Quick Trip to the Grocery Store, Vegetable Risotto

1.  Find a simple italian recipe, keeping in mind you have no food processor/blender, forgetting that you have no chopping knife.

2.  Make a grocery list.

3.  Translate entire grocery list into Italian, even if you plan on letting your language skills deteriorate into blubbering the moment anyone tries to converse with you

 beyond one word sentences.

4.  Walk to the open-air market.  On the way, make sure to not take 40-year-old portly truck driver on getting into his truck.  Consider that the reason you wear eye-catching jewelry in the U.S. is the exact same reason you don't want to wear it in Italy.

5.  Wander around aimlessly in awe of how many types of mushrooms there are.

6.  Get increasingly more and more flustered with every interaction, and end up running off in the direction of the supermarket.  Fondly remember the days where you enjoyed grocery shopping and a wider vocabulary than "mi dispiace!"

7.  Stare at the bouillon powders for 15 minutes and realize that even with all of your translations you still have no idea which one to buy because you have not been raise to know what "traditional" broth means.

8.  Be genuinely shocked when the cashier does not pitch a fit when you pay with a $50.

9.  After an hour of shopping, come home and translate recipe from tablespoons and cups into grams and milliliters, only to then guess at all the quantities anyway because there are no measuring utensils in the house, not even a scale.  Follow that by spending an hour and a half "chopping" vegetables with a paring knife.

10.  Drink as much wine directly from the bottle as you pour into the pot, so that once you're done with this whole mess you won't even care what it tastes like.

It looks less appetizing than it actually was.  Thanks for washing out my photo, blahgger!

11.  Feel 100% entitled when your roommates are impressed.  Realize that there probably would have been nothing wrong with just having brioche alla Nutella for dinner.  Again.

Valuable Extracurricular Vocabulary

- Every flavor of gelato (here)

- Skim milk, whole milk, heavy cream, coffee cream, sour cream (which is what my professor almost accidentally put in our coffee)

- "Will you make change for a twenty?" "I'm serious, I don't have any coins." "I'm sorry I gave you 5 cents, I thought it was clear that I didn't have 5 euro so I assumed that you couldn't be asking that." "Isn't it your job as a cashier to give me change?" "Il Centro Supermercato will make change, and they have Tabasco."  Punctuate the end of the discussion with "vafancullo," which roughly translates to the name of any opposing soccer club. 

- "What is this hash laced with?"

Alternatively, when not spending a night drinking on the steps of a church, discoteca vocabulary: "You have a bit of coke on your nose."  "Did he really say he had a knife?"  "Excuse me, there's a flaming champagne bucket coming through." "There are three guys already grinding on my pelvis, but I'm sure I could squeeze you in, too."

Sant'Ambrogio Market

I messed up and almost stopped blogging again, although I'm not sure anyone noticed.  But it's not like I wasn't thinking about blogging, because I have been - I have a slew of open blogger windows with halves of stories about Europe and no motivation to finish any of them.  I think what makes it so difficult to really maintain a blog while studying abroad - which is seems like everyone does nowadays - is that it's a complete story that you're in the midst of.  Trying to write a post about any one thing I do in Florence is like trying to tell a story by giving you one sentence in the middle.  I keep resorting to lists. 

And postcards!  It's so ridiculous, I feel like I can only say one thing completely on them, and I really just want to write huge letters to everyone.  Maybe I should just do that, and then send a blank postcard with them.  With a list, like "strange gelato names" or "how many people called me 'little hat' today and who."  

Or "what strange things I saw at the market today":

- A lamb's head (and what I can safely assume were a collection of its comrades' brains next to it)

- Green pomegranates

- Sting rays

- Four people in the same conversation discussing honey in four languages:

Italian/German (apiarist) , Italian/French (bystander), French/English (my professor), Italian/English (me!)

- More male dogs, and thus more prominent dog testicles.  No females dogs anywhere in Florence, it seems.  I like to think that there's a sister city in Italy with only female dogs, but I have a feeling that Europe may be the canine China.

It's just so hard to write here, it seems.  I need quiet and calm to gather my thoughts and living with four girls, one of which had to be treated for anxiety before she even came on the trip, means those moments are about as rare as electric dryers or Florentines who are willing to break a twenty.

Things I Have Learned in Europe, by Cara

1: I am an elitist bitch who does not know how to get along.  

1a. I have been reported as saying "I didn't cross the Atlantic to vomit in foreign gutters."

1b. But really, is classy too much to ask?  And by class I mean not pouring olive oil onto your paper placemat and then dipping your bread in it.  I don't know where you're from, but this is Europe, and we have plates and words to ask for them.  "Vorrei un piatto, per favore," to be exact.

2: I like gin and tonics.  But preferably not at 5 euro a pop.  And that's during happy hour.

3: Octopuses have beaks.  Also are probably scary.  But I will dive in, with a butchering knife! With courage!  And with a repressed gag reflex.

