Paris! (Part 1 of a few)

(This is part 1 of a multiple part series. To get to the other parts quickly and easily, click the links below)

Link to Part 2

Journey number two outside of Italy was, as has been alluded to, Paris. Oh Paris, Home of the Crepe, Eiffel Tower, and stuffy French people. But more on those topics later. Lets take this chronologically again shall we? I’m sure I’ll go off on tangents when I come across a topic I want to talk about. Clear your schedule for the immediate future, this is going to be a long one (I might break it up into different parts to give you a break from the reading, and my fingers a break from the typing, but this is bound to be my longest blog post to date, I’ve got a lot to say).

Friday:

This was a special trip because I met Becky (my wonderful girlfriend for those of you who do not know her) in Paris with a bunch of her friends to celebrate her 21st birthday, which happens to be today, so everyone wish Becky a Happy Birthday in the comments below. Okay, enough embarrassing Becky, I couldn’t help it.
So, as I was saying, the plan was to meet her and her friends in Paris for the weekend. Since they are all studying abroad in London, they had the opportunity to get to Paris on Thursday afternoon. So I decided to fly in as early as possible Friday morning. 7am flight from Rome FCO to Charles De Gaul airport. As it turns out, public transportation doesn’t run at 4:30 in the morning. So I bit the bullet and got a cab by myself to the airport. Since I got a cab, it took much less time than public transportation, So I got to the airport especially early. Lucky me. I think I may have been the first person through security that morning, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing except for the wait at the gate in the other end.

AirFrance:

I am now going to write a small testimony for Air France. Air France PR people, feel free to use this all over your website, so long as you link back to this wonderful blog. I decided to fly Air France from Rome to Paris instead of one of the normal budget airlines that us college students normally use. The main two being RyanAir (coincidence?) and EasyJet, but there are many more that fly specifically between different countries. Okay so reasons to fly AirFrance, well first off, it wasn’t that expensive. Actually it was comparable to the prices of EasyJet, which also flies into Charles De Gaul airport. RyanAir I ruled out because though it was much cheaper, it flies into an airport that is about two hours away from Paris itself. I was not looking to take a bus ride from the airport to the city that is shorter than my flight from Rome to Paris.
I cannot tell you how nice it was to fly AirFrance. I flew from one real airport to another, sat in a real gate, had the ability to check a bag if I wanted to, didn’t get hassled about my carry-on being too big, didn’t have to walk to and from my plane, had a nice comfortable seat with a generous amount of legroom, was given food and drink, and was not woken up by in-flight audio commercials. I could turn this into an entire blog post, but just know that everything listed there, the opposite is what RyanAir does. “Flying AirFrance was like flying First Class compared to RyanAir”-Ryan Mahoney (hint: AirFrance, use that line!). I need to stop getting distracted like that, this post will be long enough without it.

So the flight to Paris involved a lot of sleeping, which was nice, since I haven’t really ever been able to sleep at all on flights, must be a psychological thing or something. I landed in Paris around 9am, exited the plane and found my way towards the exit. Lucky for me public transportation was running in Paris at this point. Break for Metro tangent:

Paris Metro:

The Metro in Paris lives up to the stereotypes of French people: It tries to make itself out to being more sophisticated than any other European country, while really that complexity makes it fall on its face and look bad. Yes, the Paris metro is extensive and exhaustive in its amount of lines and stops that can get you basically anywhere. I cannot take that away from it. But many things about it just didn’t feel, right. First, I go to the ticket machine to buy a ticket. I had to take an RER (certain line in the metro) subway from the airport to get to the inner city. So I bought a Metro/RER ticket, for the standard metro ticket price. Problem is, you need a special RER ticket to go to and from airports. Why? Because they want to take my money, that’s why. So after failing multiple times at going through the gate with my regular ticket, I went back and figured out that I needed the other ticket. Oh well. This would not be the last problem with tickets though. One money saver tip is to buy a carnet or book of tickets, which is 10 tickets that can be used whenever. You pay 11.60 and get 10 tickets, where a single ride is 1.60. Quick math says you pay for 7.25 tickets and get 2.75 free. Cool I guess. So when we were using the metro in the city, there being 7 of us, we would buy a book of tickets and share and keep the extras toward the next ride, so it was more economical, see? Well it turns out when you want to ride the metro you should probably buy a couple extra tickets, because they are very temperamental. Everytime we got on the metro, someone’s ticket, which was just purchased, wouldn’t work. The machine would continuously reject it. So we would pass them one of the extras and that would work. We later tried passing back tickets that had just gone through the machine 1 minute before, and you know what? Yep, sometimes those worked even though they had already been used. The other quirky thing about the Paris metro, which I’m told is similar to D.C., is that you have to put your ticket through in order to exit the metro as well. See where this and our ticket fiasco might cause a problem? Yep you guessed it, tickets that had let us on the metro just 10 minutes before would not let us exit the metro. Really, I have no explanation for why this happened. I experimented with lots of different ways of putting the ticket in, walking through the turnstile, amount of time waiting for the other person to go through, where I stood etc…. and I really couldn’t figure it out. Maybe there’s a trick to it and we were just doing it wrong, a lot. I personally think its an evil scheme to confuse, frustrate tourists while gaining entertainment and profit from the locals. Apart from this, I found the signs to be confusing and not helpful. They tell you the direction of the train just like any other metro in the world, by telling you what the last stop in that direction is. Two problems with that. Many of the lines branch off into multiple directions towards the end of the line. The B RER train, which runs to and from the airports, has 4 “ends” to it. I know many of them have even more than this, but I used that line so I figured I would talk about what I know (or don’t know for that matter). The other problem is that many of the end stations have multiple names. It’ll be firstname-nextname-nameprobablyusedonasign. See how that can be confusing? The last name on the map is the one that is posted on signs. I’m sure it’s a more recognizable street or monument or direction to locals, but again, not so easy when you aren’t from around here.

Okay, this seems like a good spot for a break. Mostly because I have class now and want to post something before I head off for that. I’ll post part 2 as soon as I type it! Rest your eyes for a little bit, we've got a long way to go.

Trip number two...

In a few short hours, (and I really do mean short) I will be heading to the airport for my second trip outside of Italy.

This weekend I'll be in Paris, and I'll be meeting Becky there to celebrate her 21st birthday. I'm looking forward to seeing her for the first time since I got on a plane over a month ago, and also to visit France, the country with the foreign language I took classes in for so many years of my life.

I'm just about sure this trip will completely screw up all progress I have made with Italian. Just when I am getting in the groove of Italian, I'm going to be thrown into another language I somewhat understand (I'm going to have to shake the rust off, but I'm pretty confident I'll understand a lot of it).

I am going to keep this short tonight. I have a flight at 7am, which means Airport much earlier, and a taxi even earlier than that. Unfortunately public transportation doesn't run that early in the morning, so I'm stuck with a taxi, though that means a little extra sleep. I cannot promise any posts this weekend, but I will promise an extensive post on Monday, just like my post on Barcelona.

Is it bad I typed aeroport twice before changing it to airport?

Also, isn't there that little event called the Super Bowl going on this weekend? Yeah completely didn't realize that.

Spin Cycle

Being here for a month so far, you can see how I could have run out of clothes by now. Well this week I hit that milestone, and had the pleasure of doing laundry in Rome for the first time.

This isn't exactly the first time. I did a few items in the sink in the hotel, which ended with taking over two days to dry, so I have opted in for a more practical solution. We had heard there was a laundromat around town nearby, so we ventured out to find it.

What we found is was a small hole in the wall storefront that doubled as laundromat and internet access point. Surf the web while your clothes get clean? Sounds like a sales pitch to me.

So in we went, with clothes in hand. I won't describe the process, it's the same as in America, except instead of picking warm, cold, hot, you pick the actual temperature. 30 minutes in a washer and 30 in a dryer, about 10 euro later and we were on our way back to the hotel with clean clothes. The washing machines were tiny, while the dryers were enormous. 3 or 4 loads of wash would fit in one dryer.

The bottom line is, I was able to make it a month without having to do laundry. Lets give credit to good packing for that. By that calculation I should only have to do laundry once more. Pretty good if you ask me (I know you didn't but I get to decide what you ask and what you don't ask).

I had a really good day at St. Paul's today, more on that soon, once I have something to show for my work.

