Back at the Hill…for the Sixth Time Around!

It was surreal to be abroad, and now it is surreal to be back at Stonehill, especially to think that I only have a couple semesters left! I get really excited thinking about how Stonehill sends students all over the world…just in my room alone, my roommates and I studied in England, Scotland, Greece, and Australia and traveled also to Wales, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Germany, and the Czech Republic! I also have friends who have gone or are going to Chile, Japan, and South Africa. But right now we are all together at the Hill, swapping stories and getting reacquainted. How awesome is that?!

We came back really early it seems this semester, and I would have liked another week at home spending time with my family. However, I was so excited to be reunited with my friends this week, and being back at Stonehill is kind of like nothing has changed. And now in one short week I feel like I have never left. Sure, there are lots of stories and changes to be caught up with…but it’s the same old place with all the people I love!

I loved seeing so many friends all week long and especially this weekend! Friday, I went with my friend Kait into Boston to meet some other friends for one friend’s 21^st birthday. Here is a picture of my self with (right to left) Alexia, Carrie (who are both leaving me for Florence this semester!), and Colleen, who is Carrie’s friend from home.

Then on returning to campus, I saw lots of other friends, mainly friends from last year’s Orientation Team. But my favorite part of the night was at the end of the night when my three roommates and I spent some time together and had some serious roommate bonding!

I have of course had to adjust to living with roommates again, and as you all know, in a quad in the underclassmen dorm, Corr Hall. We did find out that we are being compensated $500 each for being placed in the forced quad in a converted study room, which is something. And now that we have settled in, I am not minding the situation as much as I thought I might. Corr is a fairly new and really nice building to live in, and because we are in converted study room, our room is actually really large, we have a lot of floor space, and you might even forget that there are four of us living in here! Here are some pictures of our room:

Last night was our Inaugural Ball in the Sports Complex, a semi-formal dance complete with appetizers, a raffle for a new TV, good music, and pictures with President-elect Obama! Here is a picture of my friends Christine, this year’s student Orientation Coordinator and Katrina and myself, the Assistant Orientation Coordinators:

The most difficult part for me readjusting to Stonehill so far is that I have classes. Since I had tutorials at Oxford, until Monday I hadn’t been in a class in over eight months! I really liked having all my time open to my own schedule. I have the self discipline required to motivate yourself to work at Oxford, so I really enjoyed the independence I had there. And independence is what going abroad really is all about for a lot of students! This semester it is strange to have five classes, as well as at least three meetings and office hours each week for Student Government Association (I am the president of my class because last semester’s president is studying abroad this semester), the Student Ambassador (tour guide) Program, and of course planning for this year’s Orientation Program for all you prospective Stonehillers out there! That’s right; we are already in the midst of hiring this year’s Orientation Team!

This semester I am taking three education classes: Assessment and Analysis, Curriculum Methods, and Classroom Management, and for Curriculum, every Friday I will be observing a fourth grade classroom in Brockton and also teaching a couple lessons! I am really excited that I think this semester’s education classes will really help me prepare for student teaching next year, and teaching in two years! (How scary is that?!) I am also taking Critical Theory, which is an English major requirement that covers many different theories for approaches to reading literature. It is definitely going to be a challenging course, but I really like my professor, Professor Scheible, and it seems like the class, which only has 15 students, is going to be like one big discussion that allows us to work through the theory texts we are reading together, with lots of questions from us and Professor Scheible’s help. Critical Theory is going to be abstract, and so is my fifth class. We have a moral inquiry requirement as a part of our general education requirements at Stonehill, so I am taking an ethics class in the Philosophy department, called Introduction to Moral Reasoning.

Speaking of classes, even though I ended up with a four day weekend this weekend, I still have started much of my homework. Time for reading!

