Italia: A Day in the Life of a College Study Abroad Program

by Brandon Thu Jun 18, 2009

I'm finally here! I made it safely from Cincinnati to DC to London to Rome to Pisa to Monsummano Terme, the little Tuscan town we're staying in. In fact, I've already been here a week, but we've been so busy doing so many things that I haven't had the chance to sit down and write a blog. But now, here we are, sitting in the town square at the end of another eventful day. I was thinking that instead of trying to retell everything that's happened so far, I could recount the events of today, which has been a pretty normal day in the life of a college study abroad program. Here goes.

7:30 AM - I wake up. Or rather, Molly wakes me up because I forgot to pack an alarm clock and I still haven't bought one.

8:15 AM - I go downstairs to eat breakfast. I'm living on the top floor of a picturesque Tuscan villa, with my own bathroom, outdoor terrace, and kitchen at my disposal (which is about right for what this program would've cost without funding). The padrona of the villa is your typical amazingly nice, slightly overweight Italian housewife, who is completely incapable of controlling herself when it comes to making us food. Although there are only eight of us interns, the padrona makes enough breakfast for an army: three loaves of bread (including pane sciocco, a disgusting type of bread with a lot of cultural history and no salt), tons of different kinds of fresh cold cuts (prosciutto, salami, mortadella - which might be "boloney" in English?), at least two types of fruit juice, Italian coffee and warm milk, fresh fruit… the list goes on and on. After breakfast, we thank the padrona, refuse to take more food with us, and head off to the Academy.

9:00 AM - After walking more than a mile through the town square, we get to the Academy and have class for the rest of the morning. We're taking three classes: one on Italian culture and advanced language, one on the history of Italian art and architecture, and one on the study of Dante's Divine Comedy. The professor, Marino Balducci, is absolutely unbelievable; he has been studying Dante for almost twice the amount of time that I've been alive, and the way he effortlessly switches between Italian, English, French, German, Latin, and Greek gives my life meaning.

12:00 PM - At noon, we finish the lesson and head into the beautiful Academy garden to have lunch. The traditional Tuscan and Italian dishes that are prepared for us are always amazing, but the part that I like best is all of the wildlife that joins us for lunch in the garden. There's Ruga, the mother tortoise with all of her babies; the band of cats that love to eat our leftover mozzarella, and, of course, the always present swarm of hungry zanzare - mosquitoes. After lunch we are joined by the members of Project Dante, and we spend the next few hours working on the "internship" side of our "academic internship."

3:00 PM - Once our meetings are over, we leave the Academy and head back to the villa to rest up for the night's activities. Some of us tan or go for a swim in the pool, others stop for gelato on the way home. I normally take a shower and spend ten or fifteen minutes staring at the bidet and wondering what it's used for.

6:30 PM - After a refreshing nap, we get ready to go out, and then walk back to the town square to catch the bus to Montecatini, the nearest town with any real nightlife. But before running off to the discoteca, we spend some time walking around and taking in the ambience. The town is just starting to wake up from its afternoon stupor, and we eventually make our way to a restaurant and sit down to eat dinner. I'd heard so much about the mouth-watering bistecca alla fiorentina, and although it cost me 40 euros, I had to try it just once. It was huge. And tasty.

11:00 PM - We finish dinner, overpay because we don't understand the concept of included tip in Europe (and of course no clever waiter is going to explain it correctly to a bunch of American kids), and wave down a taxi outside the restaurant to take us to the discoteca Bella Vita. It's a beautiful complex, complete with multiple indoor and outdoor dance floors, bars, and comfy lounges with various degrees of lighting.

3:00 AM - By now, we've had enough dancing and overpriced drinks, and it's time to call the taxi and head home. Now I'm here sitting in the almost completely silent Monsummano town square finishing up this blog post before I head back to the villa. I knew I had to write it now before going home because as soon as I see my bed, I'm going to go right to sleep. And, in fact, I think that's exactly what I'll do right now. Too bad 7:00 AM is so soon.

