i'm back!
the blog is back!
everyone give a cheer.

it has been almost four long months since i've touched this thing, due the the hassles of changing jobs, houses and continents. since the last entry i've gone back to the states; found myself an arlington house with julie, becca, and naomi; sent out hundreds of resumes; and obtained a job in dupont circle.

i miss italy an awful lot, but just because i'm not there doesn't mean i'll stop posting pictures. arlington may not have as many duomos as florence, but there are still neat and interesting things to capture. like...squirrels. and scenes from the local harris teeter. etc.

i'm going to go ahead and post some pictures from my time spent in tuscany with tommy and the grays (tommy's friend charles' family). it was my last week in italy, and it was fantastic. there are actually a bunch more of earlier pictures from before tuscany, such as when i hiked up to a refugio in the dolomites with some friends, but i can't find those right now, so they'll have to wait. i'm going crazy and being non-chronological!

so after i finished teaching at the school, i trained it over to venice where i met up with everyone. unfortunately, the venetian pictures seem to have disappeared into a black hole...i'm sure they'll make a reappearance soon enough. after a few days in venice, we headed back to santa lucia di sopra, the house which the grays had rented for two weeks. it's outside of panzano, which is a tiny town about an hour away from florence. santa lucia is an italian saint. she's blind; something about digging out her own eyes. man. everyone's a martyr.

this is the gorgeous house. once there, we spent a lot of time eating, swimming in the pool, reading and...

getting pretty blasted on wine.

a typical day for tommy and charles. we also spent a lot of time looking for satellites at night.

one day, mrs. gray, charles, tommy and myself opted to go to a cooking class at coltibuono, a converted abbey. it was quite fun. paolo was our cooking master guy, and he showed us around the gardens and grounds, stopping every once in a while to expertly pick some herbs and put them in a basket. unfortunately, he turned out to be kind of scary.

paolo scowls at the rosemary.

the gardens around the old abbey were really beautiful.

me, posing, before facing the terror of making gnocchi. oh, not really. paolo was an okay guy. he told me i spoke italian well. and the food turned out really deliciously.

during our tuscan villa stay, we made several day trips to surrounding towns, like san gimagnano and all the chianti towns -- greve in chianti, castellina in chianti, radda in chianti, etc.

here's joanna, charles and tommy at the top of some tower, i believe in san gimagnano, town of many towers, like 14. there used to be dozens, but they all crumbled over time. in any case, san gimagnano, as touristy as it is, is a pretty amazing sight when you're driving up to it -- people call it the manhattan of tuscany because of its skyline.

here's tommy and me..somewhere. clearly, i am a fan of the tube top.

we also went to several completely awesome dinners, which words cannot describe. mmm. italian food. mmm.

here's tommy and me before we go out to our last meal in tuscany. sigh.

and just for good measure, here's a tricked out ape (those little three-wheeled blue trucks you see workers driving all over the place, not ape like a monkey but ah-pay):

some sad, bored teenagers obviously got ahold of it.

to make sure i'm extra nostalgic, i'm including this hazy picture of beautiful tuscan scenery.

after we left santa lucia, we drove up to milan to go see bruce springsteen in concert. even though it rained and was full of crazy italians, the concert was amazing, in a stadium-shaking sort of way (literally). those italians sure know how to be a good audience.

broooooooooooooooose. as they say.

after that concert, i had about three days before i flew home, so i spent a lot of time packing, throwing away stuff that wouldn't fit in my 5 suitcases, and ingesting massive amounts of pizza. i also took stupid pictures of noversasco, the suburb where i lived.

this is the more-than-slightly-sketchy winner bar man, trying to kiss all of us at once. the winner bar (italians pronounce it weener bar. heh) is a tabacchi a few apartment buildings down from ours. that's where we'd often go to riccaricare (recharge our cellphones; you have to pay in increments for your time, you don't really get a cellphone plan). they also had good cappucinos and panini.

tommy and me in front of the eurospin. there are an awful lot of tommy&me pictures. anyways, you cannot understand the beauty of the eurospin (a-ooh-roe-spin) until you've shopped there. it's a discount grocery store, with the emphasis on discount. and on sketchy produce. actually, the food there's pretty good, ridiculously cheap, and sometimes they sell stuff such as bikes, underwear and tvs if you're lucky. they also produce the best brand of chocolate in the world (i'm not kidding, tommy bought 45 bars to take home), and i've never paid more than 3 euro for a bottle of wine there. despite the bitchy cashiers, the fact you could be killed if you don't pay in exact change, and the sketchy fruit, the eurospin will forever remain special to me. eurospin, baby, you're in my heart. lo shopping intelligente.

and this is my apartment building from a wacky angle. i lived in noversaco 25/9 with natania, robin, cynthia and erin. what can i say about our apartment...the appliances were a mystery; in the winter the heat was only on for about 6 hours a day (italian law); the gas oven once exploded in my face and nearly killed me; mosquitos lived there for several months, and then after the mosquitos came the invasion of the stinkbugs; the fridge was about the size of my desktop computer; surfaces accumulated a thick layer of dust in 3.4 seconds. may i also mention that we lived near a prison, and the path i used to run on was frequented by a 16 year old boy on a silver vespa who liked to stop and masturbate in front of you.

but i can also say: we could watch the hardcore soccer players screaming and shouting and kicking every evening on the fields below us; each time you came up in the elevator and someone was cooking with garlic and onions it smelled like home; we had some kickass, wine-fueled parties; the kitchen, though you cooked there at your own risk, helped us make some pretty yummy meals; we had the best balcony in the world -- the perfect place for having a glass of wine and taking in the unparalleled view of the alps; and i lived with some amazing, wonderful girls. so all in all, it wasn't too shabby.

so...bye noverasco. bye asm. bye le mie compagne di stanza. bye milan. bye italy. mi sono divertita.

don't worry.
the blog is not dead.
more photos soon.
of italy and beyond (as in washington, d.c. and arlington, va).
stay tuned.