Photo taken while walking back from the gym, when I got the idea for the photo-a-day project.

Today I made Liz's delicious recipe for banana bread, which came out mindblowingly.

Last night I had a dream about the chick pea soup I ate at the Trattoria di Mario a Firenze. It made me realize that eating in the U.S. just isn't the same as eating in Italy. When I first got back, I had very little appetite but thankfully I went to a quite authentic Italian restaurant which was incredible. However, when I told my host dad over skype, very enthused, that I had just "almost eaten an Italian-style meal," he responded, "Ok. Did you have appetizer, first course, second course, side dishes, wine, coffee, dessert and fruit?" "No," I said. "Alright, then. You did not eat Italian style. You know very well what it means to eat Italian-style!" In the dream there was this explosion of flavor, which is what it's like to eat in Italy. It's not just that their food is better-prepared with higher-quality ingredients and time-tested family recipes (all of which is true)-- it's that the food actually seems to be quite a different substance.

Incidentally, there was a bug that just landed on my computer and freaked me out, which reminded me of this one time early on in studying abroad, I was lying in bed reading around 11pm and I heard a thump. An enormous grasshopper was bumping up against my wall! I ran downstairs and my host dad came up to kill it.

It's just one of the little things I remember...

Beth, Chalene, and Elisa
After the Winter Carnival Ball, walking back home in the snow.

I'm Back

So I''m back in the U.S. and I'm back at Middlebury. This is already the third week of the semester, and as is typical here, time chugs along like a snowball gaining size and velocity at the same time, schedule expanding in every direction...

I haven't posted for ages. I really do want to sum up January and my travels, post some photos, and most of all, write some kind of closing something for the whole experience. I will do that in the next few days. For now suffice to say that the experience is not closed, because I carry it with me each day. There are moments when the immense sadness of what I left behind comes over me, and it could be triggered by anything... for example when a girl with an Italian last name came to pick up her package at the post office last week. But in those moments, along with the sadness and wet eyes, there is also an appreciation for what I was graced to experience in those five short precious beautiful months.

Francesco our yoga teacher told me in our parting exchange that study abroad fills in the spaces that aren't filled by studying in your own culture. He also told me that after one week in American, I would already have my American head back. He was right on both counts.

Leaving the topic of Italy aside for the moment, I want to propose a new purpose for this blog in the coming months. Because I may not have time to write that much, and because a picture is worth a thousand words, I plan to post one picture every day of life in Middlebury. It may be representative of how I feel or the day I lived or the whim of a moment. But I'm captivated by this project because something about it tells me that it will open my eyes to the world around me, the way that taking photos while I was abroad opened my eyes a bit to the beauty of the way the world is composed.

Allora. Comincio...
This picture is a bridge: Chalene and I cooked our first meal together, penne alla carbonara, using a recipe I got from an Italian cooking site, giallozafferano.it. We americanized it significantly, using whole-wheat pasta and pre-cooked ham cubes, but the Italian idea still made me happy.