A Hard Day's Night

All right, so we all know how incredibly overdue I am for a new post...

First, Italy: my family just spent eight days there, plus two days of travel time. We stayed in Rome, Siena, Florence, and Venice, and stopped in Viterbo, Orvieto, San Gimignano, Pisa, and Assisi. The smaller towns were pretty, clean, and nice to walk around in, although I enjoyed the color and excitement of Rome and Venice, with street performers, Indian guys shooting bubble guns at people, huge fountains, little kids running around, women in formal dresses zooming around on motorbikes... Besides the heat and the long hours spent on the tour bus, I had a lot of fun.

There were certain bad parts: desperate pantomime to communicate with people in some shops, the crazy Italian drivers (we took a cab once and only once, but to be fair, we saw no accidents), the occasional appearance of what one lady on our tour called "squatty potties," gypsies shaking Coke cups of change at you on the street, and so on. There wasn't really anything horrible, though; most of it was stuff we'd been warned about and could deal with. The most surprising part was the food. It's almost expected that Italian food will be good, but there were pretty much three kinds of places to eat: pizzerias/cafes, gelaterias (ice cream), and overpriced formal restaurants. We had a lot of pizza (which was pretty bland compared to American pizza) and ice cream, which sounds good but got old. We actually ended up seeking out a McDonalds in Florence; I was embarrassed when my dad asked Tourist Information where it was (I was very afraid of seeming like a stupid American tourist, which was inevitable, anyway), but I did enjoy fries and a Coke, and I don't even like McDonalds at home.

If anyone's planning a trip to Italy in the future, I would recommend going on a tour like ours. On the minus side, you're chained to what the guide wants, so we rushed through certain things, like St. Peter's Basilica and the Uffizi Gallery. But without a guide, it might be hard to get into those places at all. And there was a lot of down time to spend wandering around just with my family, so it wasn't like we were constantly with the group. Having the group does mean forty or so other people who speak English, with whom you can talk, compare notes, eat dinner, and so on. You spend so much time with them that it's really like a family by the end. I'm sure my sister and I will add to our inside joke repertoire the Asian lady who got lost twice in the same day, the teenaged kid who had a crush on our thirtysomething guide, the lady with bright pink pants who complained constantly, etc.

I think I've fulfilled at least one of my three "challenges" that Alexandra Benson wrote in my yearbook at the end of the school year. I definitely haven't kissed a boy, and there are a lot of days left to eat lunch or not, but if the whole vacation itself doesn't qualify as an adventure, not to mention getting lost in Venice, almost missing the bus because some Italian guys were arguing about how much the tickets cost, and having to jump a fence to get back to our hotel, then I don't know what does.

We got home late in the afternoon on Saturday and went to bed pretty soon. On Sunday evening, I went to a Pub Quiz fundraiser for the family of Rory Zuba, a student and scholastic bowl player at West who died last February from a brain tumor. My buddies from Nationals, Siva and Michael, were there, and so were some of my friends from the class of '04: Laura, Bandy, Melanie, and Adam. In Pub Quiz, you play on teams of four, each at separate tables. A moderator reads questions in sets of ten, which you write down on sheets of paper and turn in. All the points are totaled up, and the top three teams win prizes. Through all this, everyone's talking and drinking and eating, and it's a lot of fun (they have weekly ones at Bacchus, a bar downtown, that I've been to a couple of times). I played with Tyler Kerr, his mom, and Michael Jiang from West. I had fun talking to Michael; he's a Ben Folds fan, and we were arguing about the meaning of the song "Brick." He says he'll burn me the Garden State soundtrack.

We ended up getting third place; the class of '04 team beat us by one point. Afterwards, Bandy asked me if I wanted to go with them to Culver's for ice cream, since they had won gift certificates. When we got there, though, we discovered that the certificates were for four dinners at a different location. After a lot of standing around and talking and calling different people on cell phones, we decided to go to Melanie's house. Karl and Mike came over, and we watched their senior video, which was very entertaining. I had fun hanging out with those guys again. They seem to me to be the perfect combination of intellectuals and teenagers, arguing over the parallels between a John Donne poem and a John Mayer song, alternating references to classic literature with ones to Eighties music in their video. Bandy started an argument over whether the color marigold is more orange or more yellow. They're just really funny and interesting to be with. I don't think most of them really like me, though, except for Bandy, maybe, who always gets really excited to see me.

This afternoon I'm going to Mueller for my follow-up senior picture appointment (I got them back. They're disappointing, but at least there's one that's decent enough for the yearbook). Now that vacation is over, I have a lot of long days of summer ahead. I checked out a huge stack of books from the library yesterday, though, so I'm good for now.