Yol∞: traveling and life and stuff: Drowning homesickness in Milano rain and Venetian canals

This year I spent my first Thanksgiving away from my parents.

It was hard to be away, but I felt lucky enough to have such a supportive pseudo-family here, between my fellow fellows:

Evan and I cooked our very own turkey for our TeachingFellowThanksgiving

(wild success; just barely fit in our little oven; inventive use of carrots as a makeshift rack)

One of the many kitties around our house, checking out the potatoes cooling off

outside when there was no room in the fridge

And all the lovely teachers I work with. The English Departments of HAEF kindly catered a Thanksgiving dinner on Tuesday for us:

Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, cranberry, corn, salad, stuffing

(apparently Greek stuffing involves ground meat, carrots, peas, and corn...no bread involved)

...and of course no Thanksgiving would be complete without some pita!

And at school we celebrated more extensively than any school in the US. I made four bulletin boards:

And accompanied the 4th, 5th, and 6th grade songs, which they sang in the theater after their respective grades' Thanksgiving plays. It was a truly beautiful moment for me, sitting on stage with a guitar and strumming along as a bunch of Greek 4th graders sang Peter, Paul, and Mary's "If I Had a Hammer" (the 6th graders sang "This Land is Your Land")

And thoroughly enjoyed all of the little first and second graders with their paper pilgrim hats/bonnets, singing poorly-constructed "Thanksgiving songs."

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And then I drowned any remaining homesickness in the Milano rain and the canals of Venice.

We (Missy and I) arrived in Milan Friday afternoon (originally scheduled for Thursday night, but the Greek air traffic controllers had other plans)...and spent a lovely day walking around the city, which struck me with its modernity and its chic-ness. The rain also gave it an almost eery, post-apocolyptic deserted-city feeling (and also made it difficult to take many pictures...apologies...I did snap a shot of the Duomo of Milan, at the very least).

An amazing tradition in Milan is the "aperitivo"--the happiest happy hour I could imagine, complete with any drink (I chose prosecco) and an all-you-can-eat buffet of yummy Italian food, from 6pm to 8pm for a grand total of...7 euro!!

The mound of fresh mozzarella the size of a softball would have been worth it alone, even without the salami, the gnocchi, the frittata, the chicken...

After proving ourselves true Americans by filling our plates multiple times, we wandered back to the train station, and headed off to Verona, en route to Venice.

We arrived in Verona at the magical hour of 12:30AM--when, it turns out, everything is very closed. Except for one blessed coffeeshop, where we took refuge for a good hour, enjoying some electricity to charge our phones, coffee to charge our brains...and a TV showing "Texas Tarzan," featured on the Discovery Italian channel--a show I would highly recommend doing a quick Google Image search of.

And then when, just before 2AM, we were kicked out, we roamed the deserted streets of Verona.

It's hard to truly convey how bizarre this experience was: the sleep deprivation, the feeling of being awake while everyone else was asleep, the utter emptiness of the city

--the feeling that it was all ours.

Even stumbled across a little Christmas village (a little creepy/bizarre in the nighttime)

We returned to the train station around 3:30, where Missy slept on me for an hour or two, until our train was finally ready to leave.

And then we were on our way to Venezia!

We got in around 8, just as the sun was lighting everything with a beautiful golden quality, and, rather than immediately collapsing onto a bed and recovering from a very long night, we marched forth, enjoying the quiet serenity of the twisting canals and streets of Venice before everyone had really woken up. Most of the morning we spent wandering, barely talking to each other, just soaking in the beauty of the city.

We did eventually wind up joining the throng of tourists (briefly) at the Palazzo Ducale, mostly to indulge my art historical interest. The Doge's Palace was just as much of an aesthetic failure as I had hoped and learned!