Short-answer

I'm following Myrna's order to answer the following questions with only one word--it wasn't easy. I mostly followed the one-word rule :)

Your Cell Phone? Essential
Your Hair? Confused
Your Mother? Close
Your Father? Trustworthy
Your Favorite Food? Cheerios
Your Dream Last Night? Blank
Your Favorite Drink? Water
Your Dream/Goal? Art
What Room Are You In? Computer
Your Hobby? Numerous
Your Fear? Bees
Where Do You See Yourself In Six Years? Content
Where Were You Last Night? Home
Something That You Aren't? Neat
Muffins? Blueberry
Wish List Item? Books
Where Did You Grow Up? South Dakota
Last Thing You Did? Work (library)
What Are You Wearing? Sweater
Your TV? Heroes, Project Runway
Your Pets? Cat. But they won't let me keep her in my dorm room. Sigh.
Friends? Dear
Your Life? Full
Your Mood? Cheerful
Missing Someone? Skyler
Vehicle? Focus
Something You Aren't Wearing? A cape
Your Favorite Store? Bookstores
Your Favorite Color? Rainbow
When Was The Last Time You Laughed? Today
Last Time You Cried? Yesterday
Your Best Friend? Skyler
One Place You Go To Over And Over Again? Hebrews 11:1
Facebook? Yes
Favorite Place To Eat? Bagel Boy

If you read this, you are automatically charged with the task of answering these questions yourself. But only if you want to.

**Book reviews and final Italy posts will appear this week. I promise.**

Busily yours,

Musical Monday (27)

Every Monday I post whatever song I can't get out of my head or just can't get enough of because Mondays can often be less than marvelous, and music is happy--even when it's sad. If you'd like to join the party, just make your own Musical Monday post and leave a comment!

I hope you all haven't had enough of Italy-themed posts yet, because this week's songs are both in Italian! I have a 10-12 page piece of travelwriting and a presentation to put together by Wednesday, and two books to finish reading as well (Christopher Duggan's A Concise History of Italy and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun. Thank goodness I finished John Berendt's City of Falling Angels in December. It's not that these are terrible books, it's just that I wouldn't normally select them.) I'll be mentally in Italy until all that's finished. And all those posts about the trip? Total procrastination aids, and yet they've been helpful for organizing my thoughts. Thanks for visiting and commenting and forgiving me for allowing my blog to masquerade as a travel journal.

Anyway. One afternoon my travel buddies and I took a load off at the hotel and watched a little Italian MTV. Most of the songs were in English, but every now and then something Italian besides the commercials played, including today's songs. (American music was everywhere--stores, restaurants, etc. Does this bother Italian people? Because I'm sure it would bother me if all the music I heard around my hometown wasn't in my native language. If you live outside the U.S. feel free to share your thoughts about music and language. I'm curious.)

This week's first song is "Baciami Ancora". It's apparently from a movie of the same title, and listening to it makes me wish for summer. It was playing in supermarkets and restaurants, and we heard it a lot.

The second song is "Casa Casa Mia" by dARI. It amuses me, mostly because the people singing it are wearing copious amounts of eye makeup. If you speak Italian and these songs say anything crass or inappropriate, I apologize and plead ignorance. I only understand every twelfth word.




Wishing you a Most Fabulous Monday,

Holy canasta! My book is e-mailing me.

As J-term winds down I've been buying textbooks for Spring semester--some online, some in the campus bookstore depending on where the prices are the most friendly. I recently purchased one from BetterWorldBooks.com. Not only do they donate to world literacy, but they also send entertaining e-mails to let you know when your book is shipped:

Hello Sarah,

(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

Holy canasta! It's me... it's me! I can't believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I've got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can't believe I'm leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already - the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge - so many memories. I don't have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it's time to see the world!

I can't wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol' brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I've had, I'm ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn't take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I've found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.

Eagerly awaiting our meeting,

Art in Renaissance Italy: 1350-1500 (Oxford History of Art)
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Way too cute :)

(And that textbook? It's for a special topics history class called Beyond Wigs and Frescoes: The Visual World of Renaissance Europe. The last time I checked there were only three other students enrolled in the class. Oh, the thrills we will have. And I mean that as non-sarcastically as possible.)

Italy Part Tre: Venice

When I checked my e-mail on the afternoon before I left for Italy I received this message from one of the professors going on the trip:

Dear all,

Venice is having a very cold and wet winter. They are actually predicting rain, snow, and flooding while we are there. You may want to get to WalMart and buy yourselves a poncho and some rubber boots that are about knee-high. I bought some last night and they cost me $19.99.

See you tomorrow.

Dr. M.

