Italy! (days 231-242)

hey world! guess who is back from italy...your favorite blog writer jamie of course! hope you all didn't miss me too much while i was gone. i had a ton of fun going around italy with everyone from school, i'm super glad i made the decision to go with them! i guess i'll sort of give you an overview of what we did along with some pictures, but in general i can that we saw TONS of things, ate LOTS of gelato, pasta, and pizza, and especially ENJOYED the sun and atmosphere of historic, educational, beautiful italy. so here we go!
day 1: left belgium after dinner time and got on the bus to head to italy! basically slept the entire night on the bus, took a few rest stops and noticed that one rest stop was the same one we went to with my first family on ski vacation..odd?
day 2: arrived in italy mid-morning..lots of italian traffic after our breakfast stop, but eventually arrived in PISA! who knew that there is more to Pisa than the leaning tower? we saw the tower, toured a church and some other important buildings that i don't remember..but most importantly, i got my typical tourist photo i've always wanted :)

after pisa we rode yet again with the bus to Montecatini where our hotel was. this Montecatini place is where i enjoyed my first italian gelato...a deadly start to my ice cream eating filled adventure...

day 3: Florence, Italy! saw just about every important square, church, building, and statue (david included) or as many possible things as we could in one day. pity that we were only there for one day, i think it was my favorite out of them all!

had to walk up so many stairs to get to the top of some church and see this view!

apparently some known little shops on a bridge? cute!

legend says touching this thing gives me good luck..we'll see about that
day 4: Siena, Italy! two hour bus ride there, the another 7 hours in the bus later that afternoon! we weren't long in this town, but it was cute. saw an important square and a church then had a picnic in the sun (fresh mozarella and tomatoes included...mmm)!

apparently my shorts were too short, because i had to wear this silly throw away skirt that they gave me to go in this church..haha trade off for such nice weather!

day 5: Pompeii, Italy! this is the place where Mt. Vesuvius totally demolished everything way back when, but everything was somehow preserved through the ash and then they found it again..so we spent most of the day looking at all the ruins, it was interesting but very warm..good thing there's ice cream to fix that!

wooo for old ruins from houses! check out the cool main bedroom i'm in..haha

more ruins and the volcano. so then later in the day we rode the bus about 4 hours to our hotel in rome..boring bus.
day 6: Rome, Italy! lots and lots of walking, some bad pizza for lunch, lots and lots of churches, buildings, statues, fountains, but the best part it that it was sunday...so..I SAW THE POPE!

check the vatican and whatnot in the background..nice eh?

and theres the Pope! coming out of his office to say hello in so many different languages!

throwing a coin and making a wish with girls from my class in the Trevi Fountain!

and finally the spanish stairs.
day 7: Rome, Italy. saw everything dealing with "old rome"..so lots and lots of ruins! as the main attraction you would automatically assume the colosseum, right? but NO! it was (*&%$ing) CLOSED! because there was an exhibit inside or something. so we only saw the outside. guess that mean's i'll have to come back again in my lifetime, eh? but for the rest it was just old ruins, churches, and a museum..

day 8: Rome, Italy (still..). all we did was go to the Vatican Museum then sit on the bus to ride to Assisi that night. i did get to see the Sistine Chapel though, so that was cool..check out Michelangelo's neat ceiling!

followed by St. Peter's Basilica..such a big place! it was huge!

and then some gelato and some newly bought sandals. sort of fitting for rome, isnt it?

day 9: Assisi, Italy! Nice relaxing day in the quaint yet touristic town of Assisi. We saw St Francis Basilica and the Basilica of St Clare. The afternoon was really relaxing, we walked up a big hill to a castle looking thing then laid in the sun drawing the whole afternoon.

day 10: Ravenna, Italy. left our hotel in Assisi and rode 3 hours with the bus to Ravenna, where we visited yet another church and then had really thick noodles(or worms?) for lunch. actually, pasta is just an appetizer in italy...don't even get me started about how i never want to eat spaghetti, pizza, or ice cream ever again! ah!

day 11: Venice, Italy! we stayed in a super weird hotel on the sea, so the following morning we didn't have to sit in the bus forever to get a boat to venice. when i say super weird, i say that because the entire bathroom was a shower..there was a shower head/hose in the bathroom and no actual shower. so odd! but anyways, for our last day we went to Venice. This was my 3rd time in Venice and i've decided i really like it. The other two times were in the heat of July and it was just a lot more pleasant without smelling stinky warm canals and sweaty tourists and pigeons. We did a walking tour around a few important things then we had the rest of the day free. i went with a few girls from my class and had a panini for lunch, bought a few things, ate some ice cream, then stopped in the hard rock cafe for some ice tea before we left to get the boat then go back on the bus.

day 12: back in belgium! we rode the whole night with the bus back to Turnhout, Belgium. we got here this morning but what made my morning (besides eating belgian french fries again...that was more like afternoon though) was what was out the bus window this morning as i was just waking up. hot air balloons! and lots of them! there were like 12 in the sky all over and it was just so pretty! aww...

