Study Abroad Blog

Raymond Walsh 1932-2008

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:53:00 EST

On June 29, at home surrounded by friends and family, my grandfather passed away after a brief illness.

Fortunately, in an unusual moment of internet connectivity in Xi’an, I was able to log onto Skype…sitting in the cold corridor outside of a closed bar, I talked to him one last time. Being the man he was, even in this situation he had me laughing as we said goodbye.

His name was Raymond Walsh…

...and he was very much loved.

The man who taught me how to dance…

...who gave me all the pralines, chocolates and the fruits from his ice cream…

...who taught me how to throw a punch in kindergarten under the suspicion that little boys might try to steal a kiss…

...who was still giving me stuffed animals even after I was legally old enough to drink…

...my grandpa. There will never be anyone like him in the world again.

COLUMN: WVU standout Raymond Walsh dies at 76

San Giovanni Valdarno

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:30:00 EST

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This is where we are in the big world. I should post more, but super long day. Amazing photos of Fiesole, will post hopefully tomorrow. My triumphant return to Rome on Saturday! (yay!)

Autogrills & Cooking Lessons

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:39:57 EST

I walked in a stupor into an “Autogrille”, an Italian-version of a travel plaza (such as “Le Plaza” in Beckley, as my friends like to call it) with snacks and magazines and Harry Potter in Italian and My Little Pony and hunks of meat (for reasons I am not quite sure). Anyway, I was in this stupor during a 5 hour ride from Milano to the countryside and I thought it was just insane, it was so different that most American travel plazas I have been in (no Starbucks? no Sabarro? no West Virginia commemorative plates?) I wanted to share.

Yesterday we had a cooking lesson in traditional Tuscan cooking. I very willingly volunteered to be on the tiramisu “team” because a) I love tiramisu and b) I happen to enjoy baking. I figured this was an “in” into being the it-girl in the world of deserts (at least at my house and amongst my family and friends). A new specialty? Yes, please.

Team tiramisu was an absolute failure. No wonder a good slice at Pasquales’ (local delicious Italian restaurant in Beckley) is $4 or $5. Tiramisu is a very finicky dessert and there are approximately one million eggs involved (hyperbole). It was very difficult and did not have enough time to sit, but everyone seemed to enjoy it, although we were freaking out. We kept giving it all kinds of good zen by telling it it was destined to be the best tiramisu ever (false).

TEAM TIRAMISU!

Monteriggioni & San Gimignano

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:40:00 EST

We took our first field trip yesterday (probably my first since crappy junior high ones, THANKS WOODROW WILSON HIGH SCHOOL + NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND FOR LEAVING SOMETHING TO BE DESIRED IN MY CULTURAL EDUCATION). Anyway, I didn’t really know what to expect, I had never heard of either Monteriggioni or San Gimignano before but luckily they kind of told us about them before the trip. You can read about them by clicking the hyperlinks because I lack the time to elaborate more.

I realized shortly before the trip that my camera was DEAD. I am not used to my camera quite yet, I’ve only had it a couple months and haven’t done too much serious picture taking yet, despite a couple Morgantown outings and one day in Charleston with my best friend, so I am used to my old Kodak with AA batteries. Anyway, Apple has blessed the iPhone with a wonderful camera, so some pictures came out very well, despite the lack of a zoom feature.

An aside on my iPhone: It works in Italy, which is really cool. I am holding off on my habitual texting, which is SOOOO hard and SOOOO tempting. It is free for me to receive messages (TEXT AWAY, I will reply on Facebook :) ) but costs 50 cents to send one! But anyway, last night my roommates and I were in front of our school and I pulled out my phone to text my friend to get on AIM and they told me they don’t have the iPhone in Italy, which is what my grandmother told me before I left. So I have the IT-phone of multiple countries! (Let’s not talk about the new iPhone in 9 days, it only depresses me.)

Here are some photos. Enjoy!

Monteriggioni: (we climbed up a tower to see some stuff, tickets are 1,50 euro)

Me on the wall (my bangs look crazy from the wind! Tuscany is behind me)

Settling In

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:38:00 EST

And now, a true post about Italy…

...So, despite not having internet, the living situation is fine. I share a one-bedroom apartment with four other girls (it involves a pull-out couch). We have some advanced fan-air conditioning system, which is WONDERFUL. Our apartment is rather cute; I will take pictures soon and post!

We are staying, like I said before, in San Giovanni. At first feel, it felt awful, like this small town was going to stifle us- we were all feeling like we were going to be staying in Florence, not the middle of nowhere Tuscany. San Giovanni, however, is breaking all the expectations we had for it. The town is very charming and sweet: a little slow, but it still has a lot of character, which is what is important of any town (as we all know that despite Morgantown being a ?small-town?, it?s character definitely brings it to life!).

