My dearest darlings,
I know you all must be terribly disappointed with me for my lack of communication; however, you must forgive me because I have simply too busy gathering the juiciest stories to report back regularly. Also in my defense, I have been jet-setting across the great wilderness geographically identified as the continent of Europe, but for our purposes, more accurately described as Miss Sam’s playground. Besides, you can’t stay mad at me forever when I am about to give you the down and dirty of my European adventures and a whole goody bag of TIMs (total Italian moves for those of you who have forgotten our acronyms in my absence)!
Taking into consideration my fear of carpel tunnel and my desire to soak up the Mediterranean sun on this delightful cruise ship I am currently bronzing myself on without developing odd MacBook-induced tan lines, I am going to tease you with snippets of some of my most memorable moments from each of my trips outside of Milano, but will refrain from recounting each moment of these journeys.
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is arguably one of Europe’s most notorious cities, at least in the realm of college students. Well, in an attempt to experience the cultural attributes of this fair city, and since we arrived late one Thursday night without any hotel reservations due to a slight miscommunication or purposefully bitchy (I have yet to come to a conclusive answer on this) error, i miei amici and I checked into Durty Nellie’s Hostel that fateful night. I should have been tipped off that this would be a favorable experience since my delightful furball of a sister (and my mother’s favorite child, despite her feverent claims otherwise…who else gets multiple breakfasts cooked for them in the morning?!) is named Nellie. But what truly foreshadowed the rest of my 23 hours in Amsterdam was when the Scottish gentleman checking us in at the bar (yes, the hostel is primarily a pub with some rooms upstairs) read my middle name on my passport and goes, “Oh, like the Isle of Skye in my beautiful country of Scotland!” and I was like “YES!”. I may have found my soul mate at that moment, if only he had been 20 pounds lighter and 20 years younger, the accent and recognition of my middle name, plus the owning and running of a bar, in the notorious Red Light District, no less, were confirmation enough for me that we could have led very happy lives together selling beer and checking out hookers on the charming streets of Amsterdam. As you may have guessed, a place with Durty in the name naturally was the starting point for a bar crawl that night. My sorostitue status makes me incapable of resisting any activity that offers a themed t-shirt at the end of a night of binge drinking. Therefore, my friends and I, led by an Aussie-accented woman who continuously called me Holly Madison (one of Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriends) thanks to my blonde hair I suspect since there is some discrepancy between our cup sizes as I have had no plastic surgery here in Italy), and a man claiming to be an international DJ, sporting a ponytail. With our trusty guides and neon wristbands we experienced several of Amsterdam’s finest pubs and discotecas, complimented by a tour of the Red Light District where we lost the vast majority of our male companions. The highlight of the night was probably our favorite bar where I became the favorite of our bartender who offered Monica and me unlimited free drinks and the opportunity to pole dance with transvestites. I’ll leave it up to your imagination on whether I took him up on this offer. Regardless of that outcome, we proudly slept only 1 hour of the 23 we spent in Amsterdam. Do not worry parents; I managed to squeeze some more traditional culture such as the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum out of the trip. But without the coffee shops identified by a particular green plant on the sign and half naked girls in windows, the Euro-trash version of mannequins, how would Amsterdam ever receive such infamy and recognition on every college students’ radar?
Brussels
A short train ride away from the Netherland’s party capital, Brussels may be summarized by the simple acronym: BBC. No, fellow townies, not Bloomington Bagel Company, although I could certainly go for a salt bagel with low-fat schmear, this acronym stands for Belgian Beer and Chocolate. Let’s begin with the chocolate because that is where my days generally began. Chocolate museums, chocolate stores, chocolate taste tests, chocolate drenched waffles, chocolate elephants…the list really does go on and on. Belgium is famous for its fine chocolates and its capital of Brussels lived up to the reputation. Although I found shop keepers incredibly stingy and suspicious of me, I managed to wrangle my one free taste in Chocopolis, a large chocolate shop with a giant (and by giant I mean almost life-size) chocolate elephant outside in the plaza. I’m not sure if they considered me a national security threat (as Brussels is also the capital of the European Union for all of you International Relations buffs out there and I am a half-Argentine, American from the Midwest, living in Milan, visiting Belgium—suspicious, right?) or simply suspected me of gorging myself on free samples (probably a reasonable suspicion given my U.S. citizenship and confession that I have eaten lunch gratis at Sam’s Club thanks to the plethora of free samples). Regardless of my less than warm welcome, I found the chocolates delightful and purchased several boxes from the crabby salespeople to send home to my family.
Moving along to the equally important, delightfully intoxicating letter B, beer! Belgian beers are well-known around the world, but to this Keystone (aka dirty water) drinking co-ed, the labels are all new. My natural instinct was to select a beer guide for the night. Cue tall, dark, and handsome (total TIM!) Alex, an MBA-student at a prestigious international business school nearby. Alex, a partially Greek God is a transplant from Toronto and picked me out of a crowd shoving into a French fry shop (another delicacy of the region) by my use of the American language. Being suave and debonair from his European mother’s upbringing, he generously offered his services as my beer tour guide in one of the largest (3 or 4 stories I believe) beer pubs in the neighborhood. Accompanied by a gaggle of MBA-expectants relieved to be away from their intense fast-track program for a night in the city, and my friends fresh off of the Amsterdam high (take that as literally as you wish), we enjoyed a night of what even my undiscerning taste buds can identify as delicious regional beers. Perhaps the most notable event of the evening was the fact that I choose to keep 3 beer bottles from my Alex-guided drinking tour and take them back to Milan with me! This may not strike you as that incredible, but allow me to extrapolate on the audacity of this feat. Point A, I was flying Ryan Air, the notoriously difficult airline that allows only 1 itty bitty carryon in which you must also stuff your purse. Point B, the carryon I choose to take on this trip was a mini purse-backpack (the kind I remember carrying in teddy-bear version in preschool thinking I was cool to have a pseudo-purse) that I had purchased the week before at H&M for this exact purpose since my apartment was still infested with bed bugs at this time. Point C, who packs glass beer bottles and tries to carry them onto an airplane? Therefore, given the combined rules of the airline coupled with the disgustingly small size of my purse-bag, carrying 3 beer bottles home to Milan, for the single reason of soaking the bottles to carefully remove the labels for scrapbooking purposes, is in fact absurd even by TIM standards. Yes, all in all, the trip was far beyond any Total Italian Move, definitely entering Total Sam Move territory.
xoxo's
your little jet-setter