Boston Flu, Cincinnati Flu

by Brandon Thu Jun 11, 2009

Well, I managed to get well for long enough to make the trip home from Cambridge, but I was only allowed to enjoy being home for about two days before I got sick again. So here I am, just as sick as I was last week, but now there's only a week to go before I'm supposed to leave for Italy!

I spent the couple of healthy days that I did have in Cincinnati hanging out with my friends. It's so weird how everything just goes back to the way it was last summer. Seriously, in terms of my relationships with my friends, it was like this school year never even happened. We just picked up where we left off last August, and it was really nice. We went out to eat at our favorite restaurants, visited our old stomping grounds around the city, and caught up. It was weird to think that I hadn't seen some of them since December!

Since I'm completely incapacitated now, I made a huge list of things that I need to buy/do/email before I leave for Italy so that when I do get well, I can have everything in order. The list includes everything from buying toiletries and electrical converters to checking how much international phone plans cost to getting a haircut. Packing for two months is not easy, and unfortunately my mom's going to end up completing most of the list.

I told you she wasn't going to be happy.

Major Crash: The Mother of All Illnesses

by Brandon Thu Jun 4, 2009

Before I'd had even a day to celebrate the end of the school year, I crashed. Big time. I had felt a little yucky during Reading Period and finals, but I willed myself with everything I had not to get sick. Actually, I've avoided getting badly ill the whole year. I got a few colds in the winter, but for the most part nothing to miss class over, unfortunately. But now, it all hit me like a freight train. I took my last final and the next day, I was hit by something terrible. And I mean terrible. I've been bed-ridden for five days and counting.

In fact, I couldn't even go home to Cincinnati on the day I was supposed to, which was annoying because now I'm only going to have one week to spend with my friends before I go to Italy. Scarier, though, might be the fact that I'm only going to have one week to hang out with my friends and get everything ready for my two-month trip to Europe.

My mother is not going to be happy about this.

She's here actually (my mother, that is). We're holed up together in a hotel in Harvard Square waiting for me to get better. Besides the congestion, it's actually not a bad way to spend the first week of summer break. All I've done for the past five days is lounge in the room, have my mom bring me food, and read the Divine Comedy in preparation for my internship.

Oh, and I watched the season premiere of John and Kate Plus 8, but only because I couldn't leave the room.

One Last Fling in the Big Apple Before Finals

by Brandon Tue May 12, 2009

This week, to celebrate the end of our second Reading Period and the beginning of finals, we decided to take another trip to New York City! This time, though, we went in style.

I couldn't remember the website to buy the tickets for the Chinatown bus we took last time, so I Googled it and a bunch of articles came up about bus crashes and federal investigations into transportation safety, so we all decided to pay a little more and take a bus with a better safety rating (and one that had WiFi so that James and I could work on our Pudding script). Also, we opted for a hotel this time instead of the 3:30 AM Greyhound, which turned out to be a much better idea. We saw a Broadway show, ate dinner in Greenwich Village, then met up with one of my friends from high school who goes to NYU now and partied there for most of the night. We ended up walking around Times Square at 3:00 AM, but it was fine because we took the noon bus back home, so we actually got a little sleep this time.

Now I'm back at school getting ready for finals and taking care of a few last-minute preparations for the break. Soon we'll have our stuff stored in Adams for the summer and in just two weeks, I'll be home!

This summer is going to be fantastic, of course. I'll be interning in Italy for all of June and July and I won't have to worry about spending money because of all the funding I managed to get. In fact, I made a tentative budget that I'm going to do my best to stick to, and if I do, I'll have enough cash left over to spend an extra two weeks traveling around to the parts of Italy that I won't have had the chance to see during the internship, and eventually making my way up to France to spend a few days in Paris with my friends who will be there at the Harvard Summer School. It should be really fun!

I'm kind of sad that I'm only going to be spending a total of 3 weeks in Cincinnati this summer because I really miss my friends from home. Still, we've done a good job this year making time to visit each other and we've even started making plans for some of the long weekends in the fall, so I think everything is going to work out just fine. Hopefully I won't get too behind on all the Ohio happenings while I'm abroad.

