Halloween

We had a Halloween party last night. Such a small imitation of such a wonderful holiday...
Oh well, at least we had something. It was fun - we dressed up all day and then had a semi-party in the evening. I dressed up as a mermaid - wore my sparkly jeans and my blue scarf as a fakebra and had my hair long and wet. Then in the evening I became Little-Mermaid-as-Princess and went to the party, barefoot but not mute. We came late, Nevin and I, and didn't stay long, but long enough to get some cool pictures.

Michael went as the Hulk. He had a lot of fun flexing his muscles and making scary faces.


My roommates and I. Marta (in the middle) went as a mummy but had lost most of her toilet paper by the time I got there. Nevin didn't dress up because there's only so much you can do with limited supplies and religious restrictions.

Ramadan

I probably should have talked about this before. Oh well, here it is.
I'm doing Ramadan this year, the Islamic month of fasting. It's very interesting, it's changed my perception on a lot of things.
One is levels of hunger; I don't consider myself hungry until I'm truly unable to think of anything else because it's impossible to ignore the pain in my stomach. Where I once said, "I'm starving!" I now notice the feeling impassively and go on with my work - it's not important. Also, the psychological difference between can't eat and won't eat is huge. When, for example, I was in Florence and fasting, I tried to ignore the hunger until 6:30, when I suddenly became ravenous and searched for food like a maniac, and if I couldn't find it, I was furiously frustrated. It wasn't that I was more hungry, it was that I could eat but wasn't.
Another is my take on food in general. Wow. Do any of you know how gloriously wonderful an apple or a piece of bread is? Have you savored every bite of it, reveling in the foreign sensation of something in your mouth? Food is so good! I'm amazed that I've taken it for granted for so long.
There's a strange psychological/physical dynamic about evenings in Ramadan. After one meal, I'm full, but I want to/need to keep eating. It's like my head is hungry but not my stomach. In the beginning, this ended with me having a constant bellyache - in the day because I was hungry, and in the night because I was too full. But now I've figured out a pretty good balance of eating and not eating at night, and so I'm relatively comfortable all the time except the 3ish hours before I can eat again.
My favorite hour of the day is now 5:30 to 6:30 - half an hour before I can eat and half an hour after. It's wonderful to count down the minutes until you can eat, and that moment of finally putting something in your mouth is heavenly. Then the half-hour after is great too, because you can eat happily and heartily without worrying about getting overfull. (after that I have to start controlling myself)
And it's more than half over. I'm enjoying it a lot, but I will be very happy to see it end. I really miss breakfast and lunch, and the weird eating schedule is making me fat. :(
It's really great bonding time with the Arabs, sharing break-fast and late night snacks. My rooma is surprised each day that I fast - she keeps thinking that I'll give up half way through. Ha.
Funny how much impact it's had on my dreams. Nearly every night for the first weekish, I dreamed about forgetting and breaking my fast unintentionally, and I still have those dreams periodically. you'd think the subject would be exhausted by now, but there seem to be endless variations on what food I accidentally eat and when. Very interesting.
And now all this talk about food is making me hungry and I still have 3 hours to go. ug.
Ciao!

2 months

It's been officially 2 months since I left home. The longest I've ever been away from my home/family. And yet it doesn't feel like that, I catch myself thinking that perhaps life in the US was just a dream or something, certainly not as real as this.
Sure, random bursts of homesickness are more common, but not as bad as I thought they might be, and on the whole I'm noticing a distinct sense of home radiating from this place.
symptoms include:
1. Being bored with class
2. Dreaming of people here more than people at home.
3. Thinking in broken/accented English. (There's hardly a person here who speaks "normally" but I'm totally used to it.)
4. Having both good and bad days (in the beginning, it was only good days)
5. (Sadly) not being awestruck by the view out my window. (though that might have something to do with the scaffolding that completely blocks the sight)
speaking of scaffolding:
Foresteria (my residence) has been defiled for the sake of its roof. The walls are covered in plastic and metal scaffolding and there are strange men walking about at eyelevel to our 2nd floor bedrooms (sort of uncomfortable...). It's annoying because we can't use the outside stairs, because our view is ruined, and because the bathrooms look right out onto the scaffolding. (or, more importantly, the people on the scaffolding can look right in) Grr. Hopefully it'll go away soon.
I have to do Climbing homework now: find my way to the top of the mountain and back before sundown. Good luck to me!