Home for the Holidays

I have been home for just over two weeks now, and they have been full of holiday celebrations. The day I got home, I slept only for a bit so that I could start to get over the jet lag. Then I went to my grandma’s house to bake Christmas cookies. I collapsed and took a nap before going to my friend’s house for our annual Christmas party that we have been having since seventh grade.

Over the next few days, I slept about 12 hours a day, I rushed to get my presents wrapped, and helped my mom get ready to host Christmas day. On Christmas Eve we went to visit my Papa in his nursing home, went to church, and went to my Aunt’s house for dinner. Here is a picture of my sister and I on Christmas Eve in front of the tree at my house:

Family came to our house on Christmas day. It was really strange that my mom was hosting for the first time, when we always go one of my grandmas’ houses for Christmas day. But me and all my cousins are getting older, and the next generation is soon to arrive. My oldest cousin is expecting his first son in June, his brother is getting married in August, and another cousin got engaged on Christmas morning! It is strange that our generation is bridging the gap into the next stage of our lives. It was a very nice Christmas day though. It was relaxing to stay home, my mom cooked a delicious prime rib, and my dad light a fire.

A couple days later we hosted another Christmas party at our house, this time just for the aunts, uncles, and cousins on my dad’s side of the family, so everyone got to see the family they didn’t see on Christmas Eve or day. We watched the Pats game and ordered Chinese food (and ate almost all of it!)

The next thing I knew it was New Year’s Eve and there was unnecessary drama among my friends about where we were going to celebrate. I was always going to go to my best friend, Tessa’s, boyfriend’s house, and eventually some of my other friends were able to come as well, which I was very happy about. It is nice that even though sometimes it seems like my friends from home are growing distant, we can still get together to visit.

The final holiday gathering of the year was this Saturday. Everyone on my mom’s side of the family, including my mom’s aunt and uncle and all my second cousins, got together to see everyone we hadn’t yet during the holiday. It is also one of the few times I see all my second cousins each year.

During the week I also got to go out with a couple friends, go shopping, and I also went with my family to Wrentham shopping outlets and then to Patriot’s Place for dinner at CBS Scene. Here are Lindsay and I in front of the Pro Shop, and my dad and I at dinner:

While I was at dinner, I heard from my friend Heather about our rooming assignment for the spring semester, and let me tell you, it is enough to make me want to go back to Oxford. I am living in Corr Hall, an underclassmen dorm, in a quad. First of all, there are virtually no juniors who ever have to live in quads, and none who involuntarily must live in an underclassmen building. And I can’t lie, I was upset about this situation. There were 30 junior girls returning from a semester abroad who Stonehill did not have beds for. The one good thing about the situation is that Stonehill guarantees housing for all four years, so at least the 30 of us still have a room to move into this weekend, even if it is not what any of us were expecting. The bad part of the situation is that it is going to make the transition back to Stonehill much more difficult. I was excited to be living among my friends again, and eager to become close to them again. This semester, I also have a full day of student teaching every week, and I am really nervous about being able to get to bed early enough every Thursday night so I can get enough rest before this important part of my class. I was also excited to come home and be 21, and even if not in a wet residence hall, I was thinking I would still be with other friends my age. Finally, I was living in a single at Oxford, with my own bathroom. I’m not sure I am prepared to share a room with 3 roommates and a bathroom with 30 girls.

Residence Life very slyly sent out the housing assignments at quarter of five on December 30; right before a snow storm, and New Years. Finally, on Friday, I spoke with an RD, who informed me that no decisions have been made about any compensation that will be given to us, like they compensate freshmen who are living in forced triples. I surely hope they will because this situation is going to make it a challenging semester for many of us. If nothing else, this situation shows just how much we need the new upperclassmen residence hall that is supposed to be opened in the fall of 2010!

