The Impossible Pun

Preface
1) My friends and I love to make puns about the cities we visit. These jokes are usually used for Facebook albums and Blog titles. Here are some examples that Brigette, guru pun-maker, has come up with in the past:
a) Pope Benny and the Jets (Rome)
b) Arles in Charge (Arles)
Needless to say, she is a funny girl. But, when thinking about Dublin, our minds were a barren pun desert. The best we could come up with was: the Dirty Dubs, Rub-a-Dub-Dublin, and the Emerald Bile, none of which conveyed the awesome trip nor were they in the least bit amusing. Thus I will from now on be referring to this trip as the impossible pun.

2) The showers in the hostel in Dublin were straight out the movie Hostel, flickering lights, cobwebs, the worst showers in the world, thus I didn’t shower for about 4 days. The bedroom, I might also mention, slightly resembled an orphanage/child T.B. hospital.

3) In order to get to the airport in time to catch our flight to Nice we had to be up at 4:45 so we deemed it unnecessary to spend the money to sleep for 3 hours and decided to stay in the airport to save some euros. As of right now (April 20th at 5:04 p.m.) I’ve been awake for 33 hours. I refuse to fall asleep until I’ll be in for the night, thus I’ll probably stay up until 9:30 ish, meaning I’ll be nearing the 38 hours mark, a personal record.
This also will explain my multitude of clumsy speech and grammatical errors.

Chapter 1
Nice
In order to make it to the Nice airport in time to catch our Ryan Air flight (p.s this is not at all a plug, for the most part I hate Ryan Air) we decided we needed to stay in Nice for the night, so we left early Wednesday morning to spend the day on the beach, eating gelato. The bus ride that was supposed to take 2 hours ended up being a 4 hour endeavor, which was fine because we didn’t have anything important to do. We arrived in Nice, where I was stealthy groped by a short, balding man with dirty fingernails. I’m scarred. What was left of the day was spent sitting on the beach, eating gelato, and searching for our next meal.
One thing you will notice with Brigette, Marisa, and I is our tendency to turn our vacations into gastronomical journeys. It seems like after every meal we are searching for a café for coffee or a place to eat our next incredible feast. It is a diet buster and sometimes a bit expensive but this is how we like to enjoy a city.
We slept in a hostel called St. Exupery, named after the author of Le Petit Prince, one of my favorite books. The hostel was very accommodating and quaint. At one point it was a monastery so it is beautiful and has the best breakfast one can ever hope to experience at a hostel. There is a bar lined with 12 different kinds of cereals, included Nutella flavored. My dear friends, heaven is indeed a cereal bar.

Chapter 2
Dublin was not at all what I expected. The 3 hour plane trip ending with a horrible landing, compliments of Ryan air, and the bus to the inner city took a while. We arrived at the hostel to drop off our things before heading off to explore/eat. In my mind, all of Ireland was an Emerald Isle, rolling plains of four leaf clovers spotted with greasy pubs and beautiful men with lovely accents. Dublin however, is much more industrial. Dinner included a lot of overpriced fried goodness
(Side note: I realize there is no continuity between those last two sentences, it’s been 33.5 hours, give me a break.)

Chapter 3
One of Marisa’s friends, Monasie, joined us late Thursday night at the hostel. She is studying in Hungary and goes to school with Marisa in Arizona. Friday morning we decided to go to the Jameson Whiskey factory to learn about the Irish legend’s production. The tour was lead by a leprechaun who spoke just like Lucky and he taught us an Irish jig. KIDDING. The tour was lead by a less than enthusiastic 20 something who never failed to make me laugh with his sharp sarcasm. The tour was short and ended with a free tasting. I was picked with 5 others to be official tasters. We sat down and were given 5 different types of whiskey, 3 being Irish, one scotch, and one Jack Daniels. In case you are interested the difference between the three is that Irish whiskey is triple distilled making it the smoothest, while Scotch is distilled twice, and American distilled only once time. The difference between the 5 was undeniable as I suffered my way through them. Jameson has a vanilla flavor, scotch tastes a bit burnt, and Jack is somewhere in between. It might also interest you to know that Jameson is matured in casks that are shipped in from the Wild Turkey Factory in my KENTUCKY home.
I am now a certified (I have the certificate) Irish Whiskey Taster which I will attach to every resume henceforth.
Afterwards we stopped by Trinity College where there was a second hand book store. I ended up buying 4 books for less that $10 including Pride and Prejudice, a Tom Robbins, a Petit Nicolas, and Manifestes du Surrealisme. As of Friday I have purchased 10 books while abroad, I am a walking library.
Dinner consisted of Fish and Chips, yes I ate fish, I am currently a Pesca-vegetarian.

