College student for life :(

I've just rediscovered that I really might never graduate.
I need 91 units in all for me to get my degree in human development. That is 51 GE and 40 in my major.
I have 62 units already done so it seems great, right?
But in reality I still need 60 more units to graduate (this is including my minor).
So all of the units I have accumulated don't count for shit and now that I am over here in Denmark I realize that I rushed into choosing this program because only a few of my classes are actually carrying over and counting for something when all is said and done (long story).
With all of those new limits on units per semester SSU is now putting in place, I really may never get done. I am so sad and frustrated right now. My parents have never paid close attention to my school, don't care or know what classes I take, and just let me go abroad because I said it was fine and I am going to feel so sad telling them that I am really far behind.
I picked up an applied arts minor since I have taken tons of classes (theatre, music, and english) that would count for that minor. I would only need a few more units there and I want to keep taking fun classes anyway, but I might have to drop that and really just focus on Human Development if I ever want to get out. Its going to be real fun having to get advised via email in the spring to pick which classes I will take next fall. And intersessions are so expensive!
I know I am learning so much over here even if it doesn't transfer over on paper, but fucckkkkk me.

Scopa and Salute

I had a great and very interesting two weeks in Italy and Spain. I learned so much about how to travel and with each person I met and every new culture I encountered I found my whole world turned around. How can one be so sure of anything when there are so many different religions, cultures, governments, languages, etc? Oh life. This trip was random, long, and delicious. There is no way for me to write anything fluid about it…

-Gelato=Life. I ate gelato almost every day I was in Italy and ohhhh baby it is good. There are endless combinations to make. I can’t even remember my favourite one right now. Was it banana and nutella? Uva fragolla? I don’t know but I do know I want more, now please.

-Andrea lives close to the Arno River that runs through Firenze and at the end of my time in Italy I had at least 35 mosquito bites on my body, and then got a few more after that. I am from the mountains and I have gotten eaten alive by mosquitoes many a time and I have scratched the holy shit out of my mosquito bites in the past, but these were not normal mosquitoes or normal mosquito bites. They were mutants and I looked like I had leprosy or the plague. I came I saw I conquered. I swelled, I itched. I bled.

-I went to visit Ha Ani in Orvieto. This small Italian town’s population is appx. 8,000 people and no one speaks English. It is beautiful and like a little fairy tale. One night we played capture the flag in the town and it is small enough that each team had an entire piazza as their home base and we just ran around the town in the sweet October air. I hate silly competitive sports like this and I fucking hate capture the flag normally, but this was so much fun! I think my team would have won but eventually the little Italian police came and we got to a point where both teams knew where each other’s flags were but we just didn’t have enough people to conquer. Ha Ani’s program has only about 15 kids. So fun!

-Two kids from my program here in Denmark were in Florence too and we got some good wine and just chilled on the steps and drank it after speaking butchered Italian to this cute old man wine seller. I swear wine tastes better in Italy, outside, on a piazza’s steps.

-In Spain at my hostel I had some bed confusion on the first night. My safe, letter K, was in the corner so I assumed my bed was also in the corner next to my safe. I was wrong! I came in late one night to find a hairy pretty much naked boy in “my” bed. I was freaking out because it was really late and there were 20 other people in the room and I just didn’t know what to do. I needed a place to sleep so I wake him up and make him recite to me which bed he has and in the end, in the dark, I found out that my K bed was on the other side. People were so mad and it was pretty hilarious in a tragic way for me. I had actually taken a siesta in what turned out to be his bed earlier in the day and he saw me and just said he laughed and let me sleep there. Ohh man.

-Also the kids in my hostel thought I regularly talked on the phone in the night. If you know me at all you might be familiar with my sleep talking habits. I don’t just mumble, I have full on conversations with only god knows who. Kind of embarrassing…

-At the hostel we got free dinner and breakfast. It was the best and most perfect place to stay. Oh and 2 liters of beer for 3 euro. Slightly dangerous…hehe.

-I loved getting to practice my Spanish. Mexican Spanish is different than the Spanish spoken in Spain. And in Barcelona they actually really speak Catalan which is a strange hybrid of French and Spanish. But I must become fluent in Spanish when I get home! Almost everyone I meet over here speaks at least two or more languages. I hate the fact that English is becoming the main universal language. We have it way too easy as Americans.

-Ryanair, while it is cheap initially, can suck. It didn’t completely suck for me but I realize that you have to be careful. We had to take an hour bus ride after our flight and it was just a little annoyance, but I know now to double check where Ryanair is actually flying me and if it is worth it in the end when thinking of additional expenses!

-La Sagrada Familia was a religious experience for me. When it is finally done I will go back to Barcelona for sure. The detail and all of the different materials used in the construction is amazing and I just love the organic and nature inspired style!-I had a fantastic siesta on the grass at the leaning tower of Pisa. I love sunshine and grassy naps!

-I love Kababs! They are like the European burrito. The ones in Spain are better than in Italy and Denmark from what I have experienced…

-In some ways its sad to think of all of the great people I meet and I will never see any of them ever again…I love global networking!

-I watched that “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” film when I was in Barcelona and it was so cool to see all of the sites that were in the movie because I had been there too! I really enjoyed the movie too. I haven’t gone to the movies since I’ve been over here because it really isn’t my thing but I forgot how much I love going to the movies.

-I splurged and bought myself some Italian leather shoes! They were quite expensive but I only came to Europe with a pair of tennis shoes, a pair of flip flops, a pair of low heels, and my rainboots. My mom sent my old working flats that I loathe and they hurt my feet, so I still REALLY needed to find some good shoes that were a) comfortable for walking and dancing b) not gonna die in the rain c) versatile (aka BLACK and can be worn with tights or pants) d) cute and I do believe I have found them. I still need to break them in a little bit but I hope they work. I have really sensitive and gross feet so I need some good shoes finally in my life!