Now that I am home after being abroad, I was wondering what the re-entry and reverse culture shock was going to be like. What I am feeling is that being home is like being back to reality. I absolutely worked my butt off at Oxford, but living in a different country was like vacation from real life. While abroad, I learned a lot and took my studies as seriously as I do at home, but I was only there for a couple months. I wasn’t focused on everything that I will now be dealing with over the next two years. Now that I am home, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I applied for a job on campus for next summer, and because I was dedicated to that job, and fairly confident I had a chance of getting it, I turned down two other offers for work doing research with the SURE program on campus. But I didn’t get the job I applied for, and now it is too late for the other jobs. Now I am home and facing the harsh reality of the economy and the need to find a good summer job. My ideal job would be to have a paid internship with a children’s book publisher, but there’s not much in Massachusetts for publishers, and even less for paid summer internships. I only have a year and a half left at Stonehill, that means one semester of student teaching and two of classes. I am now thinking about getting a summer job that will be a step forward and a good experience for future employment.

In the mean time, until the semester gets under way and some of these things start to take shape, I am really excited to be back at Stonehill. It has been way too long since I have been there. I can’t wait to see all my friends, and to settle back into my life there.

Tour of Italy

After my week in Thessaloniki, my friend Heather and I flew from Thessaloniki to Athens, Athens to Rome, and finally Rome to Venice…to begin our tour of Italy! And somehow, I was too excited once I was in Italy to be too tired! I couldn’t believe I was in Italy, and to be honest, I’m still not sure that I believe that I was in England, Switzerland, Greece, OR Italy! As soon as Heather and I got off the bus on the main island, right next to the Grand Canal, we were SO excited! It was beautiful! This is what we saw:

We started being all tourist-y and American…being loud and taking pictures. We set to work following the instructions from our hostel about how to get there. We had to take the water bus, walk across the Rialto, and along all these small alleys to find it. It was exhausting, especially while dragging luggage, but we made it, and then set out to find Heather’s friend Julie. We spent a few hours looking for her and trying to call her, and could NOT find her! I think that is when the exhaustion hit me! Eventually, we found her at the hostel, and then went right to bed. We got a good night’s sleep so we could have a full day the next day. And we sure did! How we did most of our sightseeing, especially in Venice, was just wandering around, picking a way, and walking around until we hit a dead end. Then we took the water bus to Murano, the island famous for its glass. We wandered around the island and shopped for glass jewelry, which made great gifts for my mom and sister for Christmas. We took the typical pictures of us on the Rialto, and also saw many beautiful parts of Venice:

At this time of year, it is the rainy season in Italy, and Venice gets flooded by the aqua alta. Two weeks before we arrived in Venice, the city was the most flooded it had been in a couple decades. But we lucked out and only ran into a couple problems. When the tide came in in the morning, we walked through San Marco Piazza, and the plaza was covered with a foot of water. It was really neat to see though because they set up these foot bridges so everyone doesn’t have to walk through the water. Then, when we got off the water bus dock on Murano, we walked right into six inches of water, luckily, Heather and I bought rain boots to wear as soon as we arrived in Venice! Below is a view of San Marco at high tide, and below that is low tide:

The next morning we took the train to Florence, and began our tour of the next city. My favorite things in Florence were seeing El Duomo, which is the largest church I’ve ever been in. Here is a picture of its beautiful façade:

I also liked seeing the Ponte Vecchio. After Venice, being in Florence was a kind of a shock…because they have roads, cars and mopeds there! The Ponte Vecchio was very pretty.

That night we climbed up to the Piazza del Michaelangelo and had a beautiful view over Florence:

We went into a couple museums, but my favorite thing to see was the Statue of David. It is very tall, and much more impressive and graceful than any copies or pictures show it to be. In Florence, we also got to meet up with another friend from Stonehill studying there, in between his finals. He actually tracked us down, checking every major tourist attraction, because I gave him the wrong numbers for my mobile phone. Sorry again about that Brendan!

From Florence, we took a train to Pisa, just for a couple hours so we could see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was only an hour away, and we figured, we were there, we might as well go! We were told the tower was right near the train station, but it was not, we had to walk through the town in order to get there. But that way we saw they city as well as the tower! And of course we took the typical pictures of us pushing up the tower.

