Friday, June 19, 2009

Lets make-a ze tutti frutti pizza!

I am really craving pizza. Crispy thin crust pizza with marinara sauce, pineapple, onions, diced tomatoes, green peppers, garlic and spinach with feta and cheddar cheese. Mind you, I've never had this pizza. According to the pizza builder on the dominos.com website, a small pizza with the above specifications costs around $15, and I fail at making pizza crust most of the time.
In any case, pizza is great. : ) If anyone reads this, feel free to share your favorite pizza toppings.

Speaking of pizza, I'm learning Italian. Slowly... I suppose I have until January to get the rudimentary conversational Italian down. My interim/Jterm/January class is a political science class about political identity. And where better to study political identity than central Europe? Thus, I and 17 other students and a professor are going to Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia during January. I am going to for sure learn some Italian, and I am going to try to learn Croat, although I can't imagine an English-Croat dictionary and grammar book are easily accessed. I'm hoping Italian will be fairly common in these Slavic states, considering Italy is, you know, right there. If that falls through, I'll try to get by on French and English, but I doubt they would be more common than Italian.
Italian and French are very similar, both in spelling and pronunciation and sentence structure. So far, it's very easy for me. I will have to get common tourist phrases down for my week of vacation in Italy in February, and learn some more intellectual vocabulary that relates to politics and sociology for my class, although all of our classes will be in English. But I hope to get to talk to real people, not just professors and students. We're a unique niche of society.
I love travelling, so I am very excited for this trip, despite the additional $4k in tuition that it will cost me. I have never been on a trip with such a focus on one aspect of society. Normally, when one travels, one sees historical sites and art and food and spas and museums but not the society and history of their country and culture.

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