Milan, Italy

I finally have enough time to sit down and write this! I just went on a crazy adventure around Europe with some great friends for our two week long Spring Break! My whole adventure here is starting to wind down and I am not too sure how I feel about that!

Anyways, for the first week of my Spring Break I had an insane week lined up. I went to Italy, Croatia, Austria, and to the Czech Republic! I will do a separate post for each country just to keep things simple!

I left Thursday, April 11th for Milan. I have never traveled my train before so this was all very interesting! We took a train to Nice, then from Nice we took a train to Ventimiglia. Ventimiglia, Italy. The name is sufficient enough to tell you how bizarre this was. We had a 4 hour layover (Can you use the word 'layover' if you are traveling by train?) We were in the train station from midnight until 4:30AM. It was cold and we had some unique company in the train station. We had to keep an eye on our belongings the whole time which meant we could not sleep...

Needless to say, by the time we actually got on the train we were all exhausted! However, I firmly believe that a good cure for being tired is a nice cup of coffeee! Since we were in Italy, why not get a cappuccino!

This was probably the best cappuccino I have ever had in my life. Thank you, Italy. 

Since we only had about a day and a half or so in Milan we got some food and began our day of sightseeing!! 

The Duomo!

For my lovely Giannini friends!  

My first beer!

Milan was a great city and I had a great time wandering around the city! It was so fun to hear another language. French and Italian are very similar and sometimes we could communicate with someone (and understand them) even though they were speaking Italian and we were speaking French. 

More coming soon...!

I am working on my Spring Break post! It might be pretty long! It is just taking me awhile to get it posted! I will do my very very best to post it tonight!

Here's a sneak peak of my pictures!

I will spill all of my stories and post more pictures tonight! 

Spring Break!

Today I am leaving on a crazy adventure! I am going to Italy, Croatia, Austria, and Czech!! I will be back next Friday and I will fill you in on my crazy adventure!!!

Belated Easter Shenanigans

I went into Marseille on the Monday after Easter to spend the afternoon with my friend's "French buddy". 

Her buddy is Armenian and we met her whole family! We had a traditional Armenian Easter meal. It was really interesting and it turned out to be a really fun time. Her brother, mom, and dad didn't speak much English or at all so we had to speak French which was great! They thought we spoke very well which made me feel so good!

The first thing we did was an Armenian tradition in which you battle with hard boiled eggs, you take your egg and hit your neighbors egg with yours. If yours doesn't break, you win. You do that with everyone until you have a winner. I won. Then they gave me a crown. : )

They brought out some rice that had raisins and another kind of raisin like thing in it too. They also said we were having fish for lunch/dinner. I thought, okay cool. I eat fish. 

Oh boy. I should have known they were going to bring out an ENTIRE fish on a plate. The whole fish. With the scales.. and it's fins and tail. They put some of it on our plates and I kept getting the ribs in my mouth... Then I would try to discreetly take a rib out of my mouth and put it on my plate. It was hard to eat but it tasted really good! Her parents were very curious about what our parents did for a living so we talked about that, they were all very very sweet and I am hoping we can go back sometime! After we had dinner, Danielle and I talked with Gayanne (her buddy) and Gayanne's brother for a long time. That was so fun! We were speaking French and they thought our accents were so cute and pretty. I don't know why but okay! Gayanne and her family were all very outgoing and funny so it is easy to speak French with them. 

They kept feeding us MORE AND MORE. They brought out a picture perfect cake... and some Armenian coffee... and made us eat chocolate. I was SO full. But it felt good to be so full. They were such nice people and I will always remember my first Armenian Easter!!

French Alps

So sorry that I have neglected my blog just a little bit! I have a fill adventures to fill you in on!! Almost two weeks ago (Geez! I didn't realize it had been that long!!!) I went skiing in the French Alps for the day. We woke up at 4am to catch the bus and drive for about 3 hours into the mountains! It was snowing most of the day so our visibility wasn't very good but the view that we could see was stunning!!! 

It felt so good to be back on skis. It had been roughly two years since I'd been on the slopes! The ski lifts were a lot different than what I was used to. It was a pole with a disc at the bottom and you would put the bottom between your legs and hold on!! 

More on how difficult this was later...

I got to feeling a little too confident while going down a slope and while I started to lose a little bit of control, I got a little spastic. A midst this chain of events right before I somersaulted down a bit of this mountain, I popped myself in my mouth with the butt of my ski pole. Thought I lost a tooth, but I only busted my lip. 

As I mentioned above, these ski lifts were a little tricky... We took one lift up that pulled you around a corner then yanked you really hard to get you up the side of this mountain. My friend was pulled around the corner really fast and she yelled something back to me and told me to hold on tight. I honestly thought I was holding on, but clearly I wasn't. The lift pulled me around the corner and yanked me really hard and I lost my footing out from under me! Now, with these lifts, you are NOT up in the air. Your feet/skis are on the ground the whole time. (Just so we are all on the same page.) I may have lost my footing but I was still holding onto the pole, I was just being dragged up the side of this mountain while holding on for dear life, let's not forget I was screaming too. To make matters even better, my friend who was behind me watched me fall and then he fell because he started laughing! We both got to the top and collapsed on the ground to catch our breath. Our other friends in our group were bent over laughing and what they just watched happen. 

It was a marvelous day of skiing and I am so glad we got to go! We were exhausted when we got back and so sore the next day but it was worth every bit of it!