Our final destination in Italy was Rome, and I think besides the beauty of Venice, this was my favorite city, because there was so much to see! We got there late on Tuesday night, and met Heather and Julie’s friend Mallory. On our first day in Rome we decided to go to Vatican City. We took the metro there, and as soon as we got off, people started trying to sell us tickets to see the Pope and have a tour guide take us through the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel. At first we refused, but eventually we realized that we didn’t know where to go or what to do, and decided that it would be worth it to take advantage of it. I was pretty excited about getting to see the Pope, but I was the only one out of the four of us who is Catholic. Pope Benedict spoke first in Italian, then Spanish, then French, and finally he was beginning to speak in English when we had to leave to go meet our tour group.

Here I am in front of St. Peter's Basilica:

The tour turned out to be really entertaining and informative. Our tour guide, Stan, looked kind of like George Clooney, and was totally a ladies man. He was speaking in Italian to all the women in the museum that we passed. He was also very knowledgable, and I learned more about Michaelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than I would have on my own.

That afternoon we walked around Rome, saw the Trevi Fountain (and threw in coins!) and the Spanish steps.

That night we at a restaurant that quickly became my favorite in Italy. While, I was traveling I wanted to fulfill that image in my mind I had of sitting outside and sipping a cappuccino or getting a light lunch. Well, that didn’t exactly happen since it is the winter, but at night many places have heat lamps so that customers can sit outside comfortably even in the cooler weather. So at this restaurant we finally found a cute little place where we could sit outside and have a nice traditional dinner. I had the yummiest bacon and broccoli ravioli. Each night for dinner we would sit down and eat, and we always found some reasonably priced places. We would eat bread with olive oil, share a bottle of wine, and eat lots and lots of pasta. While in Italy we had spaghetti with Bolognese sauce (they don’t really have meatballs that I saw!), lasagna, tortellini, risotto, and gnocchi. We were looking for fettucine alfredo, but we learned that the Italians think alfredo on fettucine. Apparently Olive Garden has it wrong!

On my final day in Italy we saw the ruins: the Coloseum, Roman Forum, and Circus Maximus. I thought this was really cool because I took Latin in high school and I learned about all the things that I was seeing. In high school, I even had to give a mock guided tour of ancient Rome, and now it was like I was on my own tour!

The next day, I was finally heading home…after a completely exhausting two weeks and absolutely fantastic two and a half months! I was really wishing that it had been longer and that I had been able to do more. But I also realized that it was a good thing I wasn’t going to be spending any more money, and Christmas was right around the corner so I was anxious to get home safe to my family for the holiday. Getting home safe was a legitimate concern of mine because there was a snow storm in Boston! To turn the longest day of my life into a short story: I woke up in Rome at 4:30 in the morning, took a taxi to the airport, flew to London, my flight to Boston was delayed about 6 hours, so I spent the day in Heathrow airport. I finally boarded the plane and found my seat in between two little boys (their parents sat in front of them) and a dad holding his baby daughter (his wife and son sat in front of them). Just as we were preparing to take off, the little boy next to me got a bloody nose, so I helped him stop it. Then the baby girl fell asleep with her head in my lap. When I was trying to sleep, my new friend Adam next to me was coughing up a lung. Eight and a half hours, 2 and ¾ movies, and 4 glasses of water later, we were above Boston, and thanks to the storm experiencing turbulence that made my stomach drop. After circling the city twice we began to depart, and had a fairly smooth landing. Then we had to wait 45 minutes on the plane before we were able to get to the gate and depart! It was the longest 45 minutes ever! Next we had to wait at least a half hour for the luggage from our flight to get to baggage claim. By the time I stepped outside, it was after 2 A.M. I then took a van service home (since my family couldn’t come to the airport because of the snow), and my sister, who had been dozing on the couch and my parents, not really sleeping either, greeted me. Not going to lie, we all cried tears of relief and exhaustion.

