Spontaneity, Sunrise and Swimming

On Wednesday night we went on a mini bar crawl, after constantly feeling a bit of nostalgia for Newcastle times and reminiscing a lot. So much fun, and lots of strong cocktails were consumed, leading to hilarity all round, apart from the loss of Lydia’s phone and camera, to someone who now has lots of lovely pictures of Bologna from the beginning of the week. Lucky them, not so lucky Lydia L

Thursday morning brought headaches and pains as expected and deserved, but also an impulse trip away! After getting a phonecall from Jenny at 11.30am, we were on the 1.30pm train to La Spezia, swimming costumes packed. That morning, Lyds had found a great little hostel in Portovenere, a small village on the end of the peninsula south of La Spezia. We wondered whether reality would live up to expectations and website photographs, but as the bus turned the bend we got a full view of the nearest thing to heaven I could have wanted at the time!

At the very end of the rocky spit there is a church and the ruins of ‘Grotta Byron’, where Lord Byron spent lots of his time apparently. It’s got some great little doorways that just look straight out over the sea. After scaring ourselves with stone carvings of people in the shadows we sat down in a little pub for some wine and cake and Jen suggested we get up to watch the sunrise. Sounded like a lovely idea but I wasn’t sure whether we’d be able to drag ourselves out of bed after the night before…but, lo and behold, there we were at 6.30am, sat on the rocks looking out over the bay to the mountains beyond La Spezia. It was spectacular how the light changed and was so clear and vivid, making aeroplane trails look fluorescent pink and trees on the side of the island in front of us just silhouettes. By 8.30am the village was bathed in warm sunlight and it was time for breakfast.

Next was a coffee followed by a small hike up the side of the castello walls. Hideous amount of steps but the best views at the top! After that we went on the ‘Tre Isole’ boat trip, around Isola Palmaria, Isola Tino and Isola Tinetto, and then back on shore decided that if we couldn’t hire kayaks to go exploring we wanted to get in the water somehow, so swimming was on the agenda! We were so lucky with the weather; having the sun beating down and temperatures above 20 makes jumping into cold water a bit more bearable! The whole thing was so invigorating and refreshing and drying off in the sun made it feel like a mini summer holiday even though it’s October!

The whole trip has definitely made me want to travel more now, and we’re planning all sorts of little trips which hopefully will happen in the near future! 

Bolognese, but no spaghetti

The great thing about the trains in Italy is that they are on time (unlike most other things), quite comfortable, and ticket prices don’t change whether you buy them months or minutes in advance. So for about 12 euros return, Jen, Lydia and I decided a spontaneous day trip to Bologna was a good plan. Despite the cold and dull skies we had a lovely day wandering round the city centre, which was a lot bigger than I think all three of us imagined. It’s kind of similar to Parma but all the streets have arches over the paths on either side of the road and lots of it feels bigger and grander. There are some amazing churches and cathedrals and a huge one in the main square which had a really interesting exhibition of the life and work or Mother Teresa.

Being that we were in the home of bolognese, a good spaghetti based lunch was on the cards, and we found a really cool little restaurant but strangely ‘spaghetti bolognese’ wasn’t on the menu! We had to make do with lasagne bolognese and spaghetti carbonara, and of course a glass of red wine…if you can’t drink wine at lunch in Italy, where can you?!

We’d heard of a place in Bologna that sells hand made silver rings, but didn’t do enough research/couldn’t find anything about it on the internet before we went, but if anyone knows of anyone with more information please tell me! 

It’s strange to think I’ve been living in Italy for just over a month now. I feel like I know Parma quite well geographically but still don’t know where everything is, which is good as it’s nice to stumble upon hidden treasures when you don’t expect it. I'm definitely still not used to the laid back nature of beginning things like lectures and actually want to be given some work now, it must be bad! Self motivation is in order. 

Les Maîtres Chocolatiers

A ten minute train ride, a ten minute bus ride, and a short walk takes you from Parma to Fidenza Village, a shopping outlet. Basically not all it was cracked up to be; full of designer shops which even with the outlet discounts are still out of my price range. All but one…the Lindt shop. Right at the end of the street, and selling tons and tons of some of the most ruch, luscious chocolatey goodness in the world, including chocolate spoons for eating hot chocolate with (not quite sure how that would work without melting), tubes that look like lip gloss filled with chocolate, and huuuuge lindt balls, filled with, yes you guess it, chocolate!

Heavenly.

Mangia, Prega, Ama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8csr68LjUM

Eat, Pray, Love. 

Sounds pretty good to me.

Julia Roberts finds herself running away from New York to ‘find herself’ and do some self counselling after a divorce and inspired by a visit to a healer in Bali on a previous trip. So she works her way around the world, to Italy, India, and back to Bali where she eats, prays, and tries to learn to love again. It was pretty cheesy in parts, and I’m sure massive generalisations of whole countries’ cultures but it’s definitely a feel-good type of film. Kind of a chick-who-travels-flick. As a fan of feel good films and anything a little bit cheesy with some lovely scenery, gorgeous sunsets and gorgeous people, it was just what I needed after a stressful few days, and the soundtrack is beyooootiful! In the part set in Italy, they describe one of the most important elements of the Italian lifestyle; ‘il dolce far niente’ literally, ‘the sweetness of doing nothing’. Quite cute and lovely but at the same time doesn’t make for great ease in finding out things like an academic timetable.

