Well this is probably my last post from Italy. There will most likely be another post about getting home but this is the last from abroad. Yesterday we had our last dinner in the village. It was nice. We had a pizza party and we always have a good time just sitting around the pizza oven talking. It was nice and the pizza was good as usual. We realized pretty early, though, that there was going to be lots of wine drunk that night. We went through the most wine ever, fitting for our last dinner here. I did realize, however, that when our group gets drunk fights tend to happen and the fights generally centralize around politics-specifically feminism. I don't even remember what last night was about (probably because I tried to stay out of it). I know that part of it was about providing birth control for free but that was about the time I joined a different conversation.
Today we are spending our time cleaning and packing. Tonight we head to a restaurant for a good bye dinner. I am sure tears will be shed and then there is a birthday party for Max so there will be a bunch of 16/17 year old, drunk/high, italian kids running around. We will show up for the party for a little while but none of us are really all that excited to hang out there. Who knows what we may do. I heard rumors of beer pong but we have no ping-pongs or plastic cups.
For now, I will just lay here on my bed with Peepee (the cat) and take a nap. I have no idea what we are going to do to make the time go faster.
-Dinner was great but no tears were shed. Maybe tomorrow morning. For tonight, though, it is daylight savings (the good one) and we are just hanging out listening to music and laughing.

Ciao from Italy, I am sure I will be back again some day soon

(10/23) OLIVE PICKING DAY!!!!! Yeah, so in case you couldn't tell by that, this morning we picked olives. It was great. We went out and laid nets out underneath a few trees and descended on them like locusts. The first tree was pretty small so it was hard for all of us to work on it so some moved onto the next tree. We used little hand rakes and hand rakes on sticks to get most of the olives down and the rest we picked by hand. I soon moved to the larger tree and scaled it like a monkey. It was so much fun. I don't know if you have ever seen an olive tree but they have really thick foliage, at least these did. It felt like I was trying to bushwhack through the forest, only in a tree. It was amazingly hard to see where the branch that you were standing on was which made getting down kinda hard. I got every single olive that I could reach. In other words, I reached every single one on about a quarter of the tree. It felt really good to see my entire area clear of olives. As the morning progressed people got tired or bored and left. By the end Phil noticed that, even though most of our group is Minnesotan (or Wisconsinite), there were only Iowans and Illinoisans (with a person from Washington and one from East Timor). We got a good laugh about that because we knew that if any of them heard that the defensive words would have been flying. Tomorrow we go to press the olives and probably pick more because we only got about 100 kilos today and we probably need more in order to make it worth it.

Next day (10/24):

Pressed some olives today. It was really cool. When we got to the “factory” for lack of a better word, a truck had just pulled in and was unloading its olives. They unload them into shallow boxes so the olives do not bruise each other. We dumped our little boxes into one of the larger ones which was then dumped, along with some other olives (we didn't have quite enough) into a hopper that carried our olives through a sifter, which got rid of the leaves, and through a wash cycle. The olives then shot down into a grinder. Everything was ground up into a paste and the paste went into a centrifuge. The water/ juice and the oil separated and went their different ways. The oil continued on its way to another, smaller centrifuge which got out the rest of the water and pits. The pure oil poured out a spout. It was a beautiful green and smelled amazing (it smelled green if you know what I mean). We bottled it into our 5 liter bottles (to be distributed later) and were surprised to find that we had more oil than the 30 liters worth of containers could hold. I think we ended up with about 35 or so liters. At dinner tonight we had some of it with our bread and it is strong stuff, spicy even.

Next day (10/25):

We finished our project!!!!!!!! A full day of revising, asking the professor to look at it, and revising some more is all it took (it was really not fun). Tonight, however, we are having wild boar. Another odd food to add to my list. I will be home in four days and I can't wait. I love it here and will miss people, don't get me wrong, but I am so ready to see my parents. I don't care that travel plans were changed. I will be just as happy or even more happy to be going home rather than to Sicily. I am ready to go home.