I am in Italy!

I am in Italy and it is so beautiful. As soon as I stepped off the plane it felt like home. It feels like California here; nice and warm. Andrea picked me up at the airport, took me back to her apartment and made me a delicious lunch of veggie pasta with cinnamon tea. She took me all around Florence to a bunch of Italian places that I can't spell but they are important and I am cool for going there now. Everything is beautiful and full of so much history!
We ate delicious gellato and I have only been spending the Euros that Greta and Kyle gave me so far. Haha.
The men here are very forward and tell you you are beautiful and will just start talking to you. Andrea takes my hand and pulls me away. They all want one thing from American chicks according to Andrea but I swear it would not do to much harm to just talk to people...but I know she knows better than me after living here for all these weeks and having to fight the men off with a stick. They all want her America bootay!
So I took a little sietsa (only got 3 hours of sleep before I came here) and then we went to an Irish pub and I had absinthe and Guinness. How freaking European of me, right?
I am just so in the zone and so happy to be here. It is strange that two days ago I was in Estonia, this morning I was in Copenhagen, and now I am in Italy. I seriously cried a little bit once I got off the plane from the warm weather (I was in rain gear and freezing just last night!) and a familiar face.
We are going to go see tons of cool things and eat good food this week. I am not into the pressures to see all of Italy in a week. Right now we are watching Italian TV and Andrea made homemade chocolate chip cookies for her class for tomorrow. To some this may seem boring and one might say, "Why aren't you out doing stuff, you are in Europe!" But I live around here now and sometimes the nice chill days are just the best. And its Sunday. This is a Catholic country so there aint too much going on tonight anyway. I will go play the tourist but I want to relax and just have a good time as well.
Next week we are going to Barcelona. That "we" includes me and Andrea and there are tons of other people coming with us I guess, but Andrea doesn't know who these others are and either do I. I have no idea where I am staying (hostels probably, but maybe friends of friends of friends? Oh and we might see Madrid as well...?) Should be an adventure and I am going to do my best to go with the flow, not ruin anyone else's crazy spontaneity, and try not to spend too much money, eek.
Oh and I will probably get to see Ha Ani from high school in a small town outside of Florence. I don't even get to see the girl in "real life" at home very often, and how great is it we just get to see each other in Italy!

On another note, my week long "academic" study tour was fantastic! I took a train to Stockholm and there I ate some Swedish meatballs, took a bath in the hotel and {GASP} shaved my hairy body just because I could, hehe. We had delicious and cheap food in this underground art cafe and played so much Egyptian rat fuck...so much fun. I saw two different styles of Swedish schools, went to see the Vasa museum, had a tour of the old town, explored the metro system (it goes really deep into the ground. I think I felt the temperature change, I swear.)
Then we had an overnight booze cruise from Stockholm to Tallinn and it was great; my first cruise! The alcohol was tax free on the ship! The buffet was delicious and I had caviar for the first time ever. The dessert spread was amazing too. Turkey was playing Estonia in football the next day so our ship had tons of creepy Turkish Swedes on their way to the game. It was one girls birthday and it was certainly an adventure to sum it up. The next day I think was still drunk and left my passport in my cabin on the ship (oh em gee, right?) but luckily my friend found it. Long story short, hehe.
Estonia is such a cool country and I never would have gone there. I am not gonna lie. I didn't know it existed until I was forced to go there with my school. It was occupied by the soviet union until 1991 so it was so interesting to hear about that. I am REALLY fascinated with Russia now and I want to go there next semester. The town looks like a Disney movie and definitely has an Eastern European feel to it. I had a beautiful hotel in Estonia, went to an Estonian jazz concert, ate a completely mid evil meal only using my fingers in candle light, went to a modern art museum, ate at this neat African Kitchen, saw two Estonian schools, had a walking tour, went to a mall (eek. Estonia was pretty cheap so we were in search of various things, but yeah. A mall is a mall is a mall is a mall, which means mall stuff is more expensive always). Then we flew back to Copenhagen.

That was my great week in a nutshell. So much history, so many cool stories, currencies, languages, etc. I might have done more but honestly cannot remember!

Three cheers to an amazing week in Italy and another amazing week in Spain!

Aha!

I just dreamed in Danish! Isn't that one of those signs that I am basically fluent?
The dream was in English too, but I actually understood the Danish and the English part of the dream wasn't even important...

Either I am on the road to fluency or simply scared for my midterms this week. Lets hope its the first!

It's going to be a long winter...

It is 53 degrees here right now.
It is also 53 degrees in Truckee. How is this possible that I lived there for 14 years and I feel like right now I've never been so cold in my life?
I guess the bay area and Reno warmed me up?
I think this difference can be attributed to a) the climate change. Truckee may be high, Copenhagen is coastal. b) In Truckee we had a heater and a fireplace. Here, the heater just broke and I think it has to actually be freezing for Bodil to turn it on anyway. The fireplace doesn't do much and takes a long time to get started (or something...I am not quite sure what the deal with that is, but it does take a lot of tending to)
I am wearing two pairs of socks, a pair of PJ pants and a pair of work out pants, a long sleeved shirt, a small sweatshirt, a big sweatshirt, a scarf, a hat, a hood, and leg warmers on my arms (can't wear gloves or I can't use my hands too well.)
This is only the beginning and 53 isn't even that cold.
It is going to be a loooong winter :)