Most of the people are super wonderful: they forgive us for being English speaking Americans and want to help us out, so we speak our handful of Italian to them and they speak their handful of English to us. We, being fashion students of course, have found a couple really cute shops so far. One had a ton of vintage clothes and clothes designed by the owner?s friend. The layout of these shops are amazing: they integrate the clothing for sale into displays in such unique and interesting ways, especially aforementioned shop.

We had our first two classes yesterday: a two-hour Italian class and a one-hour art history class. I have no previous Italian or art history, so it works out well for me (but I am taking art history 101 in the fall).

My Italian is not helped by my three years of Latin in high school: I feel as though French is more similar to Latin than Italian is! I keep accidently replying in French to simple things I should know the Italian for and keep trying to use French as a common language. I know it probably sounds really dumb, but it is second nature to me, especially after spending time in France

Italy is, as I expected, almost unbearably hot. We are not even in Southern Italy, but in the northwestern part, in Tuscany. We are going to Rome this weekend, which is certain to be a meltdown.

More soon, as I am typing this on Pages and will transfer to a blog ASAP (not that it matters because by the time anyone is reading this I will have been successful at doing so). I?m sure no one wants to read ?Designo Italiano: THE BOOK? by Cassandra Pisone and would much rather read the Cliffs Notes version :).

After 24 Hours of Traveling...

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:34:00 EST

Not much time because our apartments don’t have wireless (!!!) so I am on Dr. Aman (our assistant faculty leader from WVU)’s MacBook.

After a connection from Pittsburgh, two hours on the tarmac at JFK, a flight to Milan that only involved 30 minutes of sleep, and finally a FIVE hour bus ride into the medival Tuscan town of San Giovanni (forgive any spelling errors this is QUICK) we were settled into our apartment ACROSS TOWN from everyone else. After much talking, they were able to move us into a another apartment in town.

Our cross town adventures were interesting, despite the location. We ventured down to a vending machine to get water and apparently the vending machine is the happening place to be in San Giovanni. We scored some free water (among other things) from the store owner, as well as new friend who worked at the Gucci store and was rather open with us! We were extremely loud and got a tomato thrown at us.

More soon!

spearguns and chainsaws in paradise

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:59:00 EST

So I’ve been trying to take some pictures around town so that I might post them and give you some idea of what I’m working with on this end. However, whenever I see beautiful manzara (Manzara ne demek hatirliyor musun – Do you remember what manzara means?) I grab my camera and take a photo, and every time I’m disappointed at how short it falls of what I’m actually looking at. I did take some good ones while my friend and I fished off of the Galata Bridge today though so maybe next post will include some pictures.

One thing my I’ve noticed about Turkey is that business operates completely differently. For example, if you want a bike in Istanbul, there is only one place in the whole city you can get one and it is under a bridge in the Russian district. Not that there is only one store that sells bikes, there are in fact several of them. They all just happen to be in the same place. And that is the case with just about every type of good; if you want a cooking pot, plumbing materials, speargun, guitar, chainsaw, ect., you have to go to a very specific part of town, and you can choose between a whole bunch of stores that sell the same thing. To me it seems like they don’t understand the concept of competition but I’m sure this is not the case. There must be a reason for this and I’ve decided to make it a mission of mine to figure out why. I will report back when I figure out why.

Living in Istanbul is great because everyday you wake up in the greatest city in the world. Even a menial task like riding the bus is exciting because it is so visually stimulating. Around every corner is something that is not only completely different that anything you might see in Morgantown, WV or Amherst, NY (my hometown) but it’s probably seven hundred years old and incredibly well built. I’m not really a fan of the phrase “feel the history” but there’s really no other way to describe it. Istanbul is thought to have been continuously inhabited for as long as 5000 years so if feeling the history is possible, the feeling is going to be about as intense as it can be in Istanbul.

Field Camp II

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:04:00 EST

Ok, I could not go without telling you about a really neat excursion I had the pleasure of enjoying last week. For Field Camp II, we spent a week doing all sorts of wonderful things. We stayed at the bottom of a ski lift in a dozen, small alpine huts. The view from our hut was tremendous!

The first few days were spent collecting data to calculate the differences in carbon sequestration of 2 stands that had different silvicultural (manipulating the forest) treatments. Wow, this was quite labor intensive!

But that didn?t mean we couldn?t horse around in the forest a bit!

The next day we went to Gesäuse National Park in Steiermark. This park was recently apportioned in 2001 and included many peaks over 2,000 meters (-: We hiked to the Hesshütte which was about 1,700 meters, stopping along the way for brief talks by the professors to give everyone a taste of high-alpine forestry and how it has evolved. For this day, the Masters Programme in European forestry joined us, as you can see in the below photo, we were quite a long line of us (47 in all!)

