For the Love of an English Major!

I've come to the terrible realization that not every entry can be about the postal service.

So here! Let's go back to Rome for a second.


Having narrowly escaped the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, we made our way to Piramide, where the Non-Catholic Foreigners' Cemetery is. It was quiet and green, and populated by more than a few stray cats --- I have to say that the cats roaming around made me more nervous than wandering the graveyard did!

"It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place," said Shelley. Lucky for him, he drowned and was cremated and buried here.

Lexi and I went on a mission, though --- to see the grave of Keats:


Chalk that one up as a success, I think!

In case you don't want to strain your eyes, it reads "this grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

It wasn't the first time I'd sat and spent an afternoon with the remains of a great writer. Having gone to high school directly across the street from F. Scott Fitzgerald's grave, it felt very comfortable sitting on the grass and resting our sore feet next to Mr. Keats -- some morbid kind of deja vu. I know they say familiarity breeds contempt, but it was actually one of the nicest moments of our trip, those few minutes with Keats and his friend Joseph Severn and the horrible yowling cats.

Later that afternoon we ended up at Keats' apartment next to the Spanish Steps, happily shown by a sweet docent who insisted we take in the museum at our leisure, even encouraging us to sit on the period furniture next to her dog, who was equally as content in the library armchairs as he was trotting up and down the stairs. Another reason why dogs trump cats in every possible situation.

Florence, or There's Something in the Arno!

I'm going to hammer out these last fall break posts so that I can get back to telling you about Dublin and everything that's happened these past few days --- boy, there's a lot!

The second half of our break was spent Italy-hopping. Two nights and a day in Florence, two nights and a day in Rome, two nights and a day in Venice. I don't know if these lightning-fast visits qualify me to really talk at length about Italy, but I can show you what I saw, tell you about the people we met, and of course describe the food we ate!

First up, Florence! It was a perfect introduction to Italy --- and home to the most comfortable hostel beds we'd ever encountered.


Not only did our room have a tiny little patio for sipping coffee on, it brought us together with two young guys who had just graduated from college and were spending eight months traveling around the world. They were wonderful companions for the day, having already gotten their Florentine bearings. With their entertaining accompaniment, we wandered the city.



"I went first to the cathedral, the centerpiece of the town," writes Bill Bryson in Neither Here Nor There. "I defy anyone to turn the corner into the Piazza del Duomo and not have his little heart leap. It is one of Europe's great sights." My little heart leapt, don't you worry.

My first cup of Italian gelato in hand (it was lemon, and it was perfect), we took in the streets. It was disconcerting, hearing virtually no Italian spoken during our first day in the country. About 85% of the people we came into contact with were English-speakers. It was a little soothing, after the frantic days spent miming our Spanish interactions, but it did not at all seem like we were in the real Florence.


Figuring we had seen the really crucial bits of Florence, the Duomo, the Baptistry, and David, we took the evening off --- clambering over a stone wall to go sit next to the Arno and talk, enjoying local red wine. The sun set over the river, making us feel like we were back in Dublin, debating next to the Liffey. Strange --- it seemed finally at that moment that we were really on vacation. It felt very much like that typical "college kids backpacking through Europe" moment that we had all imagined. And it only took us until Day 5 of fall break to realize it!

We spent the rest of the evening there, watching people walk their dogs and fisherman float over the stagnant water. I don't know what they were hoping to catch. The only wildlife we saw was a contented little otter swimming around, bobbing up and down as he made his way towards us on the bank. Somehow that was a real comfort --- he wasn't there for the tourists' entertainment. He had never known anything else but his muddy Italian river. And that was fine by him. And it was fine by us. We hurled ourselves back up the incline, boosting each other up over the wall as we tumbled back into the streets, delighted with the piece of Florence we'd carved out for ourselves.

More Gaudi, More Sun

Our last day in Barcelona, we went to Park Guell, another one of Gaudi's contributions to Barcelona's art and architecture scene.

We had unbelievable luck with the weather --- by now, we were freckled all over and adoring the sun!

Park Guell is hugely difference from Sagrada Familia, but you can tell it's Gaudi's work. Lots of seashell-inspired twists on conventions of his time.