April Showers, Part 3: The Curtain's About to Close on Freshman Year

by Brandon Tue May 5, 2009

I'm standing on a balcony overlooking Radcliffe Yard, one of the most historic and picturesque centers of the Harvard campus. The balcony belongs to the Agassiz House, which contains the Agassiz Theatre and the Harvard Admissions Visitor Center. Incidentally, business with both of the building's main functions has brought me here today. Behind me, the musical I've spent the better part of this school year writing is having the finishing touches put on it. I feel like I should be stressing out, like I normally am the day a show opens, but this time it's different. I'll be backstage conducting, which might be just as difficult (especially since I've never conducted an entire musical before), but at least I won't be in the spotlight this time.

While all the actors are squeezing in a few final line runs and the techies are frantically making the last light and sound checks, I'm out here standing on this balcony enjoying the first weekend that shows any real indication that summer is, in fact, going to come this year. There's a lot of action going on in Radcliffe Yard on this nice day: this year's prospective freshman are arriving for Prefrosh Weekend. (I do think it's kind of fishy that the weather's always absolutely gorgeous for Harvard's Prefrosh Weekend, especially after two solid weeks of mucky April showers leading up to it.) So there they are, shuffling nervously into the Ag and picking up the notorious "red folders," the surefire calling card of a Harvard prefrosh. They're standing exactly where I was, one year ago. Remember?

I know a lot of people talk about college going by fast, and maybe sometime after all this is over, I'll look back and feel like it did, but as of right now, I feel like I've been a freshman for 20 years. I'm ready to move on.

Here's the thing about making time move slowly: you've got to make a conscious effort. First of all, make a friend who likes to take pictures. Molly documents every single day of my friends' lives with her camera (which, by the way, is a film camera because Molly refuses to make the switch to digital, so she spends hundreds of dollars and countless hours every week taking the T into Boston to have her photos developed at one of the last film stores in the area and then going home and scanning them by hand so that she can upload them to Facebook - there's no "one-click option" on a film camera). More personally important than pictures, though, is the strict daily journal that I keep. I can flip back to any day of the year and read about exactly what I did and what I was thinking about on that day. It's really valuable now, and in 40 years, who knows how much it will mean to me? I really recommend writing in a journal every day. It's changed my life. And with Molly's pictures, my journal, Molly's journal (she's actually the only other person I've ever met who keeps a daily one like I do), souvenirs from the fun places we've gone, posters and programs from my shows, all my papers from this year safely filed away, and not to mention this blog, I truly have a complete picture that I can look back on and say, "Wow, I really did a lot this year."

And that's a beautiful thing.

Word of the Day: "Comp" (aka 'the Harvard application process')

by Brandon Tue Apr 28, 2009

A few new updates.

Both of the sources that I applied to for funding for my trip to Italy this summer responded to me. I got a total of $11,000, which is pretty good considering the amount I expect to spend on travel, food, lodging, side trips, et cetera is $7,500 (it's an unpaid internship, unfortunately). I'm really happy that I took the time to apply for funding in January and February. It was stressful because it was at the same time as winter break, when I didn't feel like doing applications, Reading Period, when applications were just one of a thousand things I had to do, and finals, when the effort required to even pronounce a four-syllable word like "applications" was out of the question. But, I got them done and it paid off. Literally.

Recall! goes up this weekend, but I've already started the "comp" (that's Harvard speak for "application process") for the Hasty Pudding script. I had so much fun working on the Freshman Musical that I can't wait to write another show. I'm doing the comp with James, one of the members of my blocking group. If we're chosen, we'll become the writers for the next Hasty Pudding show, which means our script would be performed next spring during the Pudding's international tour. Of course, first we have to write that script, but the comp leads us through the entire writing process and continues into the summer, so we have time. It's pretty rigorous so far, though. We just had the introductory meeting last week, and this Sunday we already have to submit an outline of the entire plot, the list of characters and descriptions, and our ideas about songs. We have some pretty good ideas, but having seen what we're up against at the introductory meeting, I think it's going to take more than a few good ideas to tackle this comp.