When in Rome

A major reason that I chose to take the Roman Renaissance history class that I did was the lure of a promised excursion to Rome.  I know, casual, just a field trip to Rome. No big deal, get your permission slip signed and pack a lunch.  But seriously though, how neat is that?!?

We were set to meet with up with our class on the first morning in June at the Piazza del Popolo.  A girl that I met in my class and I decided we wanted to check out Rome a few more days than that so we decided to head out on the previous Friday. Most of our class was staying at a hotel that was a bit expensive in the city ran by nuns.  Since we were staying a few more days and were traveling on a budget of two kids who've been galavanting across Europe for the previous four months, we decided to use the trusty hostelworld.com.  We ended up at Camping Fabulous, seriously, that's the name.  And I have to say it was rather appropriately named.  We were in a two person tent in the middle of some sort of resort village right outside of Rome.  I have to say it was well worth the 9 euros per night.  It even had a pool!  It was great, except for the minor inconvenience of the sunburn we received, due to our pasty skin as a result of the overcast haven of Holland.

 

Waiting for the subway at the end of the line near our campground.

On our first day, we decided to check out the city and hit some of the key things that we didn't want to miss because our class covered only Rome during the Renaissance Era.  We walked through the Circus Maximus, a decrepit area that, when it existed, held more than any other stadium, ever.  A tour guide we overheard said that it held 300,000 people.  That's even more impressive because, at the time, there were only 2 million people living in the city, but most of the time only 1 million were in town.

We also checked out the Trevi Fountain, the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele, and the Spanish steps...

 The next day we ventured out to Ostia Antica near the coastline.  It was an old abandoned city from thousands of years ago.  We found it even cooler than the Roman Forum because you're allowed to climb in and out of the ruins. It was massive: a whole town left standing complete with public buildings, houses and even a really cool stadium sort of thing.

On the way back we were right next to the sea.  We couldn't very well get that close to the sea in Italy and not go in the water.  We wandered out onto the beach that evening and went into the water.  I have to say, it was well worth it.

The next three mornings and early afternoons were occupied by class time.  A component of the class required each of us to give a twenty minute presentation of a key monument, building or church that was relevant to the time period that we had been studying in our class.  It was actually a really cool structure so we didn't have to listen to our professors talk the whole time, but we were still able to learn about some of the things that we were seeing.

After our class time for the day, we spent the rest of the afternoons and evenings checking out the other aspects of Rome that we missed.  Although it was just two of us that were staying separately, we still ended up spending time with a lot of the members of our class in our free time as we were exploring the city.  The last night, we all went out to dinner with our professor.  I think I can confidently say that the food in Italy was one of my favorites from all of the countries that we've been to.

Colosseum

Casa Sant Angelo

St. Peter's Basilica

It was a really amazing trip.  It was very cool to see first hand all of the things that we've been studying all semester.  Everything about the week was really fun and it was well worth missing a couple of other lectures to experience on-sight lectures with my class.  I think I learned more from the portion of the class in Rome than I did the entire rest of the semester in the classroom.

The Finals Countdown

Yay!  Finals are done! 

This week marked  the end of my schooling in the Netherlands.  Two weeks ago was my final week of classes, last week I was in Rome with a class, and this week was finals week. Submitting final drafts of excruciatingly long papers and pouring through painful amounts of notes for my exams made me reflect on the semester.  While the semester flew by extremely quickly, it seems like I've been going to school here for a really long time.  In fact, some of my notes seemed to be from so long ago, I didn't even remember writing them. 

The exams all took place in a building so orange inside that it seemed to glow.  Several lectures full of people from various classes filtered into rooms that seemed to be the size of football fields full of desks.  Apparently it is also standard to pack a lunch in case you get hungry in the middle of your three hour exam.  At least that's what I found out when the guy taking a Spanish test next to me pulled out a sandwich in the middle of the time period.

The whole philosophy of education seems to be a bit different here.  A lot of people seem content with merely passing their classes.  It's obviously not true for everybody, but a few of the people I talked to before the exams were only concerned with what it took to get a passing grade in the class.  If all else fails, there's always the chance to get a resit on the exams, which many people take. 

I have mixed feelings about this approach.  Granted, I have been shaped by the type of education that I have grown up accustomed to, but I have never seen the draw of just doing enough to get by.  My education has always been dictated by the mindset of doing your best and achieving the most possible.  Of course, that is one of the reason that we have so much more stress in our education system, as well as competition.  People drive themselves to achieve as much as possible and to beat others.  On the other hand, this also means that more people are working up to their potential. 

Here though, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much stress.  Really high marks are deemed practically unobtainable, or for super-humans, and passing, or doing fairly well, is often sufficient enough.  Maybe that's part of the reason that the Dutch have been found to be some of the happiest people in the world.  Their system seems to put a lot less pressure on people and results in more relaxed attitudes towards these sorts of things.  Of course, the fact that the government also helps pay for a lot of the education at the university level probably helps quite a bit too.  If people weren't automatically going to be in a ton of debt going to school, they might feel a bit less pressure to be the best as well.

