So I realize that you thought that this blog was finished, and for good reason—I haven’t written in months. At first the time and effort involved in settling back in at home kept me away from the computer, and thus from the blog, but after I settled back in (and despite hearing horror stories to the contrary settling back in to the states has been surprisingly easy) I still didn’t write. There were practical things that kept me from writing: I was looking for a job, which took up most of my time, then I was busy re-connecting with my high school friends who were too lazy to read my blog and had to be brought up to speed on every little detail about the past six months. But I know I could have found time to write if I truly wanted to. The real reason I haven’t written is that I was frightened to.

Not frightened in the sense that I have developed an over night phobia of technology, or an unreasonable paranoia that this blog might be used by serial killers searching for their next victim, and not even frightened because a final blog would mean that my London adventure was finally and truly over. No, what frightened me was the knowledge that my final blog would have to contain some form of advice. I would need to share what I learned after living abroad, and then tell all the prospective traveling learners out there why studying abroad was a valuable experience. And, if indeed I do give advice, it implies that I have some form of wisdom, which I am not at all sure that I possess.

You see, I had a lot of fun studying abroad. It is exhilarating to meet new people and discover new places, (and of course by discover I mean visit for the first time places that have been there for hundreds in some cases thousands of years but didn’t actually exist until I stumbled upon them with my guidebook and compass), and it is impossible to do these things and return unchanged. And it is from this change that I am supposed to garner a font of knowledge that I can then share with my friends and readers. But such changes are not like dying your hair or growing a third arm. Their marks are imperceptible, and so subtle that I am not even sure what they are. I know for instance that the experience of reading E. M. Forster’s Maurice was made much more enjoyable because when Forster tells us that the hero and his lover meet at the British Museum I could picture them exactly in one of the rooms, knew which exhibits they were looking at, and understood what they had to walk through before they could take off their hats and shake each others’ hands. This is a concrete result of my time spent in London, and it is not the least reason to study abroad. Simply seeing the Mona Lisa on the canvas or standing in the desert in front of an actual pyramid are valuable experiences that enrich your day-to-day life immeasurably.

Such knowledge is knowledge that I feel lucky, even blessed to have gained, and it is the most palpable result of my time spent abroad; the closest to a third arm that I will ever get, but I know that this type of knowledge is the knowledge of the tourist. Though valuable in its kind, it does not require six months on foreign soil to obtain. And indeed, I spent little more than an extended weekend in Paris and about ten days in Egypt. I’m glad I went (and even more glad I got the chance to go) but the lessons learned there are not the lessons of study abroad; they are instead the generic lessons of travel.

So what are the lessons of study abroad? How has living on foreign soil changed me? Well, I’m not sure. In my first entry I wrote that I hoped studying abroad would help me obtain some sort of career goal, that it would stop me from being feckless and give me some sort of ambition. I can categorically state that it has done none of those things. I’m just as ambivalent about my future as I was in January. What it has done, however, has made me a little easier with my own ambivalence. Career plans are all well and good, but now I know that if I’m plunked down in the middle of an unknown city I can probably order lunch, find the bathroom and make it to the train station without knowing the language. You’d be amazed the amount of confidence that sort of ability can give you. But more than merely dazzling myself with my own competence, the knowledge that I can go somewhere I’ve never been before and make friends, learn the public transportation system and eke a pleasant day to day existence out of nothing is tremendously comforting. I may not know what I want to do, but I know that I will be able to make myself happy doing it. Studying abroad has taught me that my ability to make myself happy is not dependent on my surroundings, but on myself. And that, dear readers, is all anybody can ask for.

So after all of that, what advice can I give you?

Only this: Never eat chocolate and chew gum at the same time. The chocolate will make the gum fall apart, and then you’ve wasted a perfectly good piece of gum.        

