The other week I went to Oktoberfest with a bunch of Richmond people, and it almost seems like Im still recovering from the trip. It was really long and exciting, but tiring none the less. I traveled to Munich, Germany, with Vin Macina, Phylicia Hoyt, and Katherine Enna, and our trip consisted of leaving Thursday afternoon, took a train to Florence, a bus to Pisa, and then a plane from Pisa to Munich. The trip started out well, and we made all of our connections, but we had planned on staying in the Pisa Airport the night before our flight, because we got to Pisa at 8:30 and our flight was at 7am the next morning. One thing that we didn’t consider though, was that smaller airports in Italy close for a bout 4 and a half hours every night and they kick everyone out. So at about 11 pm, we finally decided that we could try to find a hostel for the night, or we would be sleeping on the grass outside of the airport. We tried calling about 6-8 hostels and hotels, but no one had room, until we finally found one place that gave us a one hour time limit to get to them and claim our room. Luckily, the hotel was only about a 5 minute cab ride from the airport.
The next morning, bright and early, we got to Munich, took a bus from the airport to the center of the city, and got lunch and a really good Italian place. We tried to find something that had food other than Italian, but we were starving at that point and it looked and was delicious.
I met up with some girls from DG at the hotel, and we went to dinner that night after a long nap. The next morning, Saturday, we went to the Hofbrau tent and spent about 6 hours there. It was pouring the entire time, and luckily they were letting us in early, even though they didn’t start serving beer until 9am. We got 2 tables together for all of the Richmond people, and it was really crazy there. We got 1-liter mugs of beer, and the beer there is stronger than the stuff we get in America. After about 2 of those mugs, I was done. They also had pretzels the size of a Frisbee, which were delicious and the perfect accompaniment to the beer. Our table was right next to the band too, so we got to watch them play the whole time. Apparently Germans love the song Hey Baby (If You’ll Be My Girl) and sang it constantly.
Nothing else eventful went on there, just more naps and dinner at the same Italian place, however this time I got a doner kebab which was really good. The next morning we had to catch a 6 am bus back to the airport, and even though it left half an hour late, we still made the plane on time. Then back on to the bus to Florence, and then the train from Florence to home. Luckily we got home around 4:30 so I had enough time to relax and do the homework I neglected while I was away.
Although it was a boring week at school, there were a few things that made it go by faster. The first was a cooking class that I signed up for on Monday which is taught by a teacher at the school, at her house. We made homemade pasta with flour and eggs, and rolled it out and cut it and everything. We also made a bruschetta (pronounced brewsketa), with a white bean and sausage topping on it which was addictive. I ate so much of it that I was almost full by the time dinner came around. The pasta sauce was a freshly made tomato sauce with pancetta in it, and desert was Tiramisu with chocolate on it. All of it was delicious, and I was stuffed by the end of the night. The class was really small which was nice, just me, a girl named Katherine who I had gone out with a few nights this semester, and a girl named Sara who I also went to Switzerland with (more on that later).
Then on Tuesday, I had a gnocchi making class that my Italian class was offering the upper level Italian students, since the directions were all in Italian. It was at a restaurant next to the Stranieri University, and we watched while someone made the dough for gnocchi while explaining what she was doing, and then we got to roll and but the gnocchi ourselves. We made 3 different kinds, regular with a tomato and basil sauce, spinach with a butter and sage sauce, and then a cooked and then baked gnocchi with tomato sauce on the bottom and cheese on the top. The last one was my favorite, and we only got small portions of each so I was a little hungry after. We also got an apperitivo for free, so I got a Spritz, which is a bitter type of campari-like syrup, prosecco, and club soda. I met a girl named Megan, who I had seen a few times, and we had a lot of fun together and ended up going out that night.
I went to Switzerland on Thursday night. I went with a group of 6 people, including one of my roommates, Erin, and some people that I have classes with, and then Megan and Sara. We took a 30 minute train to a station called Terontola, spent a 3 hour layover there, then a 3 hour sleeper train to Bologna, hour and a half layover, 2 hour train to Milan, 35 minute layover, and then an hour train to Lugano, which is a town in Switzerland right at the border. We thought there would be a Autumn Festival with food and wine, but it turned out that the festival was only at night, and we had to get to a town called Interlocken which was 4.5 hours a way. We took a 2-hour train ride to Luzern, which is a huge town on the river that has a lot of tourist spots, and we had lunch there and went shopping for an hour. We came across a chocolate shop with truffles and blocks of different chocolates, and I got 4 truffles. I got a caramel one, hazelnut flavor, nougat, and then a cappuccino flavored one, which was phenomenal. We walked across a 13th century bridge, and then got onto a train to Interlocken.
Megan, Sarah, and I went to a Parisian restaurant with amazing food. I had a chicken breast with salad and French fries, Megan had pasta with venison, and a mushroom cream sauce (so good!) and Sara had pumpkin ravioli with a mushroom butter sauce. It was all really delicious, and we finished off the night with hot chocolate.
The next morning we got up at 7 and took trains home and got home at 12 at night. Very tiring but fun.
Ciao!
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