Anticipation

I have always wanted to go to Italy, and tomorrow I am. It's an interesting feeling. I'm going to Rome. Florence. Siena. Venice. It should be amazing.

After a week of sore throat/fever/general malaise (my standard treatment of "wait/pretend it's not happening and hope it goes away" was unsuccessful) I finally went to the doctor and I'm glad I did. Turns out I have "bacterial pharyngitis" (I think I would have been administered a strep test in the U.S....) so I'm now on antibiotics. He also prescribed me something funny to gargle. He told me to "wear a scarf, be careful with very cold beverages, and try tea with milk and honey." In any case, I don't want anything to get in the way of enjoying Italy.

My copy of "Let's Go Western Europe 09" officially no longer has a cover. For Belgium, we didn't have a proper guidebook and I didn't want to lug around the massive Let's Go, I tore out the chapter on Belgium. I did the same for Denmark and Sweden (Sweden out of the "Heading North" chapter, I guess there is a separate book for Northern Europe) for my Scandinavian trip in May. Today, even though I have a proper guidebook for Italy, I decided to tear out that chapter, and it was pretty much in the exact middle of the book.

In the process of defiling Let's Go, I looked at some train connections and such since I probably will be able to do a good week to 10 day trip in June. I'm now torn, because I realized that it would be really easy to travel from Milan to Switzerland, with a possible stop in Salzburg, to Munich, possible other German places, to Berlin, and even to Amsterdam and pretty much get a quick glimpse of every major place in Western Europe I won't have seen...except Ireland.

Also, my parents were apparently impressed when they found this blog, and my dad said I could be "the female Rick Steves." Well, maybe to a younger demographic... But seriously, if by chance anyone with the capacity to actually pay me for travel writing ever happens upon my humble blog PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE contact me.

A funny anecdote: we have been having a substitute for the past couple of weeks in two of my classes because my professor was in Afghanistan. He's very...I don't even know. In any case, unlike our normal professor, the sub is serious about attendance, i.e. he got very upset that people who missed his first class had the nerve to attend another day. I had to miss Monday because it was when I had my appointment with the doctor. I was kind of nervous about going on Tuesday, but I did. Seguridad y Cooperación went by relatively uneventfully. But then at the end it was weird because all of the kids with consistent attendance left. I asked Andrei, a Romanian Erasmus student, if we had class, and he just said, "I have to go." Something was fishy. I got my jacket and backpack and sat in the hallway. I was talking to a student from Boston College, and she didn't know what was going on and whether we should leave. Christian, a Georgetown kid, pulled me into a hallway and made me promise not to tell anyone: Monday night, the sub had left class half an hour early and told them to keep working. He came back at the end, told them it was a test, made a list of the students who stayed until the end, and told them that Tuesday, only the people on the list would be allowed into a secret class in a different location. Christian said that I had gone to the doctor and asked if I could attend. Denied. I went into the classroom, the sub revealed his game, and the rest of the class joined us shortly. Can you see why I found it impossible to find the right adjective to describe him?