An Incredible Place and An Incredible Loss

This past week was marked by my most cherished memories to date - many were created by an absolutely terrific week exploring northern Tuscany, while the others were brought about by the painful loss of my Grandma Sonya, with whom I have had more wonderful moments than I even realized.  As we explored the back streets of Pisa, made homemade pasta at our house in the tiny town of Barga, rode bikes through the walled city of Lucca and bartered with the leather men in Florence, my many memorable times with Grandma were constantly on replay in my mind - a fact that was saddening at times, but uplifting at others, as I came to realize how lucky I was to have such a great relationship with such a terrific woman.

Our trip was nearly a fairytale.  It all began last Christmas when my friend Nick stole the idea of renting a house in Italy as a family vacation from his family and converted it into a Pomona "family vacation."  There are literally thousands of houses for rent in Italy and we didn't really care where we went, but somehow it got narrowed down and we ended up with a house for the first week in April in the tiny hilltop medieval walled city of Barga, which is in between Florence and Pisa on the very northern, mountainous end of Tuscany.

I flew into Bologna and after a typical got-on-the-wrong-train story, ended up finally in Florence, where I met up with my friends Andrew, who is studying in Cambridge, and Marco, who is studying in Florence for the semester.  We wandered around, snacking on a lunch of tripe sandwich (the local specialty) and a bottle of wine on the Duomo steps.  Later, we went to see the David, which was everything and more that I had expected it to be since reading Agony and Ecstasy in eighth grade.  It was here, however, that I got the news about my grandma, putting me in a whole new state of awe.  Staring at something so perfect yet so old is strange upon realizing that not everything has such fortune.

world's smallest train

That night, Marco took us for aperitivo, the Italian tradition of buying a drink and getting unlimited food for free!  We filled up on an amazing array of Italian food, and then met up with my other friend Isabelle, who is also studying in Florence for some gelato.  The next morning, Andrew and I packed up and hopped on the train to Lucca, where we transferred to the train to Barga - all one cars of it.  We hopped off 45 minutes later, and with no direct plan for getting to the house.  Apparently the buses don't run on Sundays, so we called the English-speaking cab driver, Archie, who had been recommended by the owner of the house, but he had just had back surgery so was "out for a while. Sorry 'bout that."  The lady at the little bar next to the station was kind enough to call a taxi for us, but they didn't pick up.  How did we pick this place again?  Thankfully, a guy was kind enough to offer to call the numbers on the wall in the train station, and ten minutes later, Antonio arrived, who it turns out is Barga's primary/only cab driver.  After trying to follow directions in Italian for 45 minutes, we walked by a house where an old lady was sitting on the front porch and yelled at us in Italian, which I guess meant that she was the one who had the keys to the house.  After dropping our bags and gleefully opening every door and closet in the house, we explored the town of Barga, snacking as we went.

the view from our kitchen balcony

The next day we had planned to go to Pisa to collect Cati, Nick, Sydney, and Erica, who were all coming in from various locations.  We slept in and took the morning leisurely, planning to catch the 12:05 bus to the train station, but apparently stood on the wrong side of the road, therefore missing the only bus for the next two hours.  With nothing else to do, we decided to walk the 5 kilometers down the mountain to the train station, which, despite the funny looks the cars gave us, proved to be a lovely jaunt.  The road is so narrow and windy that big cars and buses honk around every corner - it's fantastic.  We made it to Pisa in time, took some pics of the tower, wandered the streets, had a terrific dinner, and returned to Barga, friends in tow.

walking to the train station

The following day it rained, but we just explored, bought a bunch of food, and caught up on each other's lives, as studying in Europe never comes without countless stories.  Cati and I built a Grandma Sonya-worthy meat and cheese plate, and Nick made an amazing stew for dinner from a recipe on a brochure he picked up at the tiny library when we were checking our email.  We went to bed well-fed and squeaky clean (see photos), ready for our Florence expedition the next day.  We caught the bus at the right time for this trip, but it turns out that the public bus is the same as the school bus, which made for an incredibly awkward and comical situation as we boarded a bus with forty Italian people our age staring at us like, why are you here?

Florence was just as great the second time as it had been the first.  We wandered the leather markets, walked across the Ponte Vecchio, had pizza for lunch, climbed the less-popular-but-equally-tall-and-cheaper-than-the-Duomo Campanile bell tower, ate the best gelato in Florence according to Marco, saw one of the greatest views of the city from Piazzale Michelangelo, and exhaustedly hopped on the return train, having picked up Charlotte in the process.  It turns out that that was only half of the day's adventures.  Three stops from Lucca, where we had to get on the smaller train, our bigger train stayed stopped at a station for 45 minutes.  Being on the last train of the day, we were worried about not being able to get back to Barga, and I went to the front where I tried to talk with some helpful Italian guys and the not-so-helpful conductor and basically just realized that there was nothing anyone could do.  I returned to the car, where my friends had begun to sing to fill the time, earning the friendship of two nuns in the process, who offered to have us at their convent for the night were we to not be able to return to Barga.  But through a chain of phone calls via Marco, we arranged to have Antonio drive the 45 minutes to Lucca to collect us.  It was an entertaining taxi ride as Nick, who was in the front seat, tried to chat with him the entire way.