These guys played "Fly Me to the Moon" and the Godfather theme while we squinted and applauded.

The whole park is lined with these tiled benches --- they're the perfect place to take a rest, leaning your back against the warm ceramic mosaic pieces.

A farewell view of the city we'd soon be leaving!

A very happy camper.

Sagrada Familia

Antoni Gaudi's kind of the golden maniac of Barcelona --- he's equal parts hometown hero and mad scientist to the Spanish, and his architecture is hugely celebrated in the city. We spent a morning visiting Sagrada Familia, the massive church that became his passion project. It's got an unbelievable story behind it. Construction on the church started in 1882. It's still not finished.

Gaudi was run over by a tram in June 1926 and killed. Fortunately, his proteges and collaborators continued work on Sagrada Familia --- that was, up until Gaudi's drafts and blueprints were destroyed by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War in 1938. So nobody really knows how Gaudi intended for the Sagrada Familia to be finished.

Completion is projected for 2026 --- 144 years after the first bricks were laid. But even this is a disputed date!

The entire thing is just astounding. To see the brute strength and literal years of labor it takes to make something so grand and so sacred makes your jaw hang open. After seeing St. Peter's in the Vatican, I was even more impressed. The whole of Sagrada Familia looks as if someone hauled up an old shipwreck after letting it mold for years under the sea. You wouldn't be surprised to see little crabs scuttling out of corners, barnacles on the foreheads of the sculptures.

Barcelona 2.0

So! The javelinas have made their grand entrance. If that were the most exciting thing that happened to us in Barcelona, it would still make a great story. However! We still had four more jam-packed days in the city.

We moved on to our second hostel, perfectly located on the Paseig de Gracia, Barcelona’s answer to the Champs-Elysees. And we were just a short walk from Placa Catalunya, just like Union Square in Greenwich Village. Below Placa Catalunya stretches Las Ramblas, the main drag of Barcelona. Along Las Ramblas there are cozy cafes, Hemingway's favorite absinthe haunts, and quite a few merchants selling plants and animals of all sorts.
Believe you me, it took every ounce of willpower I had not to buy a chipmunk as a little companion. Only 15 Euro!

About six more NYU kids met up with us there --- although somehow I was put in a different room from them, which was not altogether unpleasant, since my Brazilian roommates all looked like disciples or fishers of men and had strong penchants for playing “Dear Prudence” on their guitars at all hours of the day. That’s half the fun of budget hostelling, isn’t it?

Our Barcelona days were spent trying to get as much sunshine and culture into our lives as we possibly could. We took in the Museu Picasso (a mind-blowing collection of his early exercises and artwork, so humbling to look at what he produced at only 15 years old!) and a Alphonse Mucha exhibit at the CaixaForum (beautiful, feminine posters in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec) and blew dozens of Euros on postcards and prints. We walked kilometer after kilometer, taking in the strong Spanish faces. There’s something about the “Old World” countries, I’ve found. It’s effortless to look at the man sitting across from you on the subway and imagine his face in a 17th century court. Something about the eyebrows and the nose --- they’re just timeless, compared to all of our muddled American features.

That’s something else --- in Ireland, we blend in fairly well. With our pale film-school faces and big eyes, we’re actually considered kind of beautiful here! Not so in Barcelona. While here in Dublin we can get away with messy Rapunzel hair and pasty arms, in Spain we looked like short albino mushrooms, all moist and mutant. It was humbling, and a little mortifying.

You can imagine our new priority was to soak in as much sun as possible. Carmen and I started a feeding frenzy in the harbor, coaxing fish two feet long to fight over cookie crumbs. All the beaches in Barcelona itself are manmade, but that only means that the sand is dark and trucked in monthly, and falls like cornstarch under our feet. It was such a welcome rest from the gloomy seashores of Ireland --- the Mediterranean, how exotic!
Pasty Irish moonface and all, I was really, really happy there.

Benvinguts a Barcelona!

I feel bad starting out writing about Barcelona. Chronologically, we visited it first. But I loved it so much and was so sad to leave that I'm afraid any entry not about Barcelona will be a letdown. Not that Italy was a letdown at all! But all of my enthusiasm and all of my exclamation points have to go to Barcelona. It's phenomenal.