It might sound crazy to say that trying to be your best isn't always necessarily a good thing.  But I think that that's only because that's what our system has taught us our entire life.  Is it a bad thing to not let some insignificant things in the big scheme of things dictate your life?   Would society as a whole be less successful if people weren't so driven and determined to be the best?  Maybe by material standards.  But I still think there's something to be said for the easy-going lifestyle that ranks so high on the happiness scale of the world.

June!?!?

How the heck did it get to be June already?  It seem like both last week and five years ago that I showed up to this city like a chicken with my head cut off and now it's June!?!?  When I was skyping with my friend from home last night, she told me that I seem very settled and at home here. And it's true.  In no time at all, I fell right into a routine and made myself a nice life here.  And now it's June. 

I had my last class today.  I technically have classes next week, but since I'll be in Rome with a different class, I won't be there.  I have my last two exams on the 12th and 13th of June, and that's it for school.  Oh, that and the 25 page paper I need to turn in and that presentation I have to do in Rome, but that's beside  the point.  How can I already be done with classes?  I've been planning for these classes, and especially this Roman Renaissance class, since October, and now they're almost over.  I have just fell into a rhythm of going to classes here that you'd think I've been doing it for years. 

As I'm entering into my last couple of weeks I keep thinking about everything that I do and how it might be the last time I do it.  It's the last time I'll have class in A Weg 30, or the Heymanszaal in the Academy Building, or the Harmonie Building.  I probably won't be spending a lot more time in the libraries, or the study areas.  It's so weird.

The law students have their finals this week, so people have already begun to leave.  It appears that it is starting to be the beginning of the end.  June 25th used to seem so far off, and now it's in a few weeks.  I went for a walk with a friend the other night and we started talking about our first week here.  We talked about how lost and confused we were when we first showed up, when we first met all of our friends, how we failed miserably our first time grocery shopping, how we bought the crappiest bikes in the world from strangers we found online, how we made a huge list of all of the places we wanted to go and then went crazy making it our mission to check them all off. 

I'm not ready to do a final reflection yet, but I've done enough of one to realize that I'm really happy with what I've done and how I've grown this semester.  But before sitting down and looking into all of that, I need to spend the next few weeks continuing to live in the moment and enjoying this experience for all that it's worth.  I'm leaving tomorrow for Rome, a trip I've been daydreaming about since October when I signed up for the class with the promise of an excursion.  It came down to the choice to stay for the last week of classes or to go to Rome.  I was really hesitant to make this decision, but then it occurred to me: I really couldn't not go to Rome.  If coming here and being here has taught me anything it's that I should take advantage of as many opportunities that come my way as possible.  So, instead of continuing this monologue, I'm going to pack my bags and head out to witness first hand the city I've  only been able to read about up to this point. 

Languages

I've been thinking a lot about languages lately.  Everywhere I've gone, I've tried to learn some key words in that language to help navigate around and to make an effort to show an interest in the culture that I'm visiting.  Everyday here I'm surrounded by languages I don't know and, for the most part, don't understand, and it just makes me think how much more I wish I knew.  I know what I know, and I know what I don't know.  But there's so many languages out there that I don't even know I don't know.

On our trip to Switzerland, I went with two people from Spain, one from Italy and one from Brazil.  Within the group there were people who knew English, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German.  For the entirety of the trip, we were trying to teach each other new words and phrases in our native languages.  It seemed like we were constantly switching back and forth between languages and we all learned something new.  Obviously though, our interactions were about 95% in English. 

The funny thing was, my Italian friend told me at one point that she understood me better when I was speaking in Spanish than when I was speaking in English.  I wasn't sure if this was a compliment of my Spanish or an insult of my English.  But it does kind of make sense: my Spanish is a lot more basic than my English, thus easier to understand.

Last night, that same friend from Italy was teaching me a bunch of new words and phrases in Italian to use when I go to Rome tomorrow on a class trip.  I was surprised how similar a lot of the words sound to Spanish, but it's still its own unique language. I really hope to learn more of it.

The reason that I'm telling you all of this is because, this semester has really made me wish that I wasn't a native English speaker.  I know that sounds stupid and I should feel lucky that I naturally speak one of the most dominant languages in the world, but I really wish I would have had to work to learn it.  That way I'd be forced to be fluent in at least two languages.  Of course, my friends from other countries have said that they want to speak English to their kids when they're growing up so their kids don't have as hard of a time learning English as they did.  I understand that, but I think that having English as a native language is almost an excuse for not bothering to learn other languages of the world. 

We decided that we're going to have a child exchange program when we grow up.  We're going to send our kids to each others' houses during the summers to learn new languages.  They did make me promise that I wouldn't feed their kids too much peanut butter in the US and they promised to take it easy on the Nutella so my kids don't get spoiled.  Really though, I think we all agreed the best way to learn a new is to be immersed in it.  What you learn in a classroom, typically from non-native speakers of that language, cannot hold a candle to the real experience.