Dinners

As Mensa food is not high-class cuisine, students tend to plan lots of dinners, where everyone gets together to cook and eat food of a much higher quality. Some of the most noteworthy of these dinners happened this past weekend: Christian dinner, Asian/Middle Eastern dinner, and Nonlatin, American dinner.
Christian dinner was friday, and I decided to go because (despite being a rather reluctant christian) I was hungry. (they noticed that there seemed to be a lot more christians in the college once there was food involved. I wonder why...?) It was well worth it. I was struck by the blessing before the meal, though. It wasn't really like our grace at home, but just the act of holding hands with people around a table before a meal made me homesick for "for health and strength". I wonder what my family is doing without my voice in the rounds we sing? Can McKinley sing strong enough to hold her own? I feel minorly bereft, without that evening ritual.
Asian/Middle Eastern dinner was Saturday, and exclusively for the aforementioned, but I managed to get in.
How, you ask? First I told everyone that I was really close to being Asian, having lived in Japan and all. Then I helped make dumplings with the Chinese girls. Then, in case people still had problems with me joining, I dressed up Middle Eastern: I borrowed Nevin's jacket and she dressed me up in her veil. She loved it, said I looked much better than with my hair out, and proceeded to bring me around to all the Arab guys to get their concurrence that I was "very beautiful". (she got it. yay! :) )
So now it's up to you guys: do I look better with or without a veil?

Then, on Sunday evening, I had my first triumph: I successfully arranged a Nonlatin American (US and Canada) dinner, because this week is Latin week, so we needed some North American Pride to tide us over through the onslaught of Latinness. :)
We had a lot of fun, I made Banana bread, donuts, and pancakes, three people made chicken of some sort, we had French fries and fried rice putine (aka heart attack in a bowl) and spinach dip/bread. And Ayanda made chocolate cake and Deanna made the most heavenly apple pie...
By the end I was bursting with way too much food. It was fantastic, but not particularly healthy - of course, it was american. And the next day I was just as hungry as I would have been without it. It almost seemed a waste to eat all that food.

Florence

I spend my 1st long weekend of my UWC career in Florence.
Great fun, many surprises.
1st of all, it was a heck of a lot of money. Wow. 130 euros for 3 days, and I was on the low end -Toni says he spent 250 - where did it all go?? Food, (gelato...aah) and sleeping and transportation. It's so different when it's your own money you're spending.
I went with Raisa, Nick, Alejandro, Artemis, Shahar, Evita, Umberto and we met other people in other groups. We all pretty much hang in the same place: around the Duomo.

It's so amazing to be walking around a city and then look down a side street to see this fantastic structure, and watch people passing by like it's nothing special... Everything there is like that: even the mundane is spectacular. That was one surprise.

My favorite surprise was how we were greeted: the first night we were there, we were met by fireworks on the river. An amazing show of lights and music, they were some of the best fireworks I've ever seen.

Another shock was how we spent our time after dark. We stayed out until 3:00 or later every night exploring Florentine nightlife. Bars, discos, we did it all. It was really fun, and strange, because I'd never encountered this kind of culture before. I'd always thought that it was somehow only in movies. Wrong. I've officially partied all night long in Florence now, and it was very entertaining. We had a train to catch at 5:30 am, so we slept in the train station:

It was a bit chilly, so we used my skirts as blankets (I love skirts) and we curled together both for warmth and so the crazyman wouldn't bother us.
He tried to offer me beer and talk to Evita, but none of us could understand him - it sounded like he was making a language up. It sounded a little like Hebrew, so Shahar had a long pretend conversation with him before we left. We all laughed superhard about it, but then again, everything's funny when you've been up all night.
(interesting, the parallel between going and returning, this is how we got to Florence:
maybe we just like sleeping.)