I Polpi

After our first trip to il supermercato in Florence, I announced to my four roommates that I plan to cook a real homecooked italian meal some time in the next week: octopus stew.

So those relationships are off to a great start.

In Which I Almost Leave for Europe

Oh my god I am leaving in 14 hours for my semester abroad.  I am about to vomit with a mixture of excitement and fear that I will turn up and my credit cards will all be shut off or something.  Lena has helped by putting the image in my mind of me dying on a plane from eating peanuts, which helps a ton when I think of all the other dying-on-a-plane fears I have.

I was pretty relieved to find out that I'm hooking up with the other people in my group (hah!) in Frankfurt to catch the flight to Florence, because that means I can split a cab to wherever once we get there.  Not very reassuring that I don't know where I'm going once I hit the Florence airport.  However, reassured that I don't have to take a cab by myself, as cabs are my second least favorite mode of transportation (guess what is first?  hint: planes.)

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So, I thought paring down my book collection to come to North Carolina was bad, choosing the clothes to bring to Europe is significantly worse - although once I finish that, it will surely quickly lose its title to "paring down the North Carolina Book Collection (currently at 33 unread books) to 9 Novels to Entertain Me as I Come Down from My Internet Addiction in Florence."  Over the past couple of days I have been throwing clothes on top of my suitcase, but today was the first time I actually packed them.  With about 1/4 of my suitcase left free, without having thrown in toiletries or all of my textbooks/papers, I decided I might be overpacking.  That is, if I want to bring back more than a pair of Eiffel Tower earrings.

So now I'm down to fifteen pieces of clothing: 3 skirts, 5 shirts, 2 cardigans, 1 trench coat, 2 pairs of shoes, a pair of jeans, and my black dress.  Considering how ridiculous, sometimes flashy, other times childish, I look most of the time, I'm hoping taking so few clothes, all mix-matchable, will teach me how to dress well without having to be constantly over the top.  Understated but fashionable.

This baby will be getting a lot of play.

Also if I run out of things to wear/decide that miniskirts in december are dumb, it's not like Paris and Florence are the worst places to pick up some threads.

All and all, I think I'm excited?  Mostly I'm just nervous.  I've never traveled by myself, at least to the point of ending up somewhere unfamiliar and having to figure everything out on my own.  The good news is that large chunks of my Italian are coming back, although they're mostly strange grammatical things and napolitano curse words.  

Anyway (look at how all of the last few paragraphs start with "a" words), I am going to keep this blog as non-"study abroad experience"-y as possible.  It might become a fashion blog - the many ways you can remix gap and american apparel basics.  Or a food blog.  Or a blog about how disenchanted I am with everything.  Oh wait, that's what it already is.

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Later that evening...

Have moved on to book selection, thrown out three books of the initial elite eight for having too few words-per-page.  Damn you, Sarah Vowell!  I need less than a pica between lines, man.  I'm now reconsidering my relationship with books like Middlemarch and The Feminine Mystique, both which pack a considerable number of pages and words for their book volume.

Nah.

In the end, I will end up switching out Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper for Botany of Desire, despite its words-to-volume ratio, end up committing to Take the Cannoli and Chocolat anyway, reneging over the same w2v concern as Botany, and pick up The Handmaid's Tale along the way.  The final list will look like this, which is to say that with ten minutes left before I leave for the airport, I will take out one, even two, in the interest of bringing back another pair of shoes:

+ Chocolat, Joanne Harris

+ Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell

+ The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

+ The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

+ Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

+ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

+ Skinny Legs and All, Tom Robbins

+ The Best American NonRequired Reading 2008

+ Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

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The next morning...

Pollan's down!  Chocolat?  Handmaid's Tale?  You're next.

Jus de Pamplemousse

Today I got the last of my Europe supplies:

- One trench coat, black, awesome

- Two pairs of shoes, black and brown flats

- Converters, adaptors

- Books

+ Valley of the Dolls

+ Self-Made Man (hardback, for $3 on clearance! wow and sad, all at once.)

+ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

+ Take the Cannoli

+ Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

I feel sort of ungrateful taking a book about Chinese food culture to Italy and France.  Maybe I'll take The Botany of Desire instead.  Gotta cover all my favorite genre bases.

The last thing I got was the French edition of Rosetta Stone.  I got the Italian one the summer before I came to college, but I didn't really stick with it like I'd planned so the most I got out of it was being able to count before everyone else.  Considering how incredibly nervous I am about my Italian proficiency (not looking too good after I scrambled it with Spanish working at IHOP) I'm hoping I'll keep at it out of pure fear of being trapped in some dark alleyway surrounded by french hoodlums and dominatrixes (as I remember from previous Europe trips - or maybe just my dreams - those are the two categories french men and women fall into, respectively) with my only two french phrases to defend myself: "merde" and "jus de pamplemousse, s'il vous plait."