11/17-
So today we started doing actual work on our project (going to buy the waters doesn't really count). We pretty much looked at the mineral contents of the water and looked at any patterns that we could immediately see. The first thing that we noticed was that the conductivity is directly linked to the amount of total dissolved solids. As one goes up the other goes up by pretty much the same amount. I guess I knew that they were linked but it was cool to see it actually in the data. I began to look up locations of the springs where the waters came from and came across a website with all of the information that we needed. It also had a rating system of the waters. Yes, there are people out there who rate the taste and other qualities of bottled mineral water. I think my favorite comment came from ItalianFoodTV.com. And I quote "The people that are comparing Panna to Evien are extremely uneducated in mineral waters as to the taste to the point that they are simple ignorant. Panna and Fiuggi are in totally different classes especially taste, not to mention the obvious mineral content; they have nothing in common except that they are water. Its like someone comparing a Sassicaia wine with a Chianti. I suggest they drink filtered water." Yeah, they are talking about water. Water, I say!! Crazy. For lunch dessert I made myself a "baked apple". I sliced an apple very thin and cooked the pieces in a pan with some cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar. It smelled like fall in a bowl. It was great. In the afternoon I quickly made some marshmallows for our campfire that night. They were actually very easy to make. Dinner consisted of chili and it was amazing; not quite hot enough to clear out my nose but it put in a solid effort. After dinner we started up the campfire and hung out just watching the flames, talking, and laughing. Oh, and of course, s'mores were made. They were not as good without hershey's but they did their best. The marshmallows were great though, much better than store bought.

11/18-
Another day of analysis. We learned that there will be more dissolved solids if the water is exposed to the bedrock for a longer time. We also looked at the nitrate levels in the water and compared them to the amount of farming done around the source. Turns out there is a pretty significant relationship. This also makes sense because nitrate is not really naturally found in bedrock.
The fly infestation continues but we now have fly paper. It is working. It is really kinda gross but amazing how well it works. While working on making maps for our project I listened to the presidential debate. It was very interesting but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I would have been actually watching it. Too bad I don't really have an hour and a half to burn.
I decided that I wanted to do random workouts during the day so while I was waiting for pages to load on the internet (it was crazy slow today) I decided that I had to do some kind of workout. I did planks, wall-sits, push ups, sit ups, all that jazz. I had to do as many as I could during the time it took for the page to load. Sometimes it took longer than I really wanted it to.
We went out for pizza today since we are down 5 people (they went out to do research) It has actually been really kinda nice to have fewer people. For lunches, if some people are out in the field, we all fit at one table. It has been much quieter and generally happier. Now, what this says about the people who aren't here I am not sure. Ok, well I have an idea but I am going to leave that for you, the reader, to decide for yourself.

11/19
Well we are pretty much done analyzing data. Almost all of our figures based on data are done so the next few days will be about putting everything together into a poster. This afternoon I hung out with Nile and Luca (ages 6 and 9) and we shot "arrows". Apparently, according to Luca, I still need to work on my form. We hung another fly tape today and caught probably 30 flies on it so far. We also hung a bag filled with water and some pennies above our door. In theory, it is supposed to keep them away. I think it worked. There were fewer flies flying around as the day went on.
Tonight we had wings for dinner and I had to do clean up. I think that is the closest I have come to throwing up on this trip. It was so gross. On a completely different note, I think there is something wrong with the battery on my computer. It works but is not actually charging fully. It says fully charged but I end up with only a few hours of battery life, sometimes even only an hour. I think it is the voltage that is messing with things. I looked at the battery info and it says that it needs service so I think I may end up bringing the battery in when I get home. Who knows. What I do know, though, is that it is time to hit the hay as they say. Night!

