Random

I realize that I suck at keeping blogs, just like I suck at keeping a diary. I've attempted to keep diaries before, but they always failed miserably. Maybe because I'm easily distracted, so I never remember to write anything down. Sorry for not updating while I was in Italy. At least it lasted for about half the time, kinda. Maybe I'll try to write some stuff when I go to China, but I dunno how cheap the internet'll be. Probably a lot cheaper than Europe...

So I was looking up Vegas shows yesterday, and that reminded me of when I watched The Lion King musical in London. When I watched The Lion King, I sat next to this chinese couple. Asians are the same everywhere. :D During the intermission, they took out these two rubbermaid-ish plastic containers and opened them. Lo and behold, it's food. One had chow mein, the other had rice and vegetables and meat. And when they opened it, you could smell it! I guess they also added hot sauce to it. Everyone turned and was looking at them, but they seemed oblivious and just kept on eating. It looked pretty good...Meanwhile, I was eating my little rice crackers that I'd gotten in Chinatown. :) I have now been to Chinatown in London and lived in Chinatown in Rome. It actually wasn't too bad.

I want to travel again. I've realized that I really really enjoy traveling, even with my family. Unlike some others, I actually like traveling with my family. I think it's because we've traveled almost every year, whether to somewhere close like Vegas or somewhere overseas like China, and it's a nice time to bond with my family. I kinda want to live in another country again too. I really enjoy seeing how other people live, and even though I like my cleanliness, I believe that I'm not very high maintenance. I could forego the hygienic conditions that I'm used to...to a limit. Living in Italy showed me how very ignorant and self-centered Americans can be, and also how very privileged and ungrateful we are. It's interesting to see how everyone else in the world perceives us. Hopefully, after I graduate, I'll be able to travel somewhere before I have to settle down and work. But there's always that money issue. :( That's why I've been looking at different options such as teaching abroad, another study abroad program, loveboat, and just traveling. Although traveling would be much more fun with friends. Anyone wanna go adventuring with me?

Too much work.

I hate planning stuff. It's so hard trying to figure out everything. :( Right now, I'm trying to figure stuff out for after the program ends, and it's toooo complicated! I wanna travel with my family so they can just figure everything out and I don't have to worry about it. I miss my family. :( and my mom's cooking. and chinese food. and meat. and my friends.

Halfway.

I'm updating, just for Roger. Since he insists that I do. I guess I haven't updated in a while though. I came back from Venice yesterday, and last week, I went to Rome. They were both great cities...Very different, and both were wonderful. There were lots of historical sites to see in Rome, like the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hills, Pantheon, St. Peter's Basilica and of course, the Vatican Museum. It was exciting to see paintings and such that you always see in textbooks. Like we saw the School of Athens and Transfiguration by Raphael, and the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta by Michelangelo. In Venice, it was different. There was St. Mark's Piazza, with St. Mark's Basilica, where his bones are, but other than that, we just walked around, went on the vaporettos (equivalent to a bus, except on water) and just enjoyed the atmosphere of Venice. We didn't go on a gondola though. It was too hot and humid. I think it's a little overrated with the whole romance thing, cuz who wants to be cuddling with someone when you're all sweating and hot. But yea, it was still quite an experience.

Happy Fourth of July.

Happy 4th of July. Hope you all have lots of fun today and see lots of fireworks. I spent today....doing laundry....for 2 hours. :( And I'm still not done. I still have to wash all my jeans. I never knew hand washing laundry was such hard work. My back hurts now. And I didn't even have that many clothes!

We're going to Cinque Terre this weekend. :D It's supposed to be these 5 really beautiful towns on the beach. There's trails to hike in between them, and lots of relaxing stuff to do, like swimming and going on boats. The Palio on Monday was pretty crazy. We were all packed in the Piazza del Campo, the main square in town. I actually thought we were going to be packed in even tighter, but I actually had a little space to move around. Still, there were lots and lots of people there. We got there 2 hours before, but still didn't get very good spots. I could kinda see the horses during the race, but not very well. 2 jockeys actually fell off their horses. One of them was actually trampled by another horse, but then he got up right afterwards and was fine. Hehe. My culture class teacher says the jockeys are made of rubber. And guess who was at the Palio? Tom Hanks! So exciting! and we actually saw him at his window. Actually, one of my roommates saw him on our street before the Palio! She did a double take, and was gonna go talk to him, but one of his bodyguards stopped her. Andy Garcia was also there, but we didn't find him. It was funny, one of the guys that I was with had a camera with high zoom, so he was taking pictures of all the people on the balconies and zooming in on their faces to see if they were celebrities or not. When we found Tom Hanks, we were like, OMG! and started waving to him. He actually waved back to us! And took out his camera and took a picture of us. :D

Wireless!

Right now, I'm actually sitting on those steps. It's in a square, on the front steps of a church, and I'm using the wireless from one of the buildings around here. It might be the bank, or some residence. It's funny, I always walk past this area, and see people sitting on the steps with their laptops, but it never occurred to me that they were using wireless. It was one of the other girls on this program who's staying in a homestay that told me. She heard it from her home-stay mom. :D So now, I don't always have to go to the internet cafe or over to the study center. And this place is closer to where I live. Yay.