I went out and bought boots. They are brown and awkward and slightly too big because the store I chose didn't have any in women's sizes, but I didn't have time to run around town looking for the perfect pair. In any case I was glad I bought them. Here's why:

This is a mammoth puddle in front of St. Mark's Basilica with the Doge's Palace beyond. It is one of many puddles I encountered in Venice, most of them smaller yet surprisingly deep. One can see platforms in the background of the photo; these are used for walking when St. Mark's Square floods, which did happen a bit while I was there. There are similar platforms elsewhere in Venice, which was good because it rained off and on for most of our time in Venice.

While I was in Italy for school, the trip was very unstructured. Once we reached Venice we were basically told to go do whatever--just keep a journal and come to quick meetings about every other day. This was both liberating and mildly terrifying. The day after most of us visited the islands in the lagoon, however, we did have a bit of direction in the form of a challenge: Find the oldest restaurant in Venice (it's about 500 years old) and try traditional Venetian food. Hint: the staff is known for being rude, it's a bacaro (sort of like a bar that serves food), and the place is listed in most guidebooks.

I joined forces with Carrie and Tasia, my friends and two main travel buddies. We scoured our guidebooks for possible establishments and found two that fit the clues. (My mom gave me Rick Steves's Italy 2010 guidebook and it was invaluable. I've previously called guidebooks boring, and I stand by that if one is just reading one at home, but I now think them endlessly interesting and incredibly useful when figuring out the ropes for oneself in a foreign country.)

We considered asking someone on the street if they knew what restaurant the clues talked about, but nixed the idea since none of us knew how to say "500 year old restaurant" in Italian. We tried a tourist information office, but the woman at the desk just fluttered her hands and said, "A five hundred year old restaurant? It's impossible. Impossible." We went back to the hotel in defeat. One of the professors was in the lobby, though, and after one more hint we were sure which restaurant it was: the Cantina Do Mori.

It's a small place on the other side of the Rialto from St. Mark's, standing room only. The first bartender we saw didn't speak English (nor should he), and we had no idea how to ask for traditional Venetian food in Italian. Carrie pulled out her handy dandy Italian phrasebook from the 1950s (it tells you how to ask for typewriter parts and girdles) and we paged through it awkwardly for about five minutes. It was the noon hour and the place was filling up with locals; it was crowded and full of Italian words.

Finally, the other bartender--who'd watched the whole thing and apparently decided to let us hang for awhile--motioned at us and said that he spoke English. We asked him for something traditional and he gave us a variety plate of cicchetti, which are small snacks with toothpicks in them. The cicchetti we sampled included this slimy eel thing and a bunch of strange rolls and little sandwiches with whole (bony) tiny fish on top. It was all very salty, and while it wasn't my favorite food ever, it was good stuff. I wouldn't cry if I had to eat it again.

We did a lot of other things in Venice, but most of our time was spent wandering around lost. Venice is a maze and maps are only so helpful, since few list all the narrow streets (calli), and some streets change names in random places. Venice is comprised of six sestieri, or neighborhoods, with the southern neighborhood of San Marco being the most touristy. It's definitely worth heading north into San Paolo, Santa Croce, west to Dorsoduro, and beyond. After dark (and it was dark; many streets weren't brightly lit), there were many instances where it was just us on the streets or near the water. This was both eerie and peaceful. (And if you ever go to Venice and want to get away from the awful tourist menus around St. Mark's it's worth the walk to Muro in Santa Croce. It was So. Good.)

And now it's picture time!

Someone boarding a vaporetto (right) from the vaporetto stop at the Accademia Bridge (left). Since I keep talking about water buses I thought I'd show one... Most of the important streets are decorated with pretty lights, which we found both beautiful and incredibly helpful.

There were a lot of people in Venice who really wanted to sell us handbags. We didn't want any. Here are some street salesmen hounding passersby on the Accademia Bridge.

Graffiti near the Accademia Bridge. Does Venice have a faery problem? Could that be why we were lost all the time? Other notable graffiti included the phrase "Thief Cause". It was all over Venice.

We saw many people--all of them speaking Italian and probably not tourists--coming out of a gelato shop down the street as we wandered. We decided that we should go in too, and were glad we did: one euro for a large scoop of gelato in a waffle cone. Yummy and wallet friendly.

I came across this scene as we walked through Dorsoduro, and I promise that the dogs were playing, not fighting. Venetians seem to like their dogs; we saw a lot of them, and many people took their dogs into stores, even big ticket designer ones. (Note the flood platform.)

I deeply appreciate signs like this. We used them frequently.

Beautiful graffiti art on a payphone.

The view from our hotel's cozy little lobby.

Carrie and me obstructing the lovely lobby view on a rare sunny morning.

Ciao,

Tune in next time for pictures and tales from Florence!

Italy Part Due: Islands, cats, and statues oh my!

