HELLO ALL!
So before I leave for MILAN I figured I should tell you about ZURICH! Which is now, by the way, my favorite city. EVERYONE should go to Zurich at some point. It was beautiful and the people were SO MUCH NICER than the people in Geneva. It is in the German speaking part of Switzerland, and it has beautiful Germany-style buildings. Through a GREAT deal of pointing and using a mix of french, english and german (the people from Zurich......mine and my friend's German is compleeeetely nonexistant) we managed to get through and eat dinner and buy things and get lost and find ourselves! It was so incredible. THere was 0 stress involved in the weekend... we just went with it, starting with the train ride. We opted to get food and relax instead of trying to stay on some rigid time schedule, and the ride itself was BEAUTIFUL through the countryside. I'm going to post the pictures up here so you can all see how stunning it was. My goal is to one day live in a little Austrian countryside with sprawling fields and "fairy trees" as we called them. I can't even put into words how amazing this weekend was. The Old Town of Zurich was absolutely stunning, with cobbled streets and and a row or restaurants and bars. We ended up eating at a place called Johanniter and we got spaetzle with chicken in delicious sauces. We even drank some jagermeister (which was pretty interesting). As we walked (all by the river) we found a small market, which was adorable, and i bought my first infinity scarf for only 5 CHF! Woop woop woop! Not only that, but the FALL there was soo much better than Geneva's.... nothing in comparison to good old new England, but not awful :). Also, Zurich is one of those cities that is as striking in the rain as it is in the sunlight. We decided not to go to any museums, though we did make an effort to get to the Lindt chocolate factory, which ended up being closed and that was pretty disappointing, but we got a really nice lunch instead.
As someo of you may know, Switzerland is occupied by German, French and Italian speakers, and we ate all 3 of those types of cuisine! Quite a good day, I'd say. Also, I decided, in honor of Grammy Marie, I'm going to collect magnets from every place I go. My first one is a cuckoo clock :) it's adorable.
Okay now, as for my week. Pretty stressful, lots of work and not enough time, as per usual. Yesterday, I spent about 7 hours writing a French essay in Montaigne.... which, for anyone who doesn't know the wodners of Montaigne it's like reading something from SHakespeare but in French, so great. Fortunately, I met with my TA and we went over the ENTIRE excerpt together. That was so unbelieveably kind of her, and really fortunate for me because otherwise I'd have done the entire thing wrong. I already had half my essay written and had to start again from scratch. ALSO in our comparative politics class yesterday, our awesome TA didn't make us present in front of the class. We are getting so much support from TA's and Professors here! Also my AWESOME parents sent me a HUGE package with food, halloween decorations, and my fav boots!!!!!! THANKS GUYS LOVE YOU :*
I'm still plugging ahead on my research and Fulbright application... going to continue with those on Sunday, I believe.
AND NOW I will post the pictures.
xoxo
Edie
ps if this is scantily written it's because I"m in the midst of watching Sleepy Hollow.... haha