Last night, we had a welcome dinner. It was soo tasty. There were five courses, and the main dish actually had meat! It was a big thing of chicken. It was kinda sad...when they served it, all of us at the table were like....OMG MEAT! I was trying to savor every bite. The pasta was really good too. I'm not sure what you call it. It was the pasta that's rolled up, and looks like shells. I took pictures, but I haven't loaded the pictures onto the computer yet.

I'm actually learning phrases in Italian! It's still very limited, like I can only say like, 5 different phrase, but I'm gaining more and more vocabulary. Mi chiamo Sharon. Sono americana. Abito in Via dei Rossi in Siena. Studio italiano. :D Ciao! or arrivederci! (but that's more formal).

Finally using my laptop

That's me on top of the City Tower in Siena. The climb up was so tiring. There were 300 steps, and they were all very narrow and steep. But the view was so beautiful at the top, it was worth the climb. I posted a bunch of pictures at http://www.community.webshots.com/user/chineizflowr, so go see pictures there. So I finally started class today. I had Italian class from 9-12 in the morning, then I had culture class from 2-4. For our culture class, we're starting with Art History, focusing on Michelangelo. So for the class, later on, we're actually going on "field trips" to see the statue of David among other things. :D I have Italian class everyday from 9-12, and I have another core class on Tuesdays from 2-4.

This weekend, we didn't travel to anywhere. We stayed in Siena and explored the town. It really is a pretty small place. There is a city wall, and most of the attractions are inside the city wall. You can pretty much walk around to all the different sites. I've been doing sooo much walking. I better not gain weight by the end of this. I live in an apartment that's on the fifth floor (they say fourth floor, but they count the first floor as ground level), and the steps aren't all even AND they're kinda slippery, so it's a PAIN to walk up the stairs. One of my roommates has already slipped and fallen on the stairs. I'm still trying to get used to the sounds. Every morning, I wake up at around 5:30 in the morning because of the stupid pigeons outside my window. We're on the top floor, and the pigeons are always on the roof and under the eaves, so they start cooing and flapping around and they're SO LOUD! I just want to throw something at them.

The food that I've eaten the most of is pizza, and bread and peanut butter. hehe. Usually for breakfast, I eat bread and peanut butter, and yogurt. The yogurt here is actually really good. Right now, I have fragola (strawberry) flavored yogurt. It's less thick than the yogurt in the US, more like those breakfast drinks. The pizza here is pretty good. The cheese and sauce are both kinda different from the pizza in the US. The sauce is more...tangy...I also had pasta..only once though...I had tortellini. It was really good. But the servings here are so much smaller than in the US. :( I could eat two servings. Even the bread is a lot smaller!

Gah..I'm running low on batteries...so i'll post more later. Ciao!

In Italy!

So right now, it's 3 in the morning. We're all in the hotel room, and since one of the girls discovered that there's wireless here, we've all been on our laptops. We were all kinda trying to sleep, but not anymore. We have all been up for more than 24 hours now, but it's so hard falling asleep. It's really hot and stuffy in our room, and there was a big group of drunk people standing on the street outside our window, singing and being loud.

The plane ride was really long. But the first flight was pretty nice. It was about 10 hours, but each seat had its own little tv screen, and there was a wide variety of movies and tv shows that you could watch. I watched The Departed, Blood Diamond, and an episode of both Friends and Scrubs. They also seemed to be constantly serving us food. We got dinner and breakfast, and there were snacks in between like ice cream, smoked almonds, and croissants. The other two plane rides were pretty short, around 45 minutes and 1.5 hours, and they were pretty small. The airport in Amsterdam that we stopped in was really nice. It looked way better than LAX. It actually looked more like a mall in some places. I took a couple pictures, but I'll post them up later.

The thing I noticed when I first got out of the airport in Florence was the HEAT. It was over 90 degrees. SO HOT. And I'm not sure if our apartment's gonna have AC. yay..So yea, the taxi ride was a rip off. It wasn't that far, and the fare cost 30 EUROS. That's like 40 dollars! Sigh...everything's gonna be more expensive here. :( Our hotel's pretty nice. It's kinda small, but it's clean, which is the important thing. It's also pretty close to the town center, so this afternoon, we walked over to the town center, Il Duomo something. There was a big cathedral there. We were gonna go inside to look around, but me and two of the other girls were not "properly covered," meaning our shoulders were showing, so we couldn't go in. So instead of going into the church, we just walked outside a bit. There was an open marketplace, where people were just selling stuff at their stands. I guess it's pretty obvious we're from the US, cuz when we were walking around, there were these people selling stuff, and when they saw us, they went...."California?" and then one guy went "Chinatown?" So yea, they could even tell that we were from California. Probably the rainbows that gave it away. Aiyo, people are getting ready to go sleep, so I'll finish this later.