fondly, no matter how long we may go without seeing him again, if we ever even do. i was thrilled to hear from brian, "a rare pleasure!" as blake described it, and we chatted for a while, it finally coming out that blake had given him my number and told him to call (i was like, did he call my mom or something?) anyway, the combination of my dlisted success and the call from darling brian and the fact that it was our first night in rome was all just so wonderful. blake and i went down to trastevere, which was teeming with life and laughter as usual. i took him to my most favorite haunt, the cookbook bar, where i was greeting with cheek kisses from the beautiful alessio, the owner. blake and i hung out there all evening, chatting with alessio and my dear friend estevan who had been so sweet to me my time before in rome. people who i had met before kept coming in and greeting me warmly, and the conversation and wine was ust wonderful and warm, despite the uncharictaristically cold weather outside. blake and i walked home late that evening,munching on paninis and avoiding racing mopeds. blake and i agreed that it had been one of our very best days, and a fantastic beginning to what is sure to be one of out best adventures ever.

ahahahaha. this morning while waiting for blake to arrive in campo de fiori,a cab pulled up beside me. exiting the cab: that chubby food-fraud RACHAEL RAY and her short husband. they commenced to walk about taking photographs of vegetables. blah.
anyway blake is here now and he loves it! i took him to the pantheon and the rain was falling in through the hole in the top and it was magnificent.

have returned! after much hassle and anticipation, i am back in the eternal city.
antonio is absolutely just... a gift from God. i emailed him about 2 weeks ago, and very dramatically promised that if he would let me and blake stay here for a few nights we would not only cook him fabulous meals (including FRIED CHICKEN...stay tuned for that) but we would sing him Moulin Rouge love songs (he loves moulin rouge, as do i) and make him laugh. so he agreed, and at 10am this morning, 3 hours after climbing out of my evil, ungracious sleeper-train-from-venice bed, antonio and i embraced and did the cute italian cheek pecks and i came back to my favorite apartment in the world.

blake has been in berlin this past month on a journalist-convention type trip where they pay for very smart, inquisitive people to go to deutschland and get educated about the countrys history. he had a week off between the convention and his plane ticket home, so he agreed to come to italy to visit me (i say agree because blake is a little bit of a snob about italy...bedbugs, misogynists, not germany, etc...). we are going to stay in rome for a few days, and then i will return to udine for school, and meet up with him in venice next saturday.
i left for rome yesterday afternoon. i had a 7 o'clock flight out of venice on ryanair, so i figured getting to venice 2 hours before my flight would be pleanty of time. unfortunately, i am a bit of a jump-the-gun-type non-researcher, and forgot that there are 2 airports out of venice: marco polo, the big one, which has busses running to-and-from every 15 minutes for the 5 minute ride, and treviso. which is in Treviso. an hour away. and has one bus that runs every hour. so when i arrived in venice at 5:04, i had missed the 5 o'clock bus. at 6 my bus finally arrived. and at 7 we got to the airport, in time to see my plane take off without me. was. sad. i went to the info desk and was advised that i could either a) sleep on a bench and then pay 90euro for the 8am flight, or b) take a night train from venice. a night train sounded romantic enough, and certainly cheaper. so at 11:30, after a beautiful evening walking around venice and watching an orchestra perform in st.marks square, i hopped into my 2-feet wide cot in a train car with 3 women from napoli and managed to fall asleep. wasnt too terribly bad, actually, though the blanket was even thinner then the matress and i had to chose between covering my butt or my knees.
arrived in rome 7am. breakfasted at a cafe in campo de fiori. washed face, armpits, bangs in sink in bathroom of cafe where women kept coming in and peeing in a hole in the ground behind me, changed into a clean dress, and sauntered to meet antonio.
apartment is just how i remember, though antonio has taken to taping up inspirational messages to himself on random surfaces. is good; i read them and feel...inspired.
so now i am here and in love all over again.
oh, but, oh no! aside from it being my favorite place and blake being able to come etc, i totally returned to rome to find the jude law boy. but today, when i strategically positioned myself behind a thin metal pole in an effort to hide myself in manner of an osterich, and stared into the cafe where he works, he was not there! fear the worst. will be so distraught if i cannot find him again and show him how composed and alluring i am these days...oh well, anyway, greeks are silly.
so now it is evening and i have the apartment and, in a sense, the city, to myself. blake arrives tomorrow morning at 9 (trying to give him directions to campo de fiori was hilarious...he is so use toberlin, orderly, straight lines and road maps...i was like "just sort of walk up and around and to the right, in the generally opposite direction of where the sun will be rising, and if you hit the tiber youve gone too far"), so i will meet him at a cafe and say "ciao" and other cute things. i think tonight im going to go into trastevere if the rain holds off...