I prepared for my trip to Florence by reading EM Forsters A Room With A View, but the book, however much fun to read, was misleading because it implied there would be rooms to sleep in in Florence. We've had a lot of trouble finding places to stay, with views or otherwise. The original plan was to spend a day in Sienna after Pisa, and then go on to Florence. But Lindsay was supposed to book the hostel in Sienna, and apparently the computer connections aren't too reliable in Mali, so she asked her mother to do it for her from her US computer. Apparently her mom forgot to make the booking, so we decided rather than spend a single night in Sienna, it would be best to go straight to Florence. We showed up without a place to stay, however, and after a quick consultation with the guidebook decided it would be best to go to tourist information in the train station and get a room for the night.

The woman in tourist information took one look at us and said "Cheap cheap cheap?" and we said yes, we needed a place to stay for two people, one night at the cheapest possible rate. She smiled and nodded and made a lot of phonecalls in rapid sucession, speaking in breathless Italian, and finally after several tries found us two hostel beds for the night. We thanked her, and received the map she gave us and made our way through some very unpleasant and unseasonable rain to our hotel room. With the room taken care of, we decided to brave the wet in order to do some sight seeing, and found ourselves outside Saint Croce Church, the church where the hero and heroine of A Room With A View have their first real conversation. We planned to duck our heads in and take a quick peak, but we soon found out that that was impossible.

The church turned out to be the burial sight of Galileo, Machiavelli, Micheangelo and others, though not, interestingly enough of Dante. Dante is buried in Ravenna, but that didn't stop Saint Croce from building a huge garrish monument in honor of the Florentine poet. I've never been a big Dante fan despite slogging my way through three different translations of the Inferno. When I saw his monument I think I understood why. He always looks incredibly dour, as if he was having bad indigestion; I think it comes out in his writing.

The next day we had to move to our hostel that Lindsay had also booked from Mali (the deal was that she would book Florence and Sienna, I would book Venice and Pisa). Rather than head straight to our Hostel, however, we decided to do some early sight seeing, and made it to the Duomo in time to be first in line when it opened. The guidebook was not too enthusiastic about the church, claiming it was "chilly and austere" on the inside, but I enjoyed it immensely. The inside doesn't feel cluttered the way some of these churches can be. After the Duomo we headed across the way to the Baptistry to gaze at Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise," which was obscured by a sea of tourists. I'm short enough, however, that I eventually wrangled  my way to the front, and I'm glad I did, the doors are truly breathtaking.

The Piazza was beginning to get absolutely swamped with tour groups, so we headed back to our hostel to collect our bags and carried them through the wet and cold to the hostel we had booked for the next five nights.

The hostel looked amazing, it was up a steep flight of stairs, but had large windows and wooden floors as well as offering free internet. There were signs all over in broken English reminding guests that "The waisting of the energy was a crime against the enviroment" and other helpful hostel hints. When we got there, however, the woman couldn't find our booking. There was much sturm und drang, and the management was called, while we nervously looked over the reservation and tried to decipher the rapid Italian the receptionist was shouting into the phone. Eventually we realized that the reservation was for May, and we were here in June. The hostel was booked solid all five nights, and we had nowhere to stay. We asked the receptionist if she had any suggestions of places to stay, and she said that as far as she knew the entire city was booked solid. It turns out that the next day, the second of June, was a national holiday, and meaning it was a popular time to visit. She wouldn't let us use the phone, but she was nice enough to let us store our bags while we found a place to stay.

We returned to the street with absolutely no idea of what to do. We found a phone and began to call all of the hostels in the guidebook. All of them were booked solid for the next two nights, but we finally found a place that will take us for the last three nights of our stay. Lindsay went off to find an internet cafe where she could confirm the booking, and I headed in the other direction to find us a bed for the night. My plan was to head to the tourist office, but I realized that the streets on the way to the train station seemed to be lined with wall to wall hotels. I stopped into a few of the cheaper looking ones, all of which seemed to be booked solid for the next two nights (I even encountered a panicky couple whose reservations had also fallen through screaming at an unfortunate receptionist) Finally I found a one star hotel with a single room left. It was little more than a broom cubbard, but breakfast was included, and the room had a TV. Grateful to have a place to stay I headed back to collect both Lindsay and the luggage. I've learned two things from the whole experience--the first is never have anybody make a hotel booking from Mali, and the second is that commercials are more entertaining in Italian.

