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From Abroad

Here are some quick pictures of our school, NABA, I snapped.

So the past couple days have been exhausting! After our Paris adventure, we were wiped out, but we still have had so much to do!

Tuesday my friend Carly and I worked on the magazine we are making for our project here at NABA at the school until a little after 7 then rode the metro to the Duomo and were going to shop and eat dinner there, but of course… everything in Italy closes at 8! We found a bookstore that was open and luckily I found some last minute gifts there and we had a great dinner. I ordered pasta (if it is my choice to eat pasta then I am more willing to enjoy it). I had a baby lobster on it. I was unphased, however, because I also had an interesting pasta dish in Spain that involved baby lobsters.

Strange Spanish Seafood Dish
Baby Lobster Italian Seafood Dish

Yesterday we did three different interviews. The first was with Silvia Negri>, the CEO of a fashion PR firm. We then walked to the studio of Stephan Janson. He was really great because he was so down to earth and realized how to keep his head in the crazy world of fashion. He stopped doing big shows and runway because he thought it was too commercial and he wasn’t able to do what he wanted to do.
Stephan doesn’t really sew or construct his clothes but rather drapes them to make their shape. Most of the pieces are made from rectangles of fabric and it the style is dependent on the type of fabric and the places the fabric is stitched together. Most of the pieces have more than one way to be worn.

Stephan Janson in his studio, working on a dress
Our teacher, Benaetta Barzini, modeling a Stephan Janson dress

Afterwards we traveled across Milan to the offices of Pharmacy Industry, a recent clothing company that specializes in indie-hipster street wear. It is the first of its kind in Italy, as underground indie music and style aren’t a big thing in Italy. It is very comparable to American Apparel. They actually started another brand, http://2357.it/dev/index.php>2357, which is their answer to American Apparel. The clothes from 2357 are all made in Italy and are basics in basic colors, like American Apparel, except they won’t shrink or fade from washing.

Pharmacy was interesting to go to because they put a lot of research in their marketing and branding. They do a lot of research in trends and incorporate that into their business plans. They also have a partnership with PIG Magazine, which we visited on Thursday. Both companies do a lot of branding with music and have parties and special events with underground bands. Pharmacy has a close relationship to Ed Banger Records in Paris that has signed Justice and DIM MAK Records in LA that has bands such as The Kills and The Gossip (who had a spread in the June/July issue of Nylon, if anyone saw).

PIG magazine is an underground music and fashion magazine. They were the first band to feature Justice on the cover. They are basically the Italian version of Nylon and they admit to being such when asked. They have no real competition in Italy yet. PIG strives to be Anglo-American where Nylon strives to be European. It’s funny how no one seems to be really content to be from the country they originate from.

PIG started a sunglasses brand, Super. They were nice enough to give us all a pair of sunglasses, which retail for 84-150 Euros in Europe! So it was a very sucessful field trip. Super are basically Ray-Ban Wayfarers in great colors and prints.

These are the style of Sunglasses I got. This is some girl who was on the cover of PIG
Everyone in the Fashion Journalism class in our new Super sunglasses!

Our magazine is being finished as I type this. I would be helping the layout but lack Photoshop knowledge to help out. Kind of stressful, so I’m going to go do what I can!

France is by far my favorite country and I was thrilled to get the chance to go back this past weekend. I fell in love with Paris last summer and there has not been a day since that I haven’t planned on moving there when I graduate. So, in summary… my friend Carly and I used our free weekend to head to Paris last Friday.

Arriving in Paris was a little bumpy, but at least successful. Our gates changed in Zurich and we sprinted across the airport to catch our plane. On the plane I was luckily by this completely charming Swiss couple who offered to share a taxi with us and ended up picking up the whole tab! We found our hotel quickly and albeit being small, it was clean and really close to the Arc de Triumphe and Champs-Elyees, so we checked that out when we got in around 11 o’clock. We walked up and down the Champs-Elyees and around the Arc de Triumphe until about 1 then headed back to bed. We also saw an ad for the new 3G iPhone, and of course I had to stop and take a photo. Isn’t it great how the convo is in French? (Much like my friend Leah and I try to do sometimes!)

In the morning we woke up and I had REAL COFFEE (and by real coffee I mean coffee with cream) for the first time in almost a month, as well as pulpy orange juice (my favorite) and the most delicious crossiant of my life. It didn’t even look like a crossiant. Anyway, my French was still holding up pretty well by this point so I was pretty proud of myself. (“Je prende un crossiant et un cafe creme!”) I found this weekend I could understand people talking pretty decently and typically always read most things, but I freeze when it comes to talking to people.

After breakfast, we walked through the unusually cold Parisian streets to go to the top of the Effiel Tower. After seeing how terribly long the line for the elevator was, we decided to climb all 700 stairs to get to the top.

Afterwards we hit the D’Orsy, Paris’s second most famous museum (after the Louvre). I had never been before and it was really great. There were a lot of French painters (mostly French) like Renoir, Monet, Gaugain, Manet, Degas, etc.. I had seen an Impressionist exhibition the week before so it was cool to see some more (especially because Gaugain is my favorite artist, even more than Ver Meer). We walked along the Seine to the Louvre and took pictures in the gardens and around the Pyramid.

We then went to Montmarte, