the soupmenu

it is done. I am back from my year of living, studying, and eating in Italy. Of course everyone immediately simply asks ‘how was it?’. While easy to ask, this question is extremely difficult to answer.

I spent the whole year trying to describe the many elements of living in Italy, and I perhaps could spend another year attempting to give a final impression now. I will not attempt to do this, and instead I will simply offer you an overview that perhaps could only be considered a thesis statement for the overall reaction.

Italy is a place of great contradictions. It is beautiful, dirty, loud, peaceful, aggressive, lazy, productive, and the list goes on forever.

Perhaps the unifying aspect of this all is the unwillingness to change. I ask you to please remove any negative connotations of the word ‘unwillingness’ as I do not aim to paint it in a poor light. Italians are slow to change, but this is not a problem. What they have is unique, good, and beautiful; why would they wish to change that?

In today’s world of mass globalization and westernization of every culture out there, Italy stands apart. Italy does not openly accept whatever new influences are being pushed upon it from different areas of the world.

In this unwillingness is the reason why everyone loves Italy. There’s a romantic passion in everyone’s hearts for the olden days. A passion for a place that is completely unbashful about what it is and what it can offer. A place where siestas take priority over everything, good conversation is worth missing appointments for, and every night is a night for going out. While other countries are trying to be large-scale Disney worlds by welcoming all, providing everything, and not offending anyone; Italy takes the opposite stance and says go somewhere else if you don’t like what they are. In this, I find beauty. I find a culture of people who are proud and confident in themselves. I find a country with so much to offer the rest of the world in terms of how to live a happy life.

I endured many annoyances such as late trains, non existent queue lines, and endless amounts of pointless bureaucracy but, in my year there, I was always offered café after a meal, was never rushed away from a seat, and was always welcomed with love and compassion.

This will never change about Italy, and I find great comfort in this. I can’t wait to go back.

yup…i’m redoing stuff around here a bit.

stick with me and the whole site will be fresh and clean with perhaps some new content.

What is the origin of that word anyways? It has nothing to do with height or a calendar !!

I have not been blogging, as the last few weeks have been quite busy. I went to an Italian theme park, discovered my new favorite shot, and finished my last group project for school.

It’s been an interesting dynamic at school as everyone filters out for ‘summer break’. Our extremely diverse school is dispersing again back to all edges of the world for either home-cooked meals or internships. It has been semi-hard to say goodbye to all of these good friends even if it is only for two months, as we all know that the school environment will not be the same when we all come back and start our thesis. No more hour long coffee/coke breaks out in the sunshine, no more fighting at sawa for a table for 10, and no more bike gang trips to the canal….well..perhaps there will still be coke.

I’m heading to torino and florence this week as one of our projects has been selected to be displayed at a festival. Believe it or not, we have a budget to build an installation. It should be a great time and I’ll come back with some good pics/vids of the installation. Hopefully everyone will enjoy it. Immediately after that I jump on a plane and again move to someplace that I’ve never been before. For those who don’t know, I have a two month long internship in Amsterdam. Although the summer is completely different in Milan and I’ve really been enjoying the last month here, I’m quite excited to get back to a city that is clean, has food without starch, and speaks a little more English.

While my blog is semi-neglected, my tumblr gets about 4-5 link updates a day. Stay in touch via my random links!