A part of me will really miss Belgium when i'm gone..things like hot air balloons are just things i don't see much of at home, haha. but i'm content with knowing i've seen and experienced so many things this year that i will never forget and will always be thankful for! and met so many people too! ah! it has all been very nice. so that was my trip to Italy. i hope you read to the end, enjoyed the pictures, and didn't miss me too much while i was away :) goodnight!

230!

Buon giorno! just practicing my italian ya know..because tomorrow night i get on the bus to go to ITALY! neat eh? i'll be sure and keep a journal and take lots of pictures, so i can accurately update my blog when i'm back. wouldn't want to miss a thing on here, plus everyone always forgets things anyways and my blog is super handy because everything is written down as i go through my day every night. must love technology! but as much as i love technology i do find it a little sad that i wont have my computer with me. seems i've depended a little too much on my macbook this year! so with that i will say that i'm gone tomorrow the 5th and back saturday the 16th! it's like a "senior trip" organized by the school during the easter vacation, but its a little earlier for us for some reason..beat the holiday rush? who knows. either way i'll be gone, so sincere apologies for not providing you with your daily reading material!

now on to today..nothing too exciting actually! i went with my class the whole day (really, the whole day. 8:30am-9pm) as they recorded a song they wrote in a recording studio/somebody's house that has a recording room. i think it turned out nicely, and if you listen really closely you can hear me playing tambourine, haha!! the rest of the time was pretty boring, i took a nap outside on a picnic bench for at least an hour. other than that, with our spare time a couple girls decided it would be a good idea to go to the cookie factory a block away (you could smell cookies the WHOLE DAY! i could never live there i'd eat too many cookies from always smelling it i think..) and so we walked there and they tried to buy cookies but apparently factories are not the same as stores! so no luck. but the spirea bushes were blooming and i made someone take my picture. spring is here! how much longer till ours bloom in south dakota? i bet i'll be home when they do!

so that was my day. sorry to be leaving you for so long! it should be a nice trip for me though i hope! thanks for reading, talk to you the 16th :) Arrivederci!

229!

well we might as well name this blog "jamie eats her way through belgium" because what do you know, this is my BREAD PUDDING blog post! yippee! amongst packing for italy and going to the open house at my language school today, i watched my host mom make bread pudding! here's how it works folks:

old bread = a necessity for bread pudding. so clean out the cupboards, find your crusty hot dog buns and wonderbread loafs and make yourself a bowl full of stale bread pieces.

next step = add sugar and vanilla. in european baking, that means vanilla sugar. vanilla extract is good of course :)

the weird step = add some WARM milk. then mush it all together. are we stuffing a turkey? is it thanksgiving again?

wisk your eggs and add em in there as well!

and now tons and tons of cinnamon and one sliced apple. you can experiment with raisins too!

mmm going in the pan...then to the oven for a while!

whoops, must have missed a big step..i thought this was bread pudding not a giant chocolate doughnut!? ohhh..my host mom covered it in chocolate to make it TWICE as tasty!

and here we are people..time to eat (yet again more) bread (or this time, bead pudding) in belgium. YUM!

sooo moving back to my day, not in reference to food. at the open house thing i signed up for the next level of dutch class..LEVEL 4! this will be my last level there, and sadly i am going to miss most of the first week because of my italy trip and the last few weeks as well because then its already time to come home. not only did i sign up for the next level but i found out my test score too. the teacher wasn't 100% sure because she didn't have her list handy, but she said it was a 92 or 93%, and that it was the best from the class. i feel sort of arrogant putting that on my blog, but WOW! that made me happy, considering my past exams were only like 80-90%s and this time i went in with more confidence than other times. big thanks on my host family and friends at school for being so helpful with the language! ik hou van mijn nieuwe taal ;) one more funny thing about today. i know i said nothing more referring to food but whatever. tonight my host mom helped me (or did the majority of the work in all honesty) make 3 kilo of spaghetti noodles. thats..6.6 dry pounds of noodles, which makes A WHOLE BUNCH of cooked noodles. i have to take them to school tomorrow because my class is going somewhere for the whole day to record a song, and somebody else is making sauce and i guess we're going to eat spaghetti for dinner. so tomorrow morning i'm going to school with like 12 pounds of noodles in a little cart. hahaha! noodle girl. ok goodnight world, thanks for reading!

