European Vagary

Let me preface this by saying that I have been shrugging off the complaints of others that I have not been blogging enough, by rationalizing that it's only been a week and blogging once a week really isn't that bad. My discoveries today have been twofold: 1) it has not been a week, but rather two weeks and so I have realized that my concept of time is severely and irreparably skewed 2) my dreams of becoming a professional blogger will most likely never come to fruition. On this note, we embark: We can start off with a couple of weeks ago when a bunch of us went out to a club called La Maison, lots of fun. Lina didn't want to have her picture taken. Times 2. Or else that's a gang sign. The weekend after the visit to La Maison I went on an excursion to Pompeii. Three and a half hour bus ride there, 5 hours spent running around and a four and a half hour bus ride back. Very draining. But I did come out with this cool picture of me standing in front of Mount Vesuvius. Here ...

I had a great weekend this past weekend just "relaxing" in Rome. Friday night Ashley and I got all dolled up and went out to a club called Smart Club semi-close to where we live (nothing is actually close to where we live, but that's both a good and a bad thing). Smart club was fun, we were just kind of running around looking for it and we saw some random club and the bouncer was waving to us asking is to go in. We decided it looked like it was bumping so we wandered in. Turns out we had actually wound up at Smart Club, but we didn't know until we were already in there. It was a fun club, there were 3 dance floors and loooots of italians. Almost no foreigners there. So Ashley and I stood out, like we always do :) When we got bored, we just decided to get home so we got home around 3. Saturday, Ashley and I didn't really have a productive day. We just hung out around Rome and wandered a bit, getting lunch and all that. Then we decided that we wanted to go...

I'm just going to have to make a comment. This seems to be the best place to do it, so here it is: It is not a congressman/woman's job to be elected. It's their job to vote. It's their job to represent their constituency. I could honestly care less what the ramifications of their votes will be on their campaigns, I care about the ramifications for the country. I'm honestly getting sick of seeing article titles such as: "Bailout vote may be as risky as Iraq war vote". Who cares how risky it is? Aren't they getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to take that risk? Ugh. I had a conversation with my dad the other day about politics and the bailout and it's gotten me in a much more political mindset. Then last night, I talked with my homestay signora (who is a political journalist) about politics again. According to her, Europe is very affected by the American economy and political climate and so everyone here is following American news...

Alright folks, let's do this thing. I just got back from Oktoberfest today and I'm already blogging about it (will wonders never cease?). Alright, so the flight was uneventful and quite short. After flying into Munich on Friday morning, Ashley, Cara, Laura, Anna and I all got on the metro and made our way to our campsite. It took us a while to find it because the directions we had were seriously wrong. But we finally made it and I took this picture of our campsite which was at Olympic horse stadium (that's how I got this nice aerial view, bleachers). Then we all made our way to Oktoberfest itself and Ashley and I took the picture when we first arrived, aren't we cute? Then we got into the Paulaner tent and grabbed ourselves a table and some beers. Paulaner beer is the best beer I've ever tasted. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't (didn't) like beer, but my first sip of Paulaner and all I could think was "wow that's good". Definitely my favo...

Alright, I've been so focused on blogging about Greece that I've been neglecting the past week, so here's a recap: On Monday was my first day of real classes. I have to leave home at 8:15 in the morning and I get back at 7:15 at night every Monday and Wednesday. It's a long day. My classes are interesting though, I'm really glad I think I picked all of the best ones for me. I'm taking Ancient Roman Art, Rome and Renaissance Literature and Science and Religion. Science and Religion is my favorite class thus far, because we have heated philosophical discussions in class which I always enjoy. Yesterday we all talked about what we would do if we were in a position where someone was holding a gun to someone we loved's head and told us that if we said we didn't love them then they wouldn't did but if we said we did then they would die. I said that I would definitely say I didn't if I knew the shooter was telling the truth, but if I didn't kn...

Disclaimer: There will be relatively few photos in this post because I didn't take very many. I'm not going to beat around the bush here people, I was partying the whole time. Cameras are not conducive to partying. Also, you will need to know beforehand that this blog will be about partying and funny/silly/somewhat dumb things that Ashley and I did on the island of Mykonos. If you do not want to read about these things, I suggest you leave now. That being said, let's start off with the ferry ride over to Mykonos. We took the superfast ferry and actually had reserved seats so that was a nice departure from the first ferry. When we arrived in Mykonos, our resort (Paradise Beach) picked us up at the port and drove us to where we were staying. That was a nice touch. Once we arrived, we checked in and found out that we were staying in a box. No seriously. This was our first taste of Mykonos: However, I believe the box started us off on the right foot. Once we realized we weren...