I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Not just because I love to eat, but also because almost two years ago I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, and had to put gluten on the kibosh. This makes eating in France a bit more complicated. It’s easy for gluten eaters to just grab a sandwich after class, or a pain au chocolat for breakfast. Unlike many of my friends, I cannot say that I am sick of eating so much bread. Anyway, I thought I would dedicate a post to running [...]

I’ve been here for…wow not even a week. It feels like it’s been a super long time. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I think it means I’m settling in a bit, but also it means I miss the U.S. a little bit. I want tacos sooo bad. I think I’ll force them on my host family, and make them for dinner one night.  In honor of my nearly week of being here, I’m going to write up a “Top 5″ list of WHOOs and BOOs (aka, my [...]

It turns out that preparing to live in another country (even while you are in that country) is a bit complicated. Here are the things nobody really talks about beforehand: 1) How to buy a cell phone. I brought my iPhone with me to France. It’s unlocked so that I can join any cell phone provider here. However, finding a plan that is sans engagement, or in English, not on contract, is difficult. There are plans offered by Free, SFR, and Orange, with semi-reasonable prices, but there are restrictions as to where calling, [...]

For lunch today, we were all assigned to prepare and bring a traditional Ecuadorian meal to share with our group. Here their large meals start with an entrée, soup, main dish, and then top off with a dessert… So today we ate empanadas (a stuffed pastry with cheese), soup (barley rice with pork), lentils and white rice, fried plantains, and a couple other side dishes (including aji – a spicy sauce that they like to put on pretty much everything!).  After school, my friends Leah and Elisa and I went [...]

Means “I’m full,” and it is definitely a useful expression. Moroccans, or at least my host family, have a talent for bringing mounds of delicious meat, bread, and vegetables, then encouraging you to eat as you protest “shbet.” Then, Omar, my host father, brings out a huge bowl of grapes, a big yellow melon, and three of the best white peaches on planet earth. “Shbet” no longer. All this while I trade funny faces with my little host brothers, Abdullah (4) and Mohammed (2), who are absolutely the cutest children [...]

I just finished a delicious shawarma sandwich for lunch and thought this would be an awesome time to talk about the Egyptian food I have experienced thus far! The first thing I’ve learned about Egyptian cuisine is that, well, not much of it is really Egyptian.  Most of the Middle Eastern food I’ve enjoyed comes from the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, etc.) and has been adopted in Egypt.  Cairo specifically has a lot of food from all over the world, and Zamalek (the island district of Cairo where I live) seems [...]

It’s a little awkward to be a tourist in a place like this. Everybody who lives here already can tell that I’m new to this city, but taking pictures just screams foreign. During our orientation week, I spent more time photographing all of my new adventures. But now that we’ve all settled down into our host homes and started classes, it’s starting to seem less appropriate to run around everywhere with a camera. I really wish I could record some of these TV shows in more than just memory for [...]

I’ve found somewhat of a solution to the problem of not speaking enough Arabic. Today, after a late breakfast, I went to Mecca Mall with some of the SIT students. It’s a very expensive place, not where I’d want to go for all of my clothes. Dillon’s host brother went with us – he definitely made the day the experience that it was! Once we finished our shopping, he drove us all around Amman. We saw the grandeur of the American Embassy, where the brother was nervous about me taking [...]

Yesterday (Friday) I had a cooking class with one of the teachers from the International Center, Christian. Emily, Mari, Kenya, Ryan and Greg all came too! We made pebre, which is a Chilean salsa. It was delicious. It has garlic, tomatoes, onion, parsley, chile, olive oil and salt. It was really delicious! We also bought sopaipillas from a bakery and topped our sopaipillas with the pebre, it was sooo good. In Chile, traditionally when it rains people eat sopaipillas, it is like Chilean comfort food. They are fried thick tortillas made with [...]

A family eating a lunch of beef, vegetables, and rice in the Senegalese fashion. Each person takes food from the middle and puts it on the rice in the “triangle” in front of where they are sitting. On my first day here I already had a chance to eat the national meal of Senegal: Ceebu jën. Also known aspoisson et riz in French or fish and rice in English, this Wolof dish is comprised of marinated fish with spices, onions, peanut oil, and sometimes tomato sauce. I have also eaten Maafe, a [...]

If you can’t live longer, live deeper – Italian Proverb My last few days in Rome were bittersweet. For my final exam of my Italian Communications class, Sean took us to the Vatican Radio Station, to create a short segment about our work experience and then to the Vatican Television Station, where we were each able to talk about our study abroad experiences. It was incredible to be able to go into many places that only a select few have been to and to have such a lively and entertaining professor [...]

As promised, I have created one more blog post before my arrival back in the states. I think for this I’ll just go through a bunch of the last pictures that I have on my camera and leave it at that. I’ve had some of the most memorable moments of my life so far abroad these last three and a half months, and to be able to put it all into words right now would be impossible, even if I didn’t have an immense amount of things to do on [...]

Buon giorno a tutti. I know it has been quite sometime since my last post, so I’ll be sure to include one more here after this one before I return home. The pictures I have from this post are from Pasquetta, or simply Easter Monday. Joe’s family was in town for the week, and his dad made a huge meal for us and about twenty others in our program. We spent the whole day celebrating and eating at our apartment, and a good time was had by all. Above is a [...]

In late March, all of us went to our second cooking class for my Sustainable Foods class at our professor’s (Sergio) house. During this cooking extravaganza, we focused on the region of Tuscany. We started off the early morning with our routine cafe and cornetto on Sergio’s garden terrace. After waking up a little bit, we got going on the cooking. Fiore, who helps Sergio with the class, split us into three different groups and each group would be making a different Tuscan course. Our professor, Sergio, and a few [...]

Two weeks ago on Friday (2/10), I had my first of three cooking classes for my Food and Sustainability class. Each of the cooking classes focus on a different region in Italy so for this specific class we focused on Naples and Neapolitan cooking. Our class is taught by Prof. Sergio Rufini, a hilarious, older Italian man whose thoughts are all over the place, but we enjoy him anyways. We all met in Campo de Fiori (a square nearby my school) at 8:30AM. First, we dropped by a local shop to get [...]