Greetings from Pisa. Everybody I spoke to while I was planning this trip wrinkled their noses when they heard I was stopping in Pisa for three days. "Pisa is a hole," one of my friends put it bluntly, "there's nothing there but the tower and that takes fifteen minutes." With all of the negative press that Pisa had gotten I was not exactly excited to spend a large amount of time here, and probably would have skipped it entirely having no real interest in towers leaning or otherwise, but I was meeting a friend in Italy, and the cheapest airfare she could find was from London to Pisa, so Pisa it was. And after all of the dread, I'm really glad I came.

Pisa is a university town and, according to my faithful guidebook, the university here is one of the best in Italy. The "tourist sights," which include the Tower, the Duoma, a Bapitistry that looks like a wedding cake, and the "camposato" are all contained in a grassy piazza to the north of town, which means that most of the tourists are also confined to the same grassy piazza leaving the rest of the city free of interlopers. The rest of the city is lovely, the streets are narrow and winding in a way that is beginning to become familiar to me, and there are plenty of cheap cafes, restaurants and museums that the university students frequent. The river Arno runs through the center of town, and it's great to stand on a bridge in the evening light with gelato in one hand and watch the sunset.

And there are tourist sights beyond the single grassy piazza. I learned that the tower in the Palazzo dell'Oraglio is the infamous "Tower of famine," mentioned by both Dante and Shelley. According to my hazy recolections of my medieval literature class, the story goes that Ugolino della Gherardesca was locked in the tower with his young sons and left to starve. I forget exactly why he was condemned to such a fate, but I think he was a traitor of some sort. Left to starve the young sons died first, and were then eaten by his father and older brothers. I'll take that over a leaning tower any day.

The other thing that has been great about Pisa is meeting my friend, Lindsay, here. Lindsay has spent her semester abroad in Mali, and it's been wonderful to hear her stories about life in Africa. Her experience has been the polar opposite of mine, she was on a home stay for one thing, and I like to hear her talk about her Malian family. She said she had an unusal amount of crazy people staying in her house. Thinking she was speaking figuratively i asked what she meant, and she went on to describe the various states of mental imbalance of the members of her Malean family. My favorite is an elderly boarder who thinks he's running for President of Mali, and takes any opprotunity he can get to talk about his platform. He's perfectly okay otherwise, she said, but he really believes he's running for president. The whole thing reminds me of Arsnic and Old Lace, where the crazy cousin thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, but is perfectly harmless otherwise.

Today we did the "tourist sights," which only took the moring. We didn't go up the tower because it cost fifteen euros, and we didn't take one of the photos that everybody seemed to be taking where you stand a certain distance away and hold your arms out so that it looks like you're supporting the tower, but we did go into the Baptistry, the Duomo and the Campisato. The Baptistry was kind of dull, and more fun to look at from the outside than the inside. It did feature an amazing echo, though, which an Italian singer demonstrated for us once we were inside. The Duomo was great, however, according to the guide book it is "one of the most important romanesque churches in existence," and features some amazing carvings and paintings. Before leaving for Italy my friend in London told me that she had heard somebody say Europe's art is in her churches. I took the statement to mean that Europe's churches are works of art, but after touring Italy I've come to realize that that statement should be taken literally. I will duck into a church just to cool down (churches are always several degrees cooler than the outside, I'm not really sure why,) and notice that the fairly anonomous looking building is filled with gorgeous paintings and sculpture. Aside from the amazing carvings and mosaics, the Duomo here also featured several relics, including the entire body of a Saint whose name i forget, but it began with an R.

