Italy #1: food and people

During the past week, I traveled to Florence, Italy with a friend and colleage from LCC. We haven't finished sharing our pictures yet, but I will post some of the ones from my camera.

Our first night in Florence, we ate an "apertivo", which is like a buffet. We paid for two drinks, and then got to eat as much food as we wanted! After traveling all day, we definitely enjoyed the meatballs, pasta, bread, salad and wine.

This picture is from the Uffizi Gallery (art museum) that we visited on our first full day in Florence. There were lots of statues and paintings to look at, and although we weren't supposed to take pictures, I couldn't resist taking one of the beautiful ceiling (and accidentally getting my face in the picture too)!

A MASSIVE calzone that I ate for dinner one night - stuffed with two different cheeses and zucchini - yum!

This is us inside the Duomo, a very famous cathedral in Florence. There is a big dome at the front of the church, which is painted with a representation of The Last Judgement. We climbed 463 steps to get to the top of the dome and go outside, but also got to stop partway up and see the painting up close - it was so beautiful and lifelike!

Another afternoon we ate at an outdoor cafe and just soaked up the sun. I ate pizza with spicy salami, blue cheese and red onion. 

Here I am at the main lookout spot in Florence - behind me you can see the big dome on the right - the same dome in the Duomo that we visited earlier in the day.

On our last day in Italy, we took a short bus ride to Siena, and enjoyed the very medieval streets, buildings and atmosphere there. It was a beautiful day, so we got sandwiches from a deli and ate them in the main square in the sunshine. It was perfect!

The last night we ended up spending the night in the airport (unplanned - a long story). The pictures is when we were killing time in a bar, and the very kind workers let us hang out after they closed before we caught our bus to the airport. We were very tired by this point, because it was at 2:30am!

More posts to follow as soon as I get more pictures! :)

more smelt

A couple weekends ago, I went to the Smelt Festival with a couple LCC friends in Palanga, Lithuania. My friend, Bethany, posted some pictures on her blog, which I also wanted to share with you.

There were LOTS of people walking the streets at the festival. We saw...

Fish being roasted over an open fire, 

An amber fish,

And an anchor holding strength competition!

We ate fish soup, fried smelt, and cream of wheat with ham gravy.

Close-up of fried fish - with eyes and heads and everything included!

We couldn't quite bring ourselves to eat the fish heads. But the rest was good!

RA Retreat

This weekend I went on retreat with my RAs for about 24 hours. We had a lot of fun, played games and ate some delicious food. We found a place to stay for free (a friend's apartment) so we had money to spend on food and other entertainment. We played pool, Ticket to Ride, the question game, and cards. We ate at a new pizza place which is a new favorite of mine - my favorite pizza we got had spicy mustard on top! We watched a movie, slept in, and ate chocolate pancakes with raspberry jam and sour cream. Overall, we had a wonderful time together, and I feel more excited about finishing out the semester with these 4 very special people.

  Dima and Kirill trying to catch a few last minutes of sleep before breakfast.

Viktoriya and Nasta enjoying the chocolate pancakes.

V-day and Smelt

This week we had several big events to plan and execute, but they were very funny and enjoyable. One of the events was called Blind Date - it was a game show where couples matched during the show compete to be the funniest by playing different games. My RA team was in charge of advertising, so we did several things to make sure students knew about the event. One of them was dressing up as Cupid and delivering Valentines to many residents.

Dima and Kirill dressed up... they were actually excited to do this!

Another thing I did this weekend was go to the Palanga Smelt Festival. Palanga is a town about 20 minutes away from where I live. Two friends and I took a bus there, and went to celebrate the Smelt Festival with other Lithuanians. Smelt (stinta in Lithuanian) is a small fish; apparently it is plentiful in February, so why not have a festival?! Today there were craft and food booths and live musicians. It was cold but we enjoyed walking around and eating fried smelt and smelt soup. The other crazy thing that happens during this festival is a "polar bear run" into the sea. We didn't get there in time to see this, but I found this picture of the run from earlier in the day. Crazy people!!!

BRRRR!!!!!

Birthday #2

And tonight we celebrated Nastassia's birthday - she is turning 20 tomorrow. She requested Thai food, so I made a green chicken curry with rice and spicy pear chutney. Also, for dessert we had the infamous carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. We also learned that both Kirill and Nasta were born in the afternoon on their birthday, which is uncommon - apparently most babies are born in the morning.

The birthday girl with her dinner. She said her hair was in two braids because this is her last chance to be a "child" before turning the big 2-0.

Vika and Nasta

Birthday #1

Tonight we celebrated Kirill's birthday - he is turning 22 tomorrow! On his request, I made orange chicken with rice, and chocolate peanut butter cake. Everyone including Kirill enjoyed the food very much, and they left with full bellies! I learned how to say "Happy birthday" in Russian as well, but I can't write it so you'll just have to ask me next time you see me! :)

Kirill getting ready to taste the first bite...

Everyone enjoying... L-R: Dima, Kirill, Vika and Nasta

I'm pretty sure Dima's face is just a joke!

Green Week

Last week Residence Life organized a week dedicated to educating students about choices they could make to help the environment. We had different activities every day, which included making your own reusable shopping bag, eating food made from (almost) exclusively donated ingredients and taking a survey about your environmental footprint. We found it more difficult to find information about environmental issues that dealt specifically with Eastern Europe, and so it was interesting to see how students responded to this topic and what their opinions were on the issues facing today's world.

As usual, I was not very good at taking pictures, but here are a few I pulled off Facebook to share. They are from the "Stone Soup" event where we collected food from each room in the residence halls, and combined the ingredients into something to share with those who came. We made a big pot of soup (with a LOT of different random things), fried rice, sandwiches and fried potatoes. Students were excited to come to this event because there was food, and they had donated something towards the meal. We also had videos about recycling and a trivia game during the event to help people be more educated about their choices.

These RAs helped me cook and serve the food to hungry students.

This is Hanna with fried potatoes...

Sasha with a HUGE pot of "stone" soup...

And Renata with fried rice. Everything was gone afterwards, and I think we served around 85 people - hooray!

Here are the winners of the trivia game - actually all students from the States who are studying abroad for one semester.

Hopefully there will be some videos to share next week about recycling.