It is much more slippery than it looks! Completely covered our boots in ?Gatsch? (mud)! (-; The higher we hiked up, the better the scenery got!

We made a quick pause in an area that remarkably black soil. A professor told us that in former times the people that lived on this alp used to burn the trees to make charcoal to carry down on their backs to sell. This was because it was very difficult to drag or carry trees from the alp. Of course, some goof ball has to smear it on his face (-:

After a superb hot lunch at the Hesshütte of nudelnsuppe and a cold radler (beer with lemon soda) we paused for a lecture here. If lectures were held in this location everyday instead of the classroom, I would have absolutely no problem attending! (-;

Also, the view from the Hesshütte, simply magnificent isn?t it? (please excuse the dark blur towards the bottom left-hand side, my cameras lens cover has been acting up lately)

Along the path down, a random cow blocked our way, I took a funny video of the occurrence, which I will attempt to load, but here is a photo of the moment:

The very next day, we had the privileged opportunity to visit a private property managed by a monastery. In order to transport all nearly 50 of us, some had to jump in the trailer pulled behind a truck, what a wild ride!

For lunch, these young lads who worked for the monastery brought up a most delicious ?breidl jausen? which means mountain snack (my absolute favorite meal to enjoy on an alp!! (-: ). It was served as seen below with red deer meat jerky in several forms, bergkaise (hard mountain cheese) as well as fresh rolls in a variety of sizes.

We paused a few more times for the professors to speak a bit, I am especially infatuated by high altitude afforestation (tree regeneration and planting). You see, at high altitudes trees are especially stressed for growing conditions, so the individual microsite in which a tree can grow is more important than ever. This also depends on the purpose of the tree, whether it exist for avalanche protection, rockfall prevention or erosion control, a forest can be designed to provide what is needed by man, all the while mimicking the natural processes which have evolved to balance the ecosystem. I would absolutely love to develop a masters thesis on this topic (I hope- fingers super crossed!!). A short exam was given and then we all piled into the trailers again for a bumpy ride back down the mountain!

Check back for more blogs, I update them as quick as I can and you enjoy them at your leisure (-:

Merkenstein

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:15:00 EST

A nice, big reason I came to Austria was because of the rather extensive climbing opportunities. Currently, the country is going through a bit of a ?climbing revival? and climbing in all forms is more popular than ever with the masses enrolling at the indoor gyms and getting outside.

Well, as any semester exchange student knows, time is precious and always too little. So, my excursions to climb outside have been faaar too few (-; The absence of rock in my life was really getting to me, so I succumbed and a few weekends ago, Ben (a ski-touring friend of mine from the climbing course) and myself journeyed to a location just outside of Vienna near an old castle. We had to board the train with our bikes (a first for the both of us) and then ride from the train station at Bad Voslau to Merkenstein.

We worked some tough problems that day. This one above I nearly stuck, but that last move was a shoddy side-pull crimp that you had to torque on juuust right with the thumb to prevent the outswing, brutal! (-: Ben nailed it like a champ, the photo is of just before the last move:

We tried a bunch more problems, but my fingers were already spent (I know- what a pony I am!).

The ride back towards Vienna. Hopefully there will be more chances to climb before I leave Austria!

Bye!

haydi, abi... a word about turkish

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:05:00 EST

I’m currently sitting on the roof terrace of my hotel on Istanbul’s Golden Horn enjoying the heck out of the manzara, the really nice view. That’s right, Turkish has a word for a nice view. While I’m sitting here enjoying myself and thinking about Turkey I guess I should say a word about the Turkish language I’m studying.

Turkish is not, as many people assume because of Turkey’s location, in anyway grammatically related to Arabic or Persian. There are many Persian and Arabic loanwords, but grammatically Turkish is classified as Turkic language, and is related to many Central Asian languages including Uzbek, Azeri, Tatar, Turkmen, Uygur, et cetera. While you probably haven’t heard of any of these, about 200 million people speak Turkic languages worldwide. Interestingly enough, Turkish is also fairly closely related to Finnish and Japanese. I have heard this strange distribution attributed to the Turkic people fleeing Turan (the Turkic homeland) as a result of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde.

Turkish is a little difficult because the grammar is completely different than in English. Instead of prepositions, Turkish has postpositions that are added on to the ends of words. As a result, you can get words like “Cekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdan” meaning “a person whom we could not turn into one from Czechoslovakia.” Another difficulty is that the verb comes at the end of the sentence, so you have to try to speak like Yoda; “Bardak masada var mi?”, “a glass- on the table- is there?”. Once you get used to this however, Turkish is much easier than it looks.