Travelduck

Tomorrow I'm getting on a plane and going to Italy, and I'll be gone for the better part of two weeks. There will be an ocean between me and my laptop, and I will miss you all. I'm scheduling the Musical Mondays I'll miss to post automatically, but other than that Bookduck will be a pretty quiet place while I'm gone.

I wish I could say the trip is for a vacation, but it's actually part of a travel course I'm taking this January: Italian Culture in Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Travel Literature of Florence and Venice. I'm excited but nervous because so much of the itinerary is left up to us, and we've basically been told to take walks, talk to people, and get lost. I'm not good at not having plans, but I also don't like travel planning. A part of my brain shuts off as soon as I see a guidebook.

If you're wondering, my university offers classes like this every January, when we have J-term and students take one class for the entire month. It can be something fun that stays on campus or it can be a travel class like the one I'm taking. My roommate, for example, will be in Nicaragua with the Social Work department while I'm busy getting lost in Italy. (And I probably will get lost; both my sense of direction and my map reading skills are hilariously terrible.)

This won't be my first time in Europe, or even in Italy. In the summer of 2007 (right before my senior year of high school) I went to Europe with the Midwest Ambassadors of Music.

We had three buses. I got to ride on this double decker pink--excuse me, fuschia--bus all through Europe. This picture was taken in Paris.

There won't be a bus this time (we don't even have an itinerary), but I checked the weather forecasts and there's sure to be rain. There was a lot of rain in 2007, too. We zipped through London, Paris, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and swung by Venice for a day, and that day was the only dry day.

A typical umbrella huddle near the Eiffel Tower. Note our chic blue jackets. They had our names handily embroidered on the front, made it easy to spot each other, and were impermeable to rain. But I'm probably never wearing mine again.

The group included a choir and a band; I was in the band. The choir sang in lovely old churches. The band played outside in parks and town squares...where it rained and we got wet.

Following are pictures I took in Venice in July 2007. I'm wondering how different it looks in January.

We saw (and heard) these gentlemen as soon as we stepped off the boat. They sounded lovely.

Masks!

These children may look like they're playing nicely together, but they weren't. The boy was playing keep-away with the ball, and the girl was not happy.

Hurriedly snapped picture of a gondolier. No, I did not ride in a gondola. Too expensive...

Venetian glass!

Excited/nervous/happy/terrified and leaving my winter coat at home because it's not in the single digits and below zeroes in Fahrenheit in Italy (yay!),

P.S.: If you have not e-mailed me before and are not on my contact list and e-mail me between January 5th and 18th, your message will end up in my Junk e-mail folder and will be automatically deleted in ten days because that's how it's set up, and I can't figure out how to change it. Normally I'm able to rescue such e-mails, but I won't be able to at this time. Just so you know :)