Our introduction to Spain was a really pleasant one, and pretty indicative of the five days we spent there. Immediately, we knew we weren't in Dublin. The air was warm and moist, and everything smelled like orange juice and wet trees. We shouldered our bags and, amused, followed the directions to our first hostel, a place out in the hilly suburbs --- "walk 500 paces up the mountain." Something had been lost in translation, we assumed. It couldn't have been a mountain we needed to march up!

It was, though, and it took much more than 500 paces to reach the summit. But what a reward, once we got there! Our bunks were really comfortable and actually kind of good-looking, a far cry from the sleepaway camp aesthetic we’d seen in so many hostels.

We threw our bags down and found a sweet Spanish senyora who handed us trays and plates and bowls of food --- our first meal in Barcelona, a real feast! Tomato soup ladled over rice and peas, fish sticks, good bread, salad with unbelievable olives, and a poached apple. The fish sticks I fed to a cat that was creeping around my ankles, but everything --- the food, the company, the view --- was wonderful.

We spent our first day exploring Barcelona, wandering up and down Las Ramblas, the main drag in the city center. La Boqueria, a giant marketplace, provided our entertainment. Stacks and stacks of fruits we’d never seen before, crates of eels and crabs and seashells meant to have their innards scraped out and eaten with broth. And of course, new and foreign words yelled at us.

Catalan is not at all an angular language, so no matter what volume it’s being spoken at, it sounds nice. Lots of eus, and xos, not many zs. It’s similar to French and Portuguese to my ear, at least. And Barcelona being bilingual is really something amazing. In galleries and museums where there are no English translations of texts, reading both panels of Castillian Spanish and Catalan will clue you in on most of the big ideas, in terms of the English cognates and similarities to other Romance languages.

And if all of this weren't enough for our first impressions, we had the absolute terror and delight of climbing the 500-plus paces back up the mountain to our hostel in the pitch black, clutching each other and hoping we didn't trip and fall off a cliff. Imagine the three of us, tiptoeing and clutching our keys between our knuckles to stab anyone who might try to emerge from the bushes and abduct us. Instead, we came across these little javelinas rummaging for food between the yucca plants and the morning glory.
If they had had tusks, we mightn't have gotten so close to take pictures. Hindsight's 20-20!

Ryanair, and the Beginning of the End

After the past ten days of roaming around Spain and Italy, I am over the moon to be curled up on the couch in my apartment with tea and my journal, going back over all of our adventures. There's hot water in the kettle, clothes in the wash, and socks in the trash. There was no way of resurrecting them after the abuse they'd been through these past few days. So I tossed 'em.

Where to begin? Last Friday morning, I caught a cab at 4:30 with Carmen and Lexi, my companions for the first leg of the journey. Drowsy but excited, we headed out to Dublin Airport to catch our flight to Barcelona.
We flew Ryanair this fall break, which was an absolute experience in itself. Dirt cheap flights --- I don't think we paid more than 35 Euro, or about $50, for any of our three flights. In fact, going from Barcelona to Pisa was 11 Euro, taxes included. But here's the thing about Ryanair. It's awful. In a really entertaining way, of course, when you're a student backpacking on a budget, but it's just terrible. The plane's decorated in banana yellow and navy blue, the flight attendants are grumpy, and you have to pay for your own barf bags. But hey! If the plane can get on and off the ground when necessary, I'm a happy camper. The flights make for great blog fodder, at least.

Every Ryanair trip's a mixture of a gypsy caravan and a Tupperware party. There's complete anarchy as you board the plane, because there are no assigned seats, no first class or business class. Everyone scrambles for a seat, they strap you in, and we're off. No fuss. Until the official Ryanair jingle comes on! This is when things get exciting. You didn't think you paid 11 Euro to sleep on the flight, did you? Not a chance. The flight attendants, wan and smelling like Lysol, troll up and down the aisles for the entirety of the journey, hawking wares. Not the cool gadgetry you sometimes see in the catalogues on American Airlines planes. Ryanair sells discount makeup, phone cards, scratch-off tickets, generic corn-based snack products. It's like an infomercial without the charm, Chinatown in a culture vacuum. It is appalling and amazing, and you should try it at least once.