Welcome to 2010!

Happy New Year!

I realize that I’ve been very behind in my blog entries, sorry! I’m currently at home, (in North Carolina) looking out to the frozen lake that is behind our house sipping a cup of tea. I’ve been home for over two weeks, and only have a week left until I go back to Bologna. Christmas was quite nice at home, with lots of good food. I came home after a disastrous flight from Glasgow about 20 hours later than planned. Snow in London caused my 9am flight from Glasgow to London to be cancelled, and the next flight wasn’t until 12:30 or so. But my connecting flight to RDU was at 12:00. So I got on that flight with my fingers crossed that the next one would be significantly delayed. Nope. That flight was late as well, and by the time we arrived in London, any hopes of catching the direct flight to RDU were wisped away. I cued for 3 hours, watching possible flights to the US come and go, and finally got booked for the last flight to JFK. That flight was, of course, late as well. I didn’t get into JFK until 1:30am, but my suitcase never came. After reporting my lost luggage (around 2am) I asked for the hotel room that the British Airways representative in London said would be available for me, but they were all out of rooms for the night. Great. With nothing else to do, I slept on a bench in a phone booth in the lobby of JFK, since I couldn’t even go back thru security because I didn’t have the boarding tickets for my next flight. Around 5:30 or so I went to go check in, and find a place through security I could go back to sleep. Finally, by 11:00 or so, I made it home.

Luckily, I made it home with plenty of time to make cookies, nap, and go see the Phantom of the Opera in Durham. Which was a spectacular performance, Tim Martin Gleason did an excellent job as the Phantom.


To catch anyone who is reading this who hasn’t been filled in with the details of my past month in Italy, I’m going to give ya an abbreviated version, mainly filled with pictures.

For Thanksgiving, my sister Anne and my Mom came to Italy for 5 days. We spent two days in Bologna, seeing the sights and meeting my group of friends. And we had an excellent Thanksgiving dinner (Italian style) out with Ben. (Where there was also an American group of University students having a huge Thanksgiving feast, and so we had a bit of that too!) We then went to Venice for 2 full days, which was absolutely beautiful. We spent most of the time wandering the streets, but we did go in the Palace of the Doges, where we did a “secret passage” tour and saw the prison where Casanova was held.




The following weekend I went to Innsbruck, Austria with a large group of friends. We went for the Christmas Market, and got to see the first snow of the year. Anja (Austrian) meet us at the train station, since she went back to take an exam, and was our wonderful tour guide for the weekend. (And host!)









The last weekend before leaving to come home, I had a field trip for my speleologia class. We went to two different caves. Friday we spend several hours in a “touristic cave” called Grotte di Frasassi. We walked around in there for a bit, until we came to the point where we hopped the fence and went into the “non touristic” part. It was AWESOME! Second day’s cave was 10 minutes outside of Bologna, and that one was true caving, with army crawling in the mud. That was a lot of fun.


I also took my oral first exam for Sedimentologia, and got a 27/30, pretty good in my books.


The day after I took my exam, I got on a plane with Tammy and flew to London, where Chris and his brother picked us up from the airport. Chris’s Mom made us soup for lunch, and once his sister came home, we all headed out to see London town. We saw a lot of the sights, and even popped in the National Gallery and saw some Degas and Van Gogh. The next day we spent the morning at the British Museum, and then walked in the snow to see St. Paul’s and the Globe. That night, we then flew up to Glasgow, and took a train to Edinburgh.



We stayed at Tammy’s home in Edinburgh, and were greeted to another snow filled day. We wandered around Edinburgh, with a trip to the Castle for the 1:00pm gun, and the birthplace of King James. Edinburgh was lovely, I really enjoyed the day there, and I’ve already decided I’m going back in the spring.