City Hopping

I can't help but start this entry with a shameless plug for my camera, which takes such purty photos. I love my elph!

This is a photo of the Fiera (Expo Center, I guess) in Milan, where I recently spent 5 days working as an interpreter for my old office. By interpreter, I mean jack of all trades: box unloader, product presenter, plant waterer, technician, etc. We all had to work together as a team to do everything. It was exhausting, but fun - I enjoyed spending time with my coworkers and it was nice to have a change of scene.



I tried two cuisines for the first time: Brazilian and Iranian. Brazilian was the famous meat restaurant, where the waiters come around with skewers and shave off bits of meat for you. The Iranian food was home-cooked, by an Iranian-Brit whom I know from Bologna. She just happened to be taking a photo class in Milan, cooking a feast, when I was there.

Brazilian!


Iranian!


But of course the highlight of the trip was seeing Nemo, his father, and Dory in the fishtank at our hotel. Do you think that they specifically chose fish to mirror the movie?

Fantasy World

Do you recognize the girl in the drawing???

I've been back in Italy for a month and I think it's been one of the hardest transition periods yet. I wonder if it's from a lack of vitamin D (though the sun has shown its face once or twice recently). The main thing I keep realizing (re-learning, I guess) is that keeping track of my own wants and needs is something I need to remind myself to do, regardless of the avalanche of of interests, demands, and responsibilities that surround me (and everyone, of course). Living abroad provides an amazing set of challenges and triumphs, but it also has a way of knocking you off your feet abruptly and unexpectedly. You realize in those moments that you're far away from the people who understand you innately and whom you can talk to in your native language; but you also (hopefully) realize that living so independently has given you the tools to take care of yourself.

Not a bad trade-off . . .

Bad Bad Groundhog

It has recently come to my attention that the sun isn't going to be around much for the next six weeks.


I wish it would come back. Instead, this gray weather makes me feel like this:


And I want to dress like this, every day:


I can't believe that I spent any time, at all, complaining about the heat during the past few months.


I want to go back to the sun!

p.s. Many thanks to all of my readers (you are a passionate few, apparently!) who wrote to me about the mold issue. I'm also trying to convince my landlord to pay attention, so . . . We'll see what happens. I'm going to combat it as best I can, even if that means leaving it alone so that I don't have to breathe it in!