After traveling alone for ages, I was ecstatic to take a trip with one of my best friends, Julianne. We had little snack/wine get togethers to plan our trip and it turned out marvelously. We decided on a cruise, partly because it was fiscally within reach for both of us and partly because I had just spent a lot of energy planning minute details of my previous trip and I was ready to let someone else worry about filling the time. Cruises do that job very well.
Arriving in Venice the night before our ship left the harbor, we met up with one of my couchsurfing friends, Luc. We all had a lovely dinner together in Venice (with gelato of course) and stayed in an adorable hotel. Despite the dizzying number of tourists in Venice, this hotel stays impeccable and lovely because, quite simply, it is impossible to find. No one ever stays there, they wander around for hours and then collapse in the nearest Marriott. Even with Julianne's supernatural orientation abilities, it took some major commitment to find that place. Needless to say that if Julianne hadn't been there, I would still to this day be at the Venice airport.
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| Did you notice we're in ITALY?! |
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| This is Luc, a french couch surfer! |
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| Famous Venetian masks |
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| Our gifted room attendant elicited lots of joy squeals with this penguin. |
We left the next day and got on the boat, which was humongous and lovely. We joked that we were on the "Jack floor," in reference to the movie Titanic, in which the lower-class passengers are heaped together in the festering under-belly of the ship with no hope of escape. That was a bit of exaggeration for us, because our room was lovely, and also the escape route was only one floor down.
Pretty soon, we made some friends. Garrett and his sister are from California. Jakub is from Prague. Probably our best buds were 3 brothers from South Africa/New Zealand whom we
followed and tricked into talking in order to hear their glorious accents had some lovely conversations with and sometimes joined for dinner.
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| Garrett and his sis and juju and me in Santorini, Greece. |
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| Check out that doric sweetness. |
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| There was a reef far out in the Mediterranean, after I did this pose like a million other people did it too. |
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| This is the handstand for Izmir, and I haven't written about Turkey yet, but it's really hard to move these pictures in the blog. Sorry. |
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| I studied the whole time! And got back to the states and aced my MA comprehensive exams. I give all the credit to this daiquiri. |
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| These are 2/3 of the NZ boyz. |
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| Every night we ate crêpes and watched sunsets. Rough, rough, rough. |
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Me: God dammit Madrid, I'm not talking about you yet, get out of this picture slot!
This picture: Haha no! Try for another 20 minutes, see if that helps!! |
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| Just lovely. |
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| This is a real picture from one of our cameras. |
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| Venice bridge. |
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| Re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic. Would you jump into a lifeboat that was only half full and already descending? The question merits visual aids. |
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| This is Santorini. |
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| Teaching everyone the ways of the "hand game". |
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| This is how it felt when we left. |
I tried to meet up with one of my Turkish friends from my study abroad in Strasbourg when we were in her city, Izmir. We didn't get a hold of her.
However, in order to make sure that it wasn't just my phone acting up that prevented us from seeing her, we went to a place that had wifi. This place happened to be a small restaurant in a strip mall. I ordered veggie pizza and when asked what she wanted, Julianne shook her head and said, "I don't know, I can't decide, give me whatever you think is best."
My pizza came promptly and we both waited to see what surprise Julianne would get. We waited and waited. The waiter came over to ask why I wasn't eating my pizza and I replied that I was waiting for my friend to have her food too. Like Julianne's request for food, this statement was not at all understood by the waiter; like Julianne's request for food, he acted like he spoke English and said ok. After 45 minutes, we ended up just sharing the pizza, but not before a POLICE OFFICER came over and asked why I wasn't eating my pizza. I tried to explain and when I turned around I saw that a crowd had gathered at the shop window, watching us sit around the uneaten pizza. It must have been very mysterious to everyone involved (I know it was for us).
After a dreamy few days, we went to Madrid to catch our flight home. We couch-surfed with Jose in his lovely, vast apartment which used to be... what else? A brothel owned by a former nun. It was Julianne's first CS experience and she was a champ. Jose and his friends prepared a lovely dinner for us which included gazpacho and vegetarian paella. IT WAS AMAZING. The whole trip was so fantastic.
I'm writing this as I sit just inside my apartment in Tours, France, with the windows open as rain pounds down. I'm trying to limit the schadenfreude generated by the shrieks of people caught in the rain, and it's not working. I'll tell you more about my French life later though. For now, good night!
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| That's my buddy! |