Edit: We've been a little short on questions lately, anyone want to pick it up and start asking? Ask them in the comments! or shoot me an email, ramlax13(at)gmail.com (replace the (at) with @. Never post your email on a website fully, there are computer programs that search through websites for email addresses to send spam to. That's a whole other topic though...)

A month ago...

I was trying to come up with an interesting topic for my post tonight, but with being in full swing at the Vatican and with classes and traveling, I was only able to really focus on one topic tonight. I've been here exactly a month now. 30 days ago I landed in Rome, my first time in a foreign country, surrounded by a language I had no comprehension of, and not sure what to expect for the next three months.

A month later it is hard to put myself back in that position. The time has been flying by, and yet with my comfort level it feels as though I've been here for a year (I would hope however that my Italian would be better had I actually been here a year already).

So lets look back at the last 30 days...shall we? (You know you don't have a choice, like it or not I'm going to do this):

For the first time I took an international flight, by myself nonetheless. I used my passport for the first time in a Foreign Country. I've begun to learn another foreign language. I am enrolled in an all girls school. I am living in a hotel in the center of historic Rome. I experienced the Italian Christmas season. I am interning at the Vatican. I had exclusive access to private areas of St. Peter's Basilica. I've had my first real gelato, and have tried lots of new foods. I've acquired a taste for espresso and cappuccino. I take daily walks, just because. I wear a suit every day. I've been to my first real soccer game. I've seen more smart cars and mopeds than I ever thought existed. I learned how to haggle in Italian. I've toured most of Rome's famous monuments and attractions. I've written 28 blog posts. I've survived without internet and TV. I've traveled for a weekend to Barcelona. I've stayed in my first hostel and I've made a lot of new friends along the way.

So that's one third of my trip, my experience. So what's to come?

How about a trip to Paris this weekend, multiple visits from family and friends (4 separate visits and counting...), a weekend in Florence, a 5 day trip to northern Italy, a pilgrimage, a day trip to siena, a weekend in southern Italy, a video project for St. Paul Outside-The-Walls, learning more Italian, a Dave Matthews Band concert in Rome, at least one more soccer match, a couple final exams, and to wrap it up, a trip to London, with short trips to Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Ireland,(maybe more?), a State Radio concert, and by my estimation, about another 60 of these blog posts, all before heading back home on April 10th.

Are you up for the challenge? You keep reading and commenting and I'll keep posting. Hold on tight, I'm just warming up...

Blast from the past

Today we had some unexpected visitors to the office. Two Villanova graduates, who had participated in the Vatican internship program in the fall of 2006, Gloria and Chris, stopped by because they were in Rome. We had a really nice conversation with them at work and decided we should get together tonight to talk about our experiences.

When Gloria and Chris were here, they were not part of the Saint Mary’s Program. The program was very new at that point and many of the kinks were still being worked out. Regardless, they still found their experiences in Rome to be so influential that they have both come back to Rome multiple times since their study abroad program 4 years ago.

It was awesome to hear their stories and see the love they have for the Vatican program and for Rome. When they came into the office they were welcomed as if they were long lost relatives, with hugs and kisses, everyone happy to see them.

We decided to go to dinner tonight and we invited our Italian teacher who had also been their teacher, Carlotta, to join us. We went to dinner on Roman time, so 9pm, and Carlotta recommended a restaurant to us in Trastevere, a very nice neighborhood full of restaurants and shops. It was by no means a tourist restaurant, and it helped that we had Gloria and Carlotta with us, Gloria who speaks fluent Italian, and Carlotta being a Roman native, who not only understands the language but the culture behind it all.

Our food was fantastic. Home made pastas and pizza at a great price. The tiramisu though was the highlight of the night. Though it did not look anything like your normal tiramisu, it was probably the best I’ve ever had (Chris agreed, he has refused to eat tiramisu since the last time he had been at the restaurant).

It was a special night for all of us, and one that will forever be in my most prized memories of my time here. The experiences that Gloria and Chris shared and their connection with Rome formed while they were studying here makes me certain I will be back to visit many times throughout my life. Their friendship with Carlotta is still strong after all these years. I can only hope I can come back and have dinner with future Villanova Vatian internship students, share my experiences with them, and have the same impact that Gloria and Chris had on me tonight.