By far my favorite sight, though, was the Camposato. It is a long building with ornate arches that houses frescos and carved sarcaphogi. It is said to be built on earth taken from Golgotha, and once rivalled the Leaning Tower as Pisa's most popular tourist destination (in about the nineteenth century, I think,) Badly damaged in World War Two, it has been well restored. The sarcaphogi were interesting, but Lindsay and I really liked the frescos. There was one cycle that was designed by an artist known only as the "Master of the Triumph of Death," which you have to admit is a great name. The frescos tell the story of the plague in Florence, and there was one passage I loved that showed the souls escaping from the dead bodies being fought over by devils and angels. There were also frescos depicting judgement and Hell, and one that neither Lindsay nor I could figure out.

Tomorrow we move on to Florence, which I'm told is as over run with tourists and the like as Venice was. Not that I should complain, being a tourist myself, but it was nice to have a stop in Pisa and take a break from all of that. Here we could cook our own food, and shop in a supermarket and spend large parts of the day stopping to chat and catch up with our various semesters in Europe and Africa. Perhaps the plains fly here for a reason.

Writing from Bologna, where the keyboards are erratic at best, much like the busses. My hostel is located slightly outside of town, and there is a special bus that runs to the center of the city every two hours. When I took it this afternoon I was the only person on the bus and the driver kept trying to make friendly conversation with me. I appreciated the sentiment, but as he didn't speak any English and the only Italian I know comes from a passing love of Opera and four long ago years of Latin, we need to resort to pantimime to communicate. He kept turning around so he could look me in the eye, and I divided my time between trying to parse his sentences and looking nervously at the road, which he was completely disregarding.

So far Bologna has been great, but most of the sights were closed by the time I got to town. I have a full day tomorrow, though, and plan to make the most of it. The train ride here was fun, though, I shared my aisle with two very nice Indian men. Neither spoke much English, so we communicated with sentences that went subject\verb\hand gesture till I asked if they were here for holiday. One man said yes, but the other said he was coming here to live. He had to flee India because his brother was in trouble with the Indian mafia, and he feared retribution. This was shocking to find out, but even more shocking to see in pantomime.

And now for something completely different.

Verona was lovely. A small town compared to Venice and Bologna, but it had two things that Venice lacked: Cars and Italian People. I was not as productive as I might have been in Verona, choosing to skip the Opera arena in favor of sitting in cafes with a book and watching the people go past. I did manage to make it to the Casa Giulietta, however; a seventeenth century Veronese house done up as the house where Juliet Capulette lived. To tell you the truth I thought the whole thing was a little hokie. I appreciate that Shakespeare set his play in Verona for a reason, but there's no way Shakespeare could have ever seen a postcard of Verona, let alone the city itself. Still I had to respect the city's love of the play. The walls of Juliet's house were covered in graffitti from young lovers writing their names all along the outside, and the love lorn would write messages for Juliet which they would leave on the walls or by her statue. I much prefered the piazza outside the casa, which was an old town square and was covered with vendors selling fruit, food and souvenirs. In the center of the piazza there was a raised platform where I sat to eat my panini and coca light. I noticed a pair of ominous chains hanging from the platform and consulted my guidebook, which informed me that prisoners used to be chained to the platform and the townspeople would pass by and pelt them with garbage. Charming.

After the casa I walked around the city for a bit, and decided to cross the river away from the tourist attractions. The other side of the river was dominated by a steep hill, and I found a cobblestone street that lead up it. I enjoyed the walk, but eventually had to stop because my eyes started welling up, and I began to sneeze. It's been so long since I found myself in the middle of nature, that I've forgotten I usually have allergies this time of year. They haven't been much of a problem in London, seeing as it still rarely gets about the fifties (there were about two weeks of sunshine, which I have since begun to fear might have been total flukes) but the Italian sunshine caused the verdure to bloom, which in turn caused me to sneeze. I've learned not to mind the hayfever, but as I walked back I began to notice that I was getting the oddest looks from people, and I realized just how striking bright red eyes can be. I figured I must have looked like I had been crying, so I tried to counteract it by smiling broadly at people. This just seemed to frighten them even more, so I ended by simply keeping my eyes glued to the pavement.