"Due" (pronounced doo-ay) is Italian for "two". I didn't know that until a few days before I left for Italy. I like it.

I also appreciate the comments that were left on Italy Part Uno.

In response to Nina, I would love to go back to Amsterdam someday and actually get out of the airport. Love love love.

To Catherine Denton and Mariah Irvin, I don't know how I ended up with such a fascinating flight companion. I pinched myself a lot, because I don't usually get to sit by such interesting people on planes. (Well, technically everyone's interesting. You just don't know it until they talk or do a cartwheel or something, and talking with strangers on planes can be awkward, so a lot of people--I'll admit including me--just don't do it very often.)

Anyway. To pick up where I left off, we landed in Venice in the afternoon on January 6th. Then we fought jet lag and took a walk around Venice. (There are lots of stocking, sock, and tights shops there. Just an observation.)

Oh. And I saw this:

The Rialto! It's such a pretty bridge.

And I was in VENICE. (Or, as Venetians call it, Venezia.)

The next morning a bunch of us decided to visit the islands of Murano, Burano, and Torcello in Venice's lagoon.

Murano is famous for its glass factories (in--I believe--the 13th c., Venetian glassblowers were kicked out of Venice proper and sent to Murano because their furnaces were a fire hazard). Many of the factories offer free glassblowing demonstrations, and we went to one.

See the broken vase? The glassblower made it before our eyes, then dropped a piece of paper in it to show how hot the glass was. The paper burned, and shortly after the bottom of the vase shattered and it fell down. In the background, the glassblower is making a horse figurine. We were, of course, taking pictures like crazy during the demonstration, and at one point the glassblower turned and posed. At that moment it hit me that pictures of him must be in many tourists' photo albums and cameras. I'd pose too.

Murano. That spiky blue thing is a glass sculpture.

Glass flowers.

Burano, on the other hand, is famous for lace making and cute, brightly colored houses. We came during siesta, and all the kids going home from school for lunch had--I'm not kidding--wheelie backpacks. Good for them. (And their backs.) They also make great cookies--excuse me, biscuits.A pack of large cats right near the vaporetto (water bus) stop.

Idyllic laundry scene.

An apparently typical place to keep one's umbrella--I saw quite a few hanging outside sun-drenched front doors.

Now on to Torcello, which used to be a big deal. Thousands of people lived there. Now? Not so much. The big tourist attraction is the church complex about a ten minute walk from the vaporetto stop, which was worth seeing, but wandering outside with a camera was the best fun. Cat houses! With cats!

Creepy vineyard.

I love the pose of this statue, which was to the left of the vineyard.

A stone chair near the church complex. Carrie, Tasia (my two travel buddies), and I decided we needed to sit in it.
This is Tasia sitting in the chair.

This is Tasia awkwardly almost falling out of the chair.

Me sitting in the chair.

If I look cold, it's because I am. But I can talk about weather in the next post, which will be about Venice!

Ciao,

Italy Part Uno: Unexpected airplane soap opera

**Blogger isn't letting me put spaces between paragraphs where I want to, so I'm sorry for the unwieldy blocks of text below.**

On January 5th, 2010, I traveled to Minneapolis and boarded a plane from there to Amsterdam. From there I--and seventeen other students and professors--flew to Venice. (Here's why.)

I sat by an elderly woman with curly blonde-ish hair and a wrinkly, craggy face on the big flight. We exchanged first names. She called herself Bert, short for Bertha. (I would probably go by Bert too.) Bert told me that she was going on a European cruise starting from Rome with a friend and her daughter, who has MS. Cruises are the easiest vacations for the woman with MS to take. I told her I was headed to Italy on a school trip and then the plane took off. We kept talking.

What started as fairly ordinary small talk, however, became an enthralling story that unwound over the eight hour flight between movie watching, plane food eating, and Bert's settling in with her sleep mask. Turns out Bert wasn't just going on a European cruise--she was also going to Paris to meet a long-lost niece.

(!!!)

When Bert's brother was stationed in Germany in the 1960s, he went to Paris and met a woman named Cristiana. (Bert didn't say she was beautiful, but I'm sure she was.) Cristiana got pregnant but didn't tell Bert's brother about the baby. He went back to the U.S. not knowing that he was a father. "It's just like one of those crazy soap operas," Bert said.

Bert said that her brother talked about bringing Cristiana to the states, but that never happened. He married someone else, had two kids, and died twelve years ago.

Last year Bert got a phone call from a woman named Barbara, a Search Angel. Years ago Barbara was reunited with a long-lost relative and was deeply touched by the event. Now, she volunteers her time as a Search Angel, helping others find their long-lost relatives and loved ones.