Such a good day. We washed our soil samples and did some analysis, very calm and easy since we have done it once already. We planned out who is going to do each part of the poster. Two of us, Josh and I, are the "project managers" which means that we basically go around to all of the groups and make sure that everyone knows what needs to get done and that everything is formatted the same. We also kinda jump between the groups depending on who needs the extra help. This morning we basically looked for images and read some papers to see if there was any extra information (like for an intro type thing) that we needed. In the afternoon, when our samples were dry, we weighed them, looked at them under a microscope, and did a few other things to find out what the composition of the soil was. For example, one of our samples was 92% clay and silt which helped explain why the amount of carbonate in the soil was so low. By looking under the microscope we were able to see the small metal grains that we had no idea were there, It was very interesting.
Tonight we had risotto (that I made, Rolf did the "recipe" part but I cooked it and did the final touches. Josh, who is also in my work crew, roasted some walnuts for the salad. This, of course, lead to many a joke about nuts. Tomorrow we put everything together into a poster and turn in our last project of these two classes. We are now down to our last "class", our independent/more like pair projects. In two weeks I will be done with the semester. This has gone amazingly fast.

Today was art show day. Yesterday was a complete work day. At the beginning of the day we gathered together to make sure everyone knew what they were going to do and then we split off. I had a quick project but I had done a bunch of work on it before the actual work day. The title of the show was before and after so we had to do something that connected to that as well as connecting to something that we had learned so far. As I was sitting on a train, thinking about different projects, I looked around and saw graffiti. That was when I thought about combining the cave paintings that we had learned about with the "cave" paintings of today. I did a bunch of drawings and research to figure out what I should do. I got my spray paint and found some rocks in the field to do a test run on (I had never spray painted on rock before). That turned out well so I found an even bigger rock (about 3ft x 2.5ft and about 200 pounds). One of the guys helped me get it out of the field and onto a wheelbarrow. We were not able to make it in one trip which was too bad but it was crazy heavy and we were walking through freshly plowed soil so there was pretty much no solid ground. After setting it down three or four times we finally made it. Wheels are a great thing (ps this was all done in rain). I was able to wheel it to one of the garages where I cleaned off the mud and dried it off so that the paint would actually stick. I did my spray-painting and was done by 10:30am. I came back to it throughout the day to make some edits and such but while everyone else was doing very detailed pieces I was done. It kinda made me uneasy but cave paintings were relatively simple and graffiti is meant to be quick (unless you want to get caught).
Everything turned out great and so it was time to bring everything together. We put everything into place in the gallery (only a little arguing with the teacher was needed... I won by the way). We had all afternoon free so we pretty much just hung out and did a gelato run (again, in the rain). Soon enough, we had to dress up and go down to the openning. Everything went well and the few people who came liked what they saw. It was indian night for dinner so we had turkey with a curry cream sauce along with coconut rice and dal. It was really good and even the picky eaters seemed to like it. It is that time of night again, where the eye lids droop and the bed is warm and inviting. Good night!

Our last fieldtrip is officially over. We got into port at 7:15 this morning after a wavey and therefore restless sleep. At this point I knew that I didn't feel as well as I should have. I believe I have caught the monster. However, I still had time to change some plans to do whatever I could to help my body fight this thing off. I decided that going to a concert and then staying up all night after very little sleep the night before was probably not the best idea. It would have been fun to hang out with everyone but I think that fun may wear off when it is 3am and I am surrounded by 8 very drunk people. I am sure the concert will be great but since I am not actually a huge fan (I was going to go just to hang out and have fun) of his music I am not to devistated or even really upset about missing it. A few other people who were planning on going to Rome decided to hang back as well. One (Rachel) is dying... ok not really but it sounds like she is coughing up organs or something. Another (Phil) didn't want to stay up all night (I think he didn't want to get drunk) and didn't think it was worth it to get a hostel. If there had been a train that left at midnight (which wouldn't get us back until 3) I may have gone but the last train out leaves a half-hour into the concert. In the end I think I chose the right thing. I had a great dinner-pesto caprese- I will get some reading in and I get to go to bed early!

-Next day-

I can not tell you how glad I am that I didn't go to Rome. I got 12 solid hours of sleep last night. I got up and had a great breakfast, uploaded photos without having internet problems (it has crashed since then). While I was adding captions to my photos Laura came by and I learned that the Rome group was still in Rome. At this point they should have been just about to get off the train. Apparently there were “group problems” and they missed the train. They won't be back until 2:45pm now. If they sleep it will be in the nasty Rome train station. We think that the “group problems” were more like drunk yelling/fighting. I am sure we will hear about it after they come back and get some sleep. We may even get some exhausted ranting out of the deal. Like I said, I am so glad to be here having gotten 12 hours of peaceful sleep.