I ducked into a cafe to recover, and ended up getting dinner there. The cafe had a fabulous view of Verona across the water, and it was the ideal place to watch the sun set behind the duomo. Italy is filled with mosquitos (I had shared my room with one the night before, as well as with three charming Australians,) and at sunset swarms of swallows came out to feast on the bloodsucking pests. Watching the birds swoop in the twilight, and feeling the day begin to cool I sneezed, and, however horrific it may have looked, I smiled.

I had to take a final exam last week on eighteenth century literature. The entire thing took me two hours and involved writing two essays--one on Fielding and one on Johnson. That was my final exam for school, but this is my real final exam.

I'm am writing from Venice on the first full day of a two week tour of northern Italy. For seven days I'm going to be traveling alone in a country where I don't speak the language, living in hostels and
eating as much gelato as humanly possible. After that I will be joined by a friend from school (she spent the semester studying in Mali, and is now doing a tour of Europe. We're meeting in Pisa.), but until then I am
embarking on what I consider to be my real final exam. I get to find out what I've learned about finding my way around a foreign country and relying on my own resources. I'm a little frightened.

I arrived in Venice yesterday, on a flight that took off from Stansted airport in London at six thirty in the morning. Stansted is about an hour and a half outside of the city, so to ensure that I arrived with enough time to check in and make it through security I had to catch a three thirty am bus from Victoria Station. I find it difficult to sleep on buses and planes, so by the time I reached Venice I was a bit of a basektcase.  Still, I wasn't going to waste a day Venice, so tired as I was I headed out into the streets
to explore.

Venice is very difficult to navigate. The streets and canals don't seem to move in a straight line, and right angles are almost unheard of. I spent a good deal of time wandering around yesterday, only to end up back at my hostel. The city feels very touristy; I seem to hear French and German spoken as much as English and Italian, but it has an undeniable charm. To begin with Venitians seem to be much fonder of dogs than the British, and they don't feel the need to put them on lead. The dogs follow their masters in the various cafes and tratorias, and seem to be incredibly well trained.  The ubiquity of the dogs means that the integrity  of Venice's sidewalks suffer a bit, but it makes the city feel cheery.

I'm ending my trip in Venice, so I'll be back. Thus, I'm taking my time to explore the city because I don't feel I have to do everything at once. I saw San Marco square with it's gorgeous Basilico, which I didn't go into, and the grand Doge's palace, which I did. The Doge's palace was amazing, filled with paintings and frescos by the likes of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto.

I know next to nothing about Italian art (I have a hunch that will change after this trip,) but I loved looking at the large canvasses. The palace also included a tour of the dungeons, which can be reached over the "bridge of sighs," so called because prisoners crossing it would sigh when they caught their last glimpse of the outside and freedom before being locked away for good. I can't say I blame them.

The area around San Marco is incredibly touristy, and hence incredibly over priced, so I tried to see other parts of the city. I went to another museum the Accadamia, which also included many works by Veronese, Tintoretto and Titian (I'm sensing a theme.) I loved the art, though, although they could
probably open another museum just for all of the madonna and child paintings alone.

Italy is famous for its churchs, but I have yet to go into a church. Instead, I went to the Jewish section of town and took a tour of the four synagogues. Venice has the oldest ghetto in Europe. I learned that the word ghetto comes from the Italian word for foundry. When the jews were sequestered in the fourteenth century the old foundry was turned into a living area for them. Now if I can find out what a foundry is I'm going to be all set; I think it has to do with building ships. Anyway, the jews had to live in the ghetto and could only leave during the day if they were wearing a yellow or red badge if they were male, or a yellow scarf if they were female. Nowadays they've gotten a little more casual. Apparently some
of the first skyscrapers in Italy were in the ghetto because they had to fit a large community--between three and four thousand people--into a small space. Nowadays only around three hundred jews live in Venice proper, but I think it has to do more with property taxes than persecution.

The time at the internet cafe is going to run out soon. Tomorrow I leave bright and early for Verona. Till then, ciao.