Riots in Greece

I am now home, finally over jet lag, and finally done with the rush of the holidays…so I finally have some time to update you all on the past few weeks! As you already know, after leaving Oxford, I went to stay with my friend Heather in Thessaloniki, Greece. Heather is a friend from Stonehill, she is also an Education major and involved in student government, and we are planning on living together this semester when we are both back on campus.

I really enjoyed being in Greece for a couple days. I got to experience quite a few aspects of Heather’s studying abroad program, and now I have a pretty good understanding of what her experience was like. The one thing that held us back a bit were the riots. The first four of five nights I spent in Thessaloniki we just stayed in at Heather’s apartment building. But during the day there was less rioting going on, and we were able to walk around the city. I captured some posted information about the riots, such as meeting times and locations, as below, and some of the devastation of the riots (burned stores, smashed ATMs, and broken windows). For example, the building in the picture below was a Starbucks.

The first full day I was in Thessaloniki we walked up to the old part of the city to see the old city wall. The old city is up the hill behind the center of the modern city, and we were confident there would be no rioters there. There was a great view of the city and the water from the hill:

Heather and I had dinner at sunset in a taverna.

I had my new favorite food: tszatziki (which I know now how to pronounce but do not know how to spell), which is a yogurt with cucumber, dill, and garlic, and the Greeks eat it with bread. We also got fried cheese (like mozzarella sticks), fried zucchini, and chicken. The last night I spent in Thessaloniki, we also went to a tavern, one of Heather’s favorites, where they have the best chicken. That night was an awesome experience because they had a band playing traditional Greek music, and we were the only tourists among all the Greeks doing what they do for dinner all the time. There was even a ten-year -old boy at the table next to us who started dancing to the music. Then his father and grandfather started watching his feet and clapping along with the beat, the next thing you know all the men in the room are clapping along with the beat as he danced.

The next day school was back in session, and we deemed it safe to walk around the city. We did lots of outdoor sightseeing, such as the White Tower, which is the architectural symbol of the city, and is located along the Aegean Sea, and also lots of ruins. It is really neat how the city is built around all the ruins, and the public can just walk through them. I was glad I got to see how beautiful Greece is, with or without riots.

We stopped for gelato and also euros, which are flat bread sandwiches, stuffed with French fries and pretty much whatever else you want. Heather and I kept it simple with tszatziki sauce, chicken, and French fries. Before I left Greece, I also made sure I had a crepe, from Heather’s favorite down the street from her apartment. Nikos, who owned that restaurant, Heather described to me as the mayor of their neighborhood. He was really friendly, and we had a conversation, even though he doesn’t speech much English, and we don’t speak much Greek!

The next day I spent on the campus of the school that Heather attended while she was abroad because Heather had four final exams to take that day! The school was about a twenty minute ride from her apartment, so they have a bus the runs a couple times a day to take everyone to school and back. It was strange to have to prepare for a full day on campus, we packed a brown bag lunch and everything. I just hung around and watched movies and read, but it was cool to get to experience Heather’s school. Then the final day in Greece we had rain! We decided it was the perfect day to go to two of the most popular museums in Thessaloniki, one on the Byzantine empire, and the other more specifically on architecture. But both covered lots of information on the culture of the area throughout history starting back in Roman times. It was neat to see statues of Greek gods and goddesses and other artifacts. The only strange thing was that I almost got kicked out by a guard for hiccupping too loudly! His stern face speaking Greek to me and pointing to the door sure made me stop hiccupping real fast!

Friday night, my last night in Greece, we didn’t get home to Heather’s apartment until 2 A.M., and then we had to leave by taxi to go to the airport at 4:30 A.M. to fly to Italy! So, we decided to not go to bed. That was the first all nighter I have ever pulled! And let me tell you, somewhere between Athens and Rome, around 9 in the morning, that really caught up with me!