Probably more to come later today. We will see.

Well our Croatia vaca... I mean field trip is almost over. We head out tomorrow afternoon so we still have some time wander around. Today we took some samples in the morning (as usual) and then headed to a "beach". It was an overlook with a little concrete dock area where we could jump off and into the water. It also had sheer drop offs everywhere except where they had built the pier. We jumped in off the pier to survey the water and see how deep it was. The shallowest place was probably 20 meters deep and there were areas where that number jumped to 50 meters. It was crazy deep. So, what did we decide to do with sheer cliffs and deep water? Well, we jumped off the cliffs of course! The shorter of the two was probably 20-25 feet high while the taller was about 10 feet higher. It was actually less scary to jump off this cliff than the waterfall. I think it was mainly because as long as you pushed off the edge just a little bit (aka you didn't just slide down) you were not going to come anywhere near hitting something. The worst it did was clear out your sinuses and that was a welcomed thing for most of us. I got some really great photos of everyone but I forgot my cord to upload photos to my computer so you will have to wait a few days to get photos.
So, tomorrow afternoon we head back to Split and then catch the overnight ferry to Ancona. From there we are going to head back to OGC to rest up a little before most of us head to Rome for a Tallest Man on Earth concert. I haven't really heard much of his music but it will be fun to go to a concert with everyone. The plan is to then stay up all night and catch the 5:45am (the earliest train we could get) train back. I am not sure how the staying up all night after almost no sleep the night before is going to turn out but we will be active for most of it. The plan is to go to the "American" bar (where all of the American foreign exchange go) and stay there until it closes (4am we think) and then we have no idea what we are going to do for the next almost 2 hours. It could get interesting. Plus, half the group is coughing like crazy. Luckily, I am still sickness free.

Today was boat day. In theory, we were going to a smaller island to collect samples. So, in the morning, we headed down to the docks to meet up with Sandro's cousin who owns a boat big enough for all of us. It took about an hour to get to the island where we spent our day. We put the anchor down and headed into the forested island. To get an idea of the size of this island, there are seven permanent residents and we were able to walk across (the short way) the island in about 15 minutes. It was a really neat island. There were cacti, trees, wild arugula, wild asparagus (that was ready for another harvest), wild garlic, and a bunch of wild herbs and chard growing everywhere. There, also, were grapes and olives just like any good mediterranean farm. We dropped our stuff off at the restaurant (the only one on the island) and went off to take our samples (3 of them to be exact). We walked through the grape fields and found 2 different areas that were far apart and where the soil seemed to change. Magic of all magic,  the two soils were different one had more clay while the other had more sand. Our hike took us to a beach where we sampled the sand and dug through a bunch of Roman pottery shards along with some mosaic tiles. There were some really awesome things found including an old tile that a dog had stepped on before the clay was completely dry. That was by far the coolest thing we found. Then it was lunch time (very delicious) and then we were told that we had 2.5 hours to go swimming and snorkeling. We took full advantage of the opportunity. We saw three octopi, one starfish and an amazing number of sea cucumbers and sea urchins. I forgot how much I like snorkeling. It is awesome (being able to blow all of the water out of the tube after going under helps too). Many a shell were picked up. We headed off the island and traveled to an even smaller island with a fresh water pit which is weird because it was probably 20 m from the sea. We tried to collect some of the water but it was just not in the cards (tension knots are stupid when the thing that the knot is holding is  going to float...). At about 4:30 we headed home and an hour and 15 minutes later I was in the shower getting nice and clean. I think I should go to bed now since I have re-typed almost every word that I have written in the last five minutes.

