back on Track

Sorry for the lack of bloggage recently (because I know your days absolutely revolve around reading my blog) but I've been having issues: I booked my return flight for March instead of May and had to deal with all the issues that go along with that. So, I really haven't been in the mood for blogging (or really anything for that matter). I've just watched so much slip away from me (and I have to add a shout out of extreme gratefulness to Alaina's parents, if they ever read this. I am rarely speechless out of gratitude ((intrestingly enough this year had a grand total of two instances for whatever karmic reason)) and even here, in the written word where I am usually infinitely more eloquent I am still at a loss for words) including my sanity a couple of times. THIS IS WHY I'M NOT ALLOWED TO PLAN THINGS. So if you want a general summup (and you know you do) of my feelings over the past few days, I need few words. Merely: GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... ARRRGGGGGGGHHHHH. (a few general sobs, a thrown object or two... or three.. maybe more...). But now its better.

I was able to find cheap enough tickets back home (God Bless Ireland) but will spending some nights in airports. My bank account is severly depleted but, after some careful and acrobatic math I should be able to continue ethnic Tuesdays and Wednesday kebabs but my gelato intake will suffer. But all that matters is that I am in ITALY, right? And I still get to go to Barcelona.

I have to add this: the next few weeks of bloggage will either be either slim or overfull because of the work I have to do so I will either be posting like crazy to avoid doing work or not posting at all in order to do the work. I have a presentation, a paper based on that presentation and three other eight page research papers due then all my exams. (None of which I'm actually worried about, I did wonderfully with little preperation on my midterms and I can't see that these will be any harder). But you're not here to listen to my woes, you're here to hear about ITALY!!!!

What have I done recently? Well, there's the tour of the gelataria, but you don't want to hear about that... you do? Well, duh, you do. Sponsored by LDM, we headed over to a gelateria near the lovely Santa Maria Novella, the church the train station is named for. We went "behind the scenes", behind the counter and into a small room where all the magic happens. Our demonstrator made for us a strawberry gelato in front of our eyes. It took frozen strawberries, a TON of sugar and water, all blended with a mixer that looked more like a three foot drill then mixed for eight minutes in a giant blender.

And waa-laa! Gelatoey goodness:

(we got free cones)

The exciting part (besides the free cones and watching the gelato being made) was the fact that the man spoke no english and I understood VIRTUALLY ALL OF IT! We had a translator but I rarely had to listen to her. It really helps to have a set context to listen in because that makes a lot of the vocabulary more clear. And that really is what holds me back. Even though I have good grammer (in the areas we've covered, that is), my vocabulary is just too small and there is no time to do much about it.

So this is me, signing off and promising not to leave you vita della marissaless in the future.

To some of you the pictures in this blog may look awfully familiar. Thats because I straight up stole them from Alaina's blog. teeheehee