If I was Julia Roberts, swanning off around the world just soaking up cultures and using them to ‘find my inner balance’ as it goes in Bali, I’m quite sure I’d be perfectly happy with ‘il dolce far niente’, but as it is, I’m not always it’s biggest fan. And like some of the other Erasmus students, it would be nice to get some things sorted out once in a while!

It’s taken me three weeks to find out when three of my six classes are…one of my other teachers is unknown as yet, and another is apparently uncontactable, no-one has any details for her. Great. A little escapism may be in order this weekend…

Chocolat...

The other night, Anissa, one of the French girls here on Erasmus, hosted a little dinner party. Pasta featured heavily on the menu, but she also made an amazing quiche lorraine, and croque monsieur, followed by an equally amazing dessert including her famous chocolate fondante cake…actually tasted like heaven! 

Steph, Gus and I thought it would be nice to take something with us so we bought a cake too…wasn’t as good as Anissa’s! 

before...

...and after

Ciao tutti!

I had toyed with the idea of blogging for weeks before my year abroad commenced, but didn’t get round to it, until now…

So after a very teary goodbye at the airport I arrived in the heat and humidity of September in Northern Italy, with my life in two suitcases and a violin on my back! Quite a different place to the Scandinavian year I had planned since February, but that’s a story for another time. Thanks to the angels otherwise known as Jenny and Lydia, I had an apartment to stay in for free as soon as I got to Parma, which was so amazingly helpful! I spent the first night with their housemate, Romy, and some of her friends also from Israel. It was a bit daunting at first being surrounded by Italians or people who spoke Italian but that was always going to be the case, after having almost no time to prepare myself.

The first week was full of excitement, panic, chaos, and feelings from complete happiness to sadness and everything in between! Until I found a room in an apartment, everything felt very ‘in limbo’, but as soon as I put down a deposit for this room, everything immediately became more settled and especially after the trip to IKEA on the free bus for things to decorate it with, I finally had a place to call home! And having met lots of other Erasmus students, mostly English but a few French, Spanish, German and Portuguese, we were all doing more socialising and spending time in the city, getting to know where the good coffee shops and bars were!

The second week in Italy saw our first night out at a club, NeroBlanco, which turned out to be one of the strangest nights out I’ve ever had! There’s a very odd system of here where entry is ‘free’, and you are given a drinks card with prices and boxes to be stamped. When you get a drink at the bar, the staff stamp the price of your drink, but you pay on the way out, before you leave. And so the first drink is always 8 euros! So expensive! We convinced ourselves this was ok as it covered the drink and the entry, (or exit?!) price, but agreed that it was a weird way of doing things! Very confusing! Apart from this we have all been taking full advantage of the ‘aperitivo’ culture, where food is provided at bars and you can help yourself when you buy a drink, how lovely!

One Sunday, Lydia and I had a fairly casual wander round the shops, on the eternal search for the perfect jacket, and as it started to rain, we stumbled into Chiesa della Steccata, a church just off the main square, Piazza Garibaldi. Turned out to be one of the most beautiful, awesome churches I’ve ever seen, with paintings all over the walls and all of the ceilings, and huge columns and pillars, and two huge organs at the back! When we entered it was deadly silent, but after about five minutes an organist started playing and it was just brilliant. We indeed up wandering round to where he was sat, at a new organ connected to both the old ones, and he just played bits of all sorts to us for about half an hour! For two music students it was so inspiring and such a lucky find!

It’s true what people say, Italians take a long time to do things! Usually this doesn’t matter, and gives a much more relaxed vibe to most things, but when it comes to filling in learning agreements and signing forms it’s so frustrating! It took us a whole week to pin down the right person in a meeting to finalise modules, after going into the Conservatorio three days in a row for various other meetings, only be to referred to a different person. Slightly stressing to say the least, and by the end of the week I was beginning to crack, but the Tetley’s teabags turned out to be a genius addition to my suitcase and saved me!

The end of this week has been the official Erasmus Welcome Weekend, and although most people have made their own friends and we aren’t all wandering around on our own like little lost sheep (exactly what I was like at first!) it was kind of nice to have nights out organised just for us

·      There was a presentation on Thursday evening about all the trips and activities that the Erasmus society runs, then a huge trek out to ‘XXL Pub’, another place miles away from town!

·      ‘Positiva’ club was Friday’s destination, again, miles away, and I’m not even sure that the trip on the infamous ‘Discobus’ was enough to make up for the strangeness of the club…the fact that it’s on an industrial estate and that there were children running around inside when first got there..?! But it turned out to be a good night, and all we could do was laugh at the situation, especially when one of the English girls, Gus, literally ran onto a dual carriageway roundabout at 2.30am, arms flailing, to get the departing Discobus to stop and let us on!

·      La ‘BARatona’ was the title of Saturday night’s activity, a ‘maratona’ of bars, in other words, bar crawl! Parma is full of little bars on tiny side streets that you’d normally just walk past without looking down, so it was great to be shown a couple of these that we’d missed, and one that does 20% discount for Erasmus students. Great, apart from the fact that the cocktails are nearly pure alcohol and almost undrinkable, although in true Newcastle girls fashion Jen and I managed to ‘see off’ the most horrifically strong mojito ever!

·      Sunday afternoon was basically a walk in the park, and around the city, on a guided tour. I couldn’t actually hear the speakers and so didn’t really learn anything new but there were blue skies, sunshine and a lovely autumn crispness in the air. Lots of photo opportunities around the city, Lyds and I got a little snap happy!