Barbara told Bert that she was about to hear something strange and told her about her niece. Bert almost hung up, but she heard Barbara out, and Barbara left it up to Bert to follow through. After some careful thinking, Bert hesitantly contacted her niece, who is now forty-eight years old. The niece sent photo albums from her childhood; she looked just like Bert's late mother.

The icing on the evidence cake was a picture of Cristiana with Bert's brother. (Bert's brother brought one home just like it.) The niece lives in France and has a sister in Paris who speaks English, which is helpful since Bert doesn't speak French.

I asked Bert how she felt about the upcoming meeting, and she said she was excited and anxious: this was likely to be a closure-filled emotional event. The niece originally searched for her father, but since he's dead, Bert is standing in for him.

The flight landed in Amsterdam, we parted, and I hope her meeting went well.

I stumbled off the big flight feeling absolutely exhausted. It was about midnight my time, and I'm terrible at sleeping on planes. It was about 7 AM in Amsterdam. We had a connecting flight to Venice, but first we had to go through passport control and security screening, and I've got to say that Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport--besides being beautiful and possessing random doors in the middle of hallways that open to nowhere and entertained my friends and I to no end--has the happiest security workers I have ever seen. There was smiling. There was small talk. There was a man in an important looking uniform bellowing out, "Old MacDonald Had a Farm". I can still hear him singing "E I E I Oooo!" in my head.

In Venice the vaporetto, or water bus, that we took to reach our hotel landed near where I'd seen the accordion player in July 2007, but he wasn't there this time. Hardly anyone was. (People aren't kidding when they say that January is Venice's slow month, when it belongs to Venetians more than to tourists.)

I have lots more to tell, and many pictures to show (I didn't even get to that today) but the Bert story is probably enough for now :)

(In other news, I highly recommend visiting Stephanie Perkins's blog. She is in Paris researching for her novel, Anna and the French Kiss, and recently crowned the hottest guy in the Louvre. (As in the ones depicted in the art, not the living visitors.))

Guest Post: Claire Voyante, Main Character of Dream Life by Lauren Mechling

Today I have the pleasure of welcoming a very special guest blogger to Bookduck: Claire Voyante, half-French psychic girl detective and main character of Dream Girl and Dream Life, both by Lauren Mechling (who stopped by for an interview not too long ago). I am now turning the keyboard over to Claire.

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Greetings and salutations, book lovers! I’m Claire Voyante, the main character of Dream Life, Lauren Mechling’s rip-roaring detective novel (and no, it is not immodest to say that about a book you didn’t write but in which you star—I checked in one of my grandmother Kiki’s etiquette books).

Dream Life is all about what happened after I found out my best friend Becca had just joined a super-exclusive, centuries-old secret society called the Blue Moons. I figured out how to wiggle my way into the club, and, of course, much drama ensued. I warmly invite you to check Dream Life out—it’s available at a bookstore or Internet site near you.

When Dream Girl, the first book in the series, came out, my creator Lauren fielded questions from bloggers and journalists. Lauren is currently underground working on a secret project so I offered to step in and relief pitch. I’m taking a page from Ann Landers's book and writing an advice column. The questions came from fans of the series. The answers came from the heart.

(Warning: I don't have a degree in psychotherapy--use at your own risk!)

Dear Claire,

I know you’re a huge fan of fashion magazines. So am I, only sometimes they make me feel really bad about myself. I never see models with frizzy hair or normal-sized noses. How do you deal?

Thanks!
Paulette Who Doesn’t Even Remotely Look Like Agneys Deyn

Dear PWDERLLAD,

It’s a drag, isn’t it? When I was younger I wanted to have bigger lips so I drew a line around my mouth with my mom’s lip-liner and filled it in with Vaseline. And then I found out it was actually eye liner. You can imagine how gorgeous it looked.

Then my mom started working on a ghostwriting project for a former supermodel named Saffran (although I recently found out her birth certificate says “Gail”). She started coming by our apartment all the time, and as we got to know each other she shared a few tricks of the trade with me.

First, most of the pictures you’re seeing are about as truthful as “photographs” of UFOs on the National Enquirer. The models are totally airbrushed, and sometimes worse. Saffran showed me one picture that was actually a collage of parts from different models’ bodies—when you’ve been in the business as long as she has, you start to know Photoshop when you see it.

All to say, I imagine being a model would be a bit of a bummer. Think of how depressing it would be to look at a picture of yourself only to see that they'd decided to replace your knee with somebody else's. Plus, I have two words for you: fries and chocolate. They alone are worth it.

L’amour toujours!
Claire

Dream Life by Lauren Mechling -- Trailer from Richie Williams on Vimeo

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Thanks for visiting, Claire! (Also, thanks for the reminder that Photoshop can be used for good or evil, and that chocolate is good.)