So, I am pretty sure that we are in Croatia as a side vacation and they just added in a little project to make it seem legit. Now, don't think that I am complaining because I am most definitely not. It has been a pretty sweet field trip. This morning we actually did some work. We followed this thrust fault across the island. It is an interesting fault because, although the island has almost all limestone as its bedrock (that combined with the tiny amount of rainfall results in a very thin layer of soil throughout most of the island), there is marl (clay, basically) on the other side of this fault. That means that on the marly side the soil is way thicker and is also much more fertile. It was very interesting. After we collected 3 samples we headed to lunch. A picnic lunch. On the beach. It was great. We made sandwiches and headed out into the water. What made it even better was the fact that we had brought some snorkels and masks. We spent the entire afternoon in the water looking at fish and jumping off boulders. Who said being a scientist was hard work? :D We did do a little bit of geology along the beach, however. there was one area where there are red/pink rocks (the only place on the whole island) and there were some crazy awesome fossils. We did a short lecture there and headed back home.
Once home the girls decided to go out into town and hang out. We bought some pastries (doughnuts with awesome chocolate in the middle) and walked around. I bought some lavender oil from an old lady (they are known for their lavender) and we watched the kids play around in the piazza. Dinner was stuffed peppers and mashed potatoes. There happened to be a small festival going on downtown so we headed back there after dinner to see what was happening. There was a showing of the small old boats and there was a concert in the opera house. I felt like such a techie when I was looking at the lights and realizing how many robotic lights, LED lights, and normal lights they had along with the way that the man was lighting the people singing (green light on faces that are not supposed to look sick???  Really?)
Tomorrow is boat day! I am hoping we get back early enough to get some photos up on the internet/ uploaded onto my computer.

Day 1-1.5

This has been one crazy trip to Croatia. We left OGC at 5:30pm to go to Ancona. We had three cars, two vans of students and one punto filled with one of the families from town. We were about 20 minutes out when we got a call. One of the kids had puked. The family ended up turning back to wait for the next boat to see if he felt better (from what I understand, the mother puked the next day so they will not be coming). We continued to head to the port of Ancona.

Once there, we received our bording passes and boarded the ferry for a 9 hour, over-night, boat ride. The plan was to, basically, find a spot to put our sleeping bags down and sleep where ever that happened to be. It ended up working pretty well. We found the one place on the deck that didn't have a bunch of lights and all crashed in the same place. This was nice because it would be a whole lot harder to mess with one of us without waking other people up as well. I slept pretty well but not as well as I would have if I had been in a bed.

We arrived in Split, Croatia at around 8am and went through customs. Then, we headed into town where we met up with an archologist tour guide. The first place we stopped was right on the coast. It was the spot where there is an upwelling of “smelly” sulfuric water. The fish were going crazy around it trying to get at whatever food that was living in the water. The next stop was the old palace area, which was basically the old town. There were crazy amounts of tourists but once we got out to the side streets it was nice. The whole place was gorgeous, by the way. After a coffee and snack break, we headed to the archeology museum. There were some really nice mosaics and they had a rediculous number of old coins. They were pretty awesome.

Once the tour was done we were give 100 kuna (about $20) and were let loose on the town to find lunch. Most of us stopped at a sea food place that was really pretty cheap and was right on the water. I got seafood risotto which had fish (not sure what kind) and mussels. It was surprisingly good. We headed back to the port to grab our ferry to Hvar (pronounce ho-ar, basically). Luckly this was only a two hour ferry. Half of us still ended up sleeping but at least some of us were able to watch what was going by and do some reading.

It was about 10 minutes from the port in Hvar to our bed and breakfast that Sandro's cousin owns. It is a really nice place. There is a hammock and hammock chair by where we have breakfast, all of the rooms have balconies with incredable views and there is even a cat. The beds are some of the most comfortable and they have comforters so they are warm as well. Hard to beat that.

After getting settled in quickly, we threw on our swimsuits and walked down to the beach (about 5 minutes away). I hope you are realizing that it is October and we were swimming for over an hour. The water was warm and the air was warm. It only got better because we ended up watching the sunset over the water while in the water (Oh and there were sea urchins in the water! How cool is that?). On our way back up to the hotel to clean up for dinner we passed by a group of kids that told us that it was too cold to swim and they actually threw something at us as we passed by. It was really bizarre.

We cleaned up and headed to dinner which was beef that tasted like saurbratten and there were mashed potatoes. It was almost like I was back home (not quite as good as home's though).