The thing about English, though, is that it brought us all together.  To study in the Netherlands, we all had to know English.  To communicate with each other, we all had to know English.  And I think it's really special that we all have something like that that bonds us together.  It doesn't have to be English, that fact is merely a product of history and society, but it's nice that there is some language we can do it in.  Having a mutual language allows countries to preserve their culture, heritage and national languages, but still allows people from all nationalities to bridge gaps.  It would be virtually impossible to be able to speak in the natural language of everybody that we meet here, but we have found common ground because we have the link of a language, in this case English.  There's no way we could get to know each other, learn from each other, and form everlasting friendships without this imperative link.

Having this link of language also catalyzes the expansion of our knowledge base into other languages.  While I'm helping other learn to say the phrase they want to say and helping them words their essays in ways that make more sense, they're teaching me bits of their languages so that I can expand my vocabulary too.  I mentioned a month or so ago about the phenomenon of "minglish."  That's still true, my English has warped a little.  But I would trade that any day for all of the new things that I've learned along the way.  I'd say it's a fair compensation.

Switzerland

About a month ago, a group of friends and I who live in Blekerslaan decided that we all wanted to take a trip together.  Without any immediate ideas for destinations, we decided on a two-fold approach to decide on a location.  Since three of the people I was going with were from Europe, this already narrowed down our choices.  Perhaps even more significantly, we weren’t too keen on spending a ton of money to get somewhere.  Our strategy, therefore, was to find a destination that (a) none of us had been to and (b) somewhere that Ryanair went to for a relatively cheap price.  Come to find out, this place was Geneva, Switzerland.  Not knowing a ton about Switzerland, our mutual anticipations included mountains, clocks, chocolate, and Swiss army knives.  

Not until the day before arriving in Geneva did we find out that it was a special weekend for the city.  Come to find out, Geneva was having a “Cave Ouvertes” that weekend where the local wineries in areas surrounding the city open up their doors to the public.  This provided us with a unique opportunity to take advantage of to get out into the countryside and see a new side of the local culture.  To get there, we had to take a train to a station about a half an hour away and where there were free shuttle buses taking visitors between wineries.  This taste of culture was a lot of fun to share with my friends and we all enjoyed touring the various wineries.  This was definitely something my mom would love, so I figured I had to check it out or she’d never forgive me.

One of the things we heard about Geneva, and that we really noticed when we got there was how international the city was.  Everywhere we turned, we heard people speaking different languages.  It wasn’t just on the tour, because I understand that there are tourists around, but the city itself seemed to have permanent residents from all over the world.  A lot of the people we talked to who said they lived in the city, weren’t originally from Switzerland.

Still not venturing into the city, we decided to hop on the train the next day and to check out some of the other towns around the magnificent Lake Geneva.  While the city of Geneva straddles the border between Switzerland and France, the gargantuan Lake Geneva expands vastly into the middle of Switzerland and its mountains.  We first took the train to Montreux  along the lake. Other than it being inhabited, or perhaps because it was inhabited, with these creatures....

...it was really beautiful.  We walked alongside the lake for about 45 minutes until we saw my new home.  

The Château of Chillon is a castle that nestles right up to the waters of Lake Geneva.  With plenty of bedrooms and excellent ventilation, it is to be my next real estate purchase.  It looks like it might be a bit drafty in the winter, but the view of the snow-capped mountains is to die for and it's conducive to the most amazing parties and festivities.  Plus, if you think about it, it's a rather sound investment, because any visitors I have to the region are more than welcome to stay in my castle.  I should be able to find an extra bedroom for them. 

My castle is pretty old.  Through the tour we could see many facets of its history, with the earliest known part of it being created in the 2nd century.  Chillon was made popular by Lord Byron when he wrote the poem The Prisoner of Chillon in 1816.  I'm not honestly familiar with that particular piece of work, but, oddly enough, I just read a piece by Henry James today called Daisy Miller, from 1878.  The story began with an American who was living in Geneva and went to tour Chillon with a lady.  He described walking along the path that we had just taken around the lake and what the castle was like.  "Pretty neat," I thought, "I'm buying a pretty popular piece of history." Here's my first picture on the dock of my new estate...

On our train back to Geneva, we stopped at Lausanne, a big university city also situated along the lake.  Nobody warned me that it being situated in the Alps meant that the roads would be fairly steep to climb, but the view from the top made it well worth it.  It was a really beautiful and sunny day.  Finally it seemed enough to soak in some rays, but, at the same time, we could still feel the slightly crisp mountain breeze blowing.  Quick Jeopardy fact: Lausanne also houses the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee.

We were spending our last day to actually explore the city of Geneva.  A pretty city, but pretty low-key, many of the locals didn't seem to think it should be a hot tourist destination, claiming that it was rather boring.  However, Geneva is a really nice town, situated in an even nicer region. The majority of the population speaks French in the city, because, as I said, it's right on the boarder with France.  Switzerland also has three other national languages, that vary on the region: German, Italian, and Romansh. We wandered around the town a bit, taking in the cathedral, the international monument of reformation, a giant chess set in the park, found a strange statue to climb on in front of the museum, and checked out the massive fountain on the lake.  All in all, it made for nice day and a wonderful trip.  If you're ever in the neighborhood, call me up because you're more than welcome to stay at my new humble abode.