For Thursday, we planned to go to the nearby town of Bagni di Lucca (Baths of Lucca) to test out the "natural springs," but again misinterpreted the bus schedule and then learned from the girl at the library that they were very commercialized and more like a fancy spa than a series of crystalline pools as we had envisioned.  Relieved that we hadn't made it all the way there only to discover a 50€ entrance charge, we restructured our day and went on the greatest countryside walk imaginable, followed by homemade pizza night (no matter how hard I try, I can't throw pizza dough in the air like the pizza guys do).

a snapshot of our Italian countryside jaunt

Nick, Andrew, Cati & Sydney with Barga behind

Friday we went into Lucca, where we wandered the narrow streets, had another fantastic lunch, met up with Cody, Michael and Wiley who were joining us for the weekend, and rented bikes to ride around the wall around the old city.  It was a beautiful day, which we hadn't had yet on our trip, and a great city.  We caught the 5:00 bus back to Barga, though, in order to ensure enough time for our homemade pasta to dry.  Marco, whose family is Italian, taught us all how to make pasta, which it turns out is really easy. Who knew?  Cati and I topped the night off with a pretty stellar apple cobbler using the recipe of: just add more butter, sugar and cinnamon.  Come to think of it, we didn't take any pictures of the cobbler.  We must have been too excited to eat it.

The next day was our final day in Barga, and it rained quite hard most of the day, so we spent most of it inside next to the fireplace playing cards, baking bread, and just enjoying each other's company.  For dinner, we had an assortment of Italian appetizers as we played cards, including seemingly unlimited meat and cheese, prosciutto and melon, and bruschetta, plus sorbet and prosecco for dessert.  There was some sort of procession in honor of Easter, of which we had a prime view from our balconies.  Then we did a whirlwind cleaning of the house before packing and hit the hay.  The next morning, we said our goodbyes to Barga, turned in the keys to Maria the neighbor, who offered us Easter chocolates, and went to meet the cab.  It must have been Antonio's day off, because it was a different guy, but we were sad to not get to say goodbye to our old friend.

I don't think they get a lot of visitors our age to the town of Barga.  At the end of the week, we had made a pretty big impact on the town and, in addition to Maria and Antonio, the butcher, the gelato woman, the librarian, the wine shop owner, all of the grocery store employees - even the cats knew us well.  That is why traveling to such small places is so great - everyone there was incredibly friendly and helpful, despite the fact that we couldn't really even communicate (except with the gelato woman who was Scottish).  I would go back to Barga.  Despite our endless transportation woes, its obvious isolation, and poor weather, it was an unbelievably beautiful place, and an excellent way to take advantage of life at a time when I'm realizing how quickly it can end.

This was maybe the most photogenic week of my life too.  Here are the pictures if you want to see them all. Italy Album

Spring

 It's a beautiful day to be writing an essay about the public education system in Spain...

Intercambio

One of the things that our program recommends we do while in Madrid is an intercambio, which is a language exchange with a Spaniard who is trying to learn English.  The goal is for you to meet with them and talk half in English and half in Spanish in order to improve both our speaking and listening proficiency.  During the crazy apartment-hunting time at the beginning of the semester, one of our helpers mentioned that she wanted to speak English with us in order to practice, but wasn't allowed.  We got along quite well and decided to do an intercambio once the apartment madness settled down.  Now, we meet almost every week (I'm gone a lot as you may have noticed) for two hours and just chat.  It's super fun - we use it as a chance to try out new restaurants or cafés, and we have a lot in common which makes nonchalantly talking for two hours not a problem at all.

Her name is Irene (pronounced ee-ren-ay) and she is from Logroño, which is a small city in the north of Spain and she's in her last year of studying translation at a university just outside of Madrid.  Her first foreign language is French, in which she is totally fluent as far as I can tell. But she has also been studying English for quite a few years, and as a student of translation, she understands the language perfectly and in general her only hiccups come from pronunciation and fluidity in spoken language.  She is also studying Japanese now, if the three languages weren't enough.  She just got a job (which is a miracle in Spain) with a translation agency, so she has been doing that while finishing up her classes, so there are few windows in which we're both available to hang out for a couple hours.

During our conversations we talk about cultural differences between Spain and the US, grammar questions that we have, politics, school, travel, and just life in general.  You don't realize how stressed it makes you to speak Spanish all of the time until you are with someone who is on an even playing field with you, and it feels so great to ask questions that you've always thought were too dumb to say out loud, like "what is the difference between perdón and perdona?"

Being friends with Irene has been one of my favorite parts of being in Spain, because it has proven to be quite challenging to make friends with Spaniards given my lack of direct interaction with them.  I'm not sure if there are things like this in bigger cities, but they are such a great way to mix cultures, make friends, and learn a language.