Day 2 in Croatia

Today we had a different archeologist show us around the island of Hvar. We saw a museum and some excavation sites. We knew that it was a pretty relaxed day when we didn't get lunch until 3 and did'nt leave the restaurant until after 4. We headed back to our hotel and just hung around for a little while before we decided to head out and into the main part of town. We did some shopping but mostly we just walked around at soaked evertything in. There was a play going on and it was in an amazing looking theater, I was kinda jealous. Dinner consisted of pretty much all fish except for the bread and the mashed potatoes.

Well, since that is basically the end of our day today and since I am falling alseep at the computer I think I should probably go to bed. Good night!

Wine, tie-dye and playing battle-bots? Yeah, sometimes school is rough. Ok, so, not really. At least not today. We started the day off finishing our mini soils project and then presented them. It was only 11:30 when we finished but there wasn't a whole lot to do that could be done before lunch so we turned in our top three choices for our independent projects and headed out into the sunshine. After lunch we were told to meet back up at 3 because it would take some time for them to put everyone in groups. At 2ish Laura (professor) came around and told us to wait until 4. Now we were suppose to write a proposal up once we found out what we were doing. Finding things out at 4 would have given us a half hour to write something up so they decided to cut that from our to-do list. Pretty sweet, right? At four we met down in our classroom area. We were just sitting there waiting for Laura and Sandro when one of the other residents of the town came in and told us that his family has a tradition of giving gifts to every group of students that come in when they are there. It was awesome. We went outside and saw tie-dye shirts everywhere. It was crazy. They told us where each size was and to go ahead and pick one. It was so much fun. Mine is a lime green shirt with a radiating swirl that kinda looks like daisy petals or like *, kinda. We took some pictures and then decided to put a shirt on the dog. You really can't beat a black dog with a rainbow tie-dye on. We sat in the piazza for a little while to find out what we were going to be doing for our "independent" projects and really are not so independent. Lauren and I are doing a project to see if there is a correlation between the ionic chemistry of bottled spring water and the rock formations that the water is flowing through before it gets bottled. I think it could be a very interesting project.
The next exciting part of our day was wine tasting but that wasn't going to start until six. So, what do a bunch of college kids do in their spare time? We play Battle-bots. Basically you have groups of two. One person is blindfolded and is in the center while the other person is on the outside being the eyes. There are balls and pool noodles (in our case balled up t-shirts and rolled up sleeping pads) in the center. The idea is for the blindfolded person to grab one of the objects and either throw it at someone or swing and hit someone (ball and sleeping pad, respectively) and the eyes have to lead them while doing this. If you get hit you are out, simple as that. It was so much fun. In some cases the match ended in a tie. In those cases we had a face off. Blindfolded, three steps away from each other, turn and throw. This was one of those games where it was just as much fun to watch as it was to actually be active. At half past six we headed to the classroom/ dining room/ multipurpose area for wine tasting to taste the difference that the soils make in the taste of the wines. Of course, we forgot that in this case we were on Italian time rather than American time so at seven the guy that was going to talk to us about tasting wine showed up at the door. An hour and 8 kinds of local wine later, we had learned all we could for the day. The wine tasting was very interesting. As most of you know, I really don't drink so I had to make a decision. I didn't have to do the tasting, it wasn't going towards our grade, but I thought it would be interesting to actually taste what we had been talking about. Luckily, I was able to follow the lead of our wine master. I took a small sip (enough to get the flavor on all parts of my tongue) and then was able to dump the extra wine or give it to my neighbors. I knew there was a secondary reason for sitting next to me. It was interesting because I was actually able to tell the difference. I think one of my favorites was a oak matured Verdicchio from the Castelli di Jesi region. It actually had a woody background/after-taste. It was really cool.
Tomorrow is another day off but it is a shortened one because we are headed to Croatia in the evening. As of right now my plan is to pack a lunch and just start walking. When lunch hits I will stop and eat and then turn around and head back for home. That way I will be tired for the boat ride that promises to provide an uncomfortable sleep at best.
My next post will probably be from Croatia! (Assuming the internet works.....)

P.S. The internet stopped working last night so this is from Tuesday