tarzanelli

first things first - i just learned the words for dingleberry and skidmark. at dinner. i just thought you all should know that the cultural immersion process is well on its way.

as for my weekend trip, about which nobody commented, i guess it was pretty good. i mean, if you're into amber rolling hills and perfect weather and good italian food (including awesome gelato and homemade olive oil) and not paying for much. and 1100 year-old castle/villas. and pesto. and dogs and cats all over the place, especially a tiny little dog named davidoff. also, listening to dutch people talk is fun. and when there are world-class musicians just hanging around practicing for their upcoming performance in the hague that they have hardly even studied for...well yeah, that is cool too.

so anyway, the story is that j and i went down to arezzo on friday, stayed at the hostel where i was after freshman summer, took lots of stupid videos, as we do, and then met up with adam and his people on saturday morning. hung out with them and spent saturday night at the villa. sunday morning we made some american breakfast, then went to help the hosts do yardwork. it was mostly picking up sticks that tony (the host) had cut off of trees, and then chopping them into fireplace-bundle sizes. jamal and i tried incessantly to drop the hint that tony should hire us to work for him in the summer. by which i mean we spent about 3 hours saying "dang, i love this work." "well it's not so much work as a life calling." "i don't like to think of myself as a burden, i'll just sleep on the steps." "something about tuscany just makes me want to chop sticks up and work on an olive farm and restore old buildings." "yeah, it's cool, that's what i did last summer." and so on. once we had flooded the villa with our inanity, we left for arezzo on sunday afternoon, walked around, etc. went to the duomo and a park that i hadn't seen before even though i spent 6 weeks there. talked about sweet medieval stuff while at the medici fortress, like druids and demons and boiling pitch.

then we came back and met up with umrao (i mean, nlo, if you're up on jamal terminology) and kristin to plan for spring break down in napoli and sicilia, which will without doubt be cool and also expensive. so anyway i will be gone from weds afternoon until april 4. take that, doing work. so if you want to actually make a comment on my site, do it soon, because otherwise i won't get it forever.