Today is the first day of our spring break! I’m going to Geneva and London with a friend from IES. I am pretty terrible at packing and planning and tend to leave everything until the last minute. So of course last night I was trying to figure out how to fit ten days worth of clothes into a backpack while researching things to do in Geneva and London and completing an application for a summer job that’s due on Monday. Typical.
Before even beginning my internship, I must have thought of a million reasons why doing it would prove to be entirely too overwhelming and too time consuming. Fortunately, Simona, the internship coordinator at IES Roma, did not let me make a final decision without visiting my internship site first. And surely enough, after my first visit, during which I met the director of Casa Famiglia, I somehow felt and knew that I needed to do this.
“Come as you are. Pay as you feel.”
I was walking along the Albert Cuyp Market when I noticed these words drawn onto a window. Like any other hungry student on a budget, my first thought was whether free food was available.
I cannot sing enough praises about visiting Italy – or any country, really – in the quiet months between tourist seasons. Our hostel owner in Florence a few weeks ago told us how in the summer, the piazza in front of the Duomo will be shoulder to shoulder with visitors, and it can take half an hour to get close to Michelangelo’s “David” once you wait the three hours in line to get into the museum itself. This weekend, my friends and I went to a picturesque region of the Italian Riviera called Cinque Terre, in what was decidedly the off season.
I was never enchanted by Santiago.
From above, the dense, brown smog makes it hard to see the city at all, let alone the Andes. The architecture is bland, poorly maintained and out of place. Even Plaza de Arma’s historic cathedral stands in the depressing shadow of a brutally modern high rise.