228!

have i really wrote something every day for 228 days already? i surprise myself sometimes..in a good way. it's amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it, i say that now but i forget that a lot as well. enough about that, more about my day. saturday! hooray. but it started out not so hooray-ish, because the neighbors are building something so the sound of hammers and saws woke me up around 8am, and i went to bed pretty late and i don't know. i always feel like i get my best sleep between 6am and noon, and thus i felt sort of blah this morning. it quickly went away, as my host mom was like "come on jamie its beautiful outside lets do something" which i just thought she was saying because she likes to say that, and normally she's right..in a belgian way. beautiful outside to a belgian = no rain. but today, there was not only no rain but a briiiiight shining sun and it was over 70 degrees f! RIDICULOUSLY WARM! girls were walking around town in short skirts and heels and it was sort of fun to giggle at them. i mean, its still not summer. you could still feel the cool spring breeze and whatnot, it's nothing like the 90 degree humid heat we can get in south dakota, oh my! but still. nice day outside. we biked to the market, then to the grocery store, then later walked around the shopping street because apparently its "fashion weekend" in turnhout, which basically means some stores give you 10% off and are open on sunday. i ended up exchanging one of my two red sweaters and getting a green/khaki-ish one in the place of one of the red ones, because who needs two red sweaters?! something i feel like i should write down otherwise i will forget it and its kind of cool to me..for lunch we had like, sandwiches..lettuce, ham, mayo and whatnot..only on turkish bread from the little turkish grocery store by the train station. such a multicultural experience eh! i should definitely mention that we ate lunch OUTSIDE of course. and i hate to tell you south dakotans but we ate dinner OUTSIDE as well, can you believe it!? dinner...and we sat there till like 9pm! but sadly we came inside for dessert, got a little too chilly and windy. yes, of course there was dessert, and yes, of course i baked today. COOKIES! classic american chocolate chip cookies.

two different kinds, in fact! one was supposedly "chewy" and the other was "original" but everyone thought the chewy was less chewy than the original so don't bother with different cookie recipes, cookies are cookies. its funny, here in the grocery store you can find chocolate chip cookies by the chips and other junk food sort of like "chips a hoy" only they're always labeled "american cookies" and one brand is called "new yorkers"..so my family always calls them new yorkers, and eventually i started to call them new yorkers as well but i had to stop saying that otherwise i drove myself crazy calling things different english names while speaking dutch. i dont know why, but its like..something should either be in dutch or in english, and when people are speaking dutch and use american words and phrases it just feels weird to me? who cares actually, the point is i made COOKIES! yay! sooo hard not to eat a ton of them, i can't imagine what life will be like when i'm home. eating all the things i've missed. me and food..just a dangerous combination. curiosity killed the cat eh! here they call me a "snoeper" (yeah?) which sadly there is no english word for...candy eater, snacker, nibbler, sort of like that. you only live once eh! and to close, a quote to live by; especially as an exchange student.

"If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home." James Michener

thanks for reading!

227!

hello world! 227 days in belgium, yippee! well, what i did today. i started the morning by going to my dutch class because the teacher told us that on friday we could see our exam scores and sign up for the next level, but what do you know..no teacher, and the secretaries office was closed! she told me to come back on sunday and i could work it all out then. what the heck, it must be a ploy to get us all there on sunday for their "open door day" which is like an open house. it seems that lots of schools and businesses do this around the same period of time in belgium, anyone want to clarify that for me? but anyways. i can only say that i certainly passed, but it makes me sort of anxious not knowing my exact results! but for a good majority of my day i (with the help from my super nice host mom) was packing my giant box to send home! i have so many clothes that i don't need anymore because the weather is getting nicer and will hopefully stay that way and it's not super long till i come home anyways! but there was a dilemma. there was a box that was too small for what i wanted to send home, and there was one that was too big. so i thought..ok, lets put it all in the too big box then i will find a few more things to stick in there to fill it up. but i couldn't find anything i wanted to give up quite yet, so i went to the grocery store and bought 10 kilo (20 pounds) worth of BELGIAN CHOCOLATE! here's me and the box right before going to the post office..

the chocolate definitely solved the problem of it being too big. i dont know if i can get chocolate through customs when i come back so i might as well send it now eh! haha..APRIL FOOLS! i actually ended up sending an entire box of clothes, old dutch books, jackets, shoes, boots, everything. no chocolate. but that was sort of believable, right? nobody really pranked me with anything today..sort of makes me sad, but lucky at the same time. yes, they do celebrate april fools day here as well, as far as i can tell its the same as at home but maybe not so extreme. people can do pretty sick jokes sometimes! but that was really the extent of my day right there. bed time, super tired! thinking i might bake some chocolate chip cookies tomorrow..hmm. we'll see. goodnight!