Chapter 4
Friday night Emily, another friend of Marisa’s met us at the hostel. She is studying in Paris, and she is also awesome.
Saturday morning we met up with 2 more friends, Amanda and Alli, at the Guinness factory. The place was incredible. It was more like a museum than a guided tour. There were 7 floors where we learned the brewing process, the different types of Guinness, the advertising over the past few decades, and loads more. I thoroughly enjoyed the tour, which ended at the Gravity bar where you could see an incredible 360 view of Dublin.
We visited Trinity again, as well as Molly Malone (the tart with the cart.) The afternoon turned to night in a series of restaurants, cafes, and pubs.

Chapter 5
As previously mentioned, we decided to stay at the airport overnight en lieu de paying for a hostel. We arrived before midnight and camped out in a nice food court area where we read, did sudoku, and talked. We bought bottomless cups of coffee, the first time in months, which lead to 3 stomach aches but delightful dispositions. We checked in at 5:45 and waited in “the budget waiting area” which was much less attractive than the rest of the airport. Just because we’re economical doesn’t mean we deserve any less than the idiots who overpay for plane tickets. The plane ride was spent in and out of consciousness while incessant French children played hand clap games. A bus picked us up at the airport and drove us the 4 hour route back to Aix, our love.

Epilogue
In the end, Brigette, Marisa, and I successfully spent over 2 weeks together without killing eachother. We ever parted with hugs today. Friends who travel together, suffer together, don’t shower for days together, and experience gastronomical journeys together, stay together.



Guinness


The Truth


My Goodness My Guiness



Brigette knows that Guinness makes you strong



Trinity University


Jameson Factory


Whiskey Tasting


The Famous Temple Bar



My Dublin trip was soundtracked by the Beatles and then I saw this building

italia

In case you weren’t aware, this week and last week is spring break. It probably won’t surprise you that among other things, spring break in Europe (at least for students studying abroad) is astronomically different. While in the states one might venture south to Florida, take a cruise to Cancun or rent a cabin in Gatlinburg, but in Europe because the countries are so close together it’s relatively normal to hop on a train to Germany, Italy, or take a tour of France. This is why the first week of my spring break was spent on a tour of Italy or as we so affectionately called it “Olive Garden, Tour of Italy, the Never-ending pasta bowl.”

Our journey began in Roma; Marisa, Brigette, Denise, and myself. I can’t say my knowledge was vast on the subject upon arrival, to be honest a big chunk of it came from the Lizzie McGuire movie (thank you Disney.) We stayed there for about 2 days visiting the most touristy sights and being annoyed by the tour groups. I’m just going to say: at no point in my life will I ever be a part of a tour group in a city. While I realize that I was a tourist there is a vast difference between being a tourist and being part of a tour group. I refuse to follow a woman with an umbrella or flower held high in the air while she speaks to me through walkie-talkie sending bits of information through an earpiece while we block up the road. Maybe I’m just too prideful for that or maybe I just refuse to lose my dignity in such a god awful way, either way I’m discovering cities on my own.
Anyways, after getting off the overnight train, which was an experience in itself, we dropped off our backpacks (yes, we all only took just one, incredible, I know) at our hostel. The Yellow hostel was my first hostel experience and I can’t complain. It was trying way too hard to be cool, playing top 40 hits as we paid and received our keys, but it was very accommodating and relatively clean. We started off the tour of Italy in the Vatican, touring the church and completely missing the Sistine chapel. We saw the Pieta and the incredible architecture before heading off to the Pantheon. In case you weren’t aware, it is election time in Italy and so we walked through a rally in front of the Pantheon on our way inside. To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed with it. Maybe because I didn’t know too much about it, but we went and saw Donatello’s grave.





Our first Italian lunch was at a small Trattoire where the waiter was admittedly hung over but very friendly. We shared two pizzas and explored the ancient aqueduct in the basement. The Trevi fountain followed which was what I was most excited to see. It was swarming with tourists and men trying to sell worthless toys. We threw our obligatory coins in the fountain, one promising a visit back to Roma and another granting us a wish. I’m not entirely positive but I’m relatively sure that three of the four of us wished for the same thing. Who goes to the Trevi fountain single and wishes for anything but true love? We found our way to the Spanish steps that were covered in people, thousands of people, just sitting. Marisa, Brigette, Denise, and I joined them for close to 30 minutes. A short pause at the hostel and then we found a small trattoria for a mouth watering dinner.

Day two commenced with the Colosseum, the most amazing place in Rome. I can’t even begin to describe the grandness of it, but just know that it’s INCREDIBLE. The rest of the day was spent wandering the streets looking for a movie theatre where we could sit for more than 50 minutes and enjoy cin cin cinema. To no avail did we ever find the place we only increased the size of our blisters. Dinner was amazing, Gnocchi is my favorite food I’ve decided.



















Day 3 (this entry will now become more list like with side notes.)
Sistene chapel- incredible, I got goosebumps I also ran into a friend from UK who is studying in Spain, what are the odds?
Train to Florence, my favorite city.
Met Brigette’s roommate
Explored the city, which was less touristy but still filled with high schoolers that seemed to be following us everywhere we went.
Incredible dinner, as usual.






Day 4
Florence market, incredible sandals purchased. Real Italian leather, real gangster.
David- magnenemous
Dinner with Tiramisu, my favorite desert of all time. I forgot to mention that every day there is at least one cone of gelato, true story.



Day 5
Uffizzi. I made a brochure for the Uffizzi in middle school, never thinking I’d ever go there. It was pretty cool, I loved the Botticelli’s but besides that I wasn’t too impressed.
The group split up and Denise and I wandered into a café where we sat for hours playing sudoku, talking, and reading. At the time I was reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I would highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. I actually ended up buying it for myself after an incident involving applesauce and a borrowed copy. In short the author spends a year living abroad, four months in Italy, four in India, and four in Indonesia. Pretty much she writes a story about my life, well not exactly but I feel like we have a lot of the same sentiments. In the book she talks about everyone having a word to describe them, just one word. I searched for my word for a long time, one to describe me in a purest sense. I found it while sitting at the café reading and being harassed by a homeless man who was later forcefully removed from the premises.
For dinner Marisa, Denise, and I went to a place across the street from our hotel where we were serenaded by an accordion and I ate the most delicious spaghetti of my life. Al dente with tomato, garlic, and chili flakes. Mmmmmmmm.
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Day 6
Left Florence after taking obligatory silly photos in from of the Duomo.
Train to Venice.
Checked into our hotel in Mestre, only a busride away from the island. It was a 3 star and only 20 euros a night, complete with CNN and MTV Italy.
Dinner at an Oyster Bar that we liked to call TGIVenice.




Day 7
First day of Venice Tour. I’ve never been in a more confusing city in my life. It was picturesque but practically impossible to get anywhere on a schedule. We visited the Guggenheim, which is frankly the best museum I’ve ever been too. The air was stuffy and the rooms were packed but it was the house Peggy Guggenheim (just because I say her name don’t think I know who she is, I have no idea) and it was filled with modern art that I adored. There was an entire room devoted to Pollock. Other artists included Dali, Picasso, and Picabia. I nearly died when I saw the one by Picabia, who is a dadaist, and i love dadaism. On the way home we ended up missing our stop and riding the bus back to the depot where we saw a man who was in the process of being arrested, be released and walk toward us as we were being told by a man who didn’t speak English that the last bus had run and there were no more until 5 a.m. We clutched each other and ran to a hotel where the concierge, who spoke English, pointed us in the direction of the train station. We bought tickets for a train scheduled to leave in 8 minutes and sprinted to the platform where we waited for about 5. Looking back it was a bit comical.



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Day 8
Went back to the island to finish exploring that seemed to be only inhabited by tourists and shop owners. Our train left at 10 p.m. so we wasted a lot of time at cafes and restaurants. One of which was a pizza place called Alla Strega which reminded me of Strega Nona, one of my favorite books when I was younger. This place had the best pizza I have ever tasted. There had the widest variety and the weirdest combinations. I ended up ordering the Diabolic, which included onions, sun dried tomatoes, mushrooms (this is the only time I’ve enjoyed mushrooms, I usually LOATHE them with the passion of a thousand blazing suns) and brie. I was sold on the brie.




Day 9
Wake up on the night train where Denise and I shared a compartment with a man who may have been in the mafia but was the nicest French/Italian speaking man I’ve ever met and a soccer player from Luxembourg who smelled like sweat and urine. We finally got back to Aix a little after 12 where we shared a bus with Irina, a friend from IAU who I adore. She’s probably one of my favorite people I’ve met since being here. We talked about her trip to Cannes and my upcoming trip to Dublin (I leave tomorrow.) When I finally made it to my house I set up a towel on my terrace and sunbathed for hours, leaving my back lobster red (although not quite as bad as last spring break in Alabama, Jennifer remembers…)

Tomorrow morning I leave for Nice where I’m meeting up with Katy and her mom (YAY) and spending the day eating gelato on the beach. We’re staying at a hostel where they have a never ending cereal bar with every flavor, including Nutella, and in the morning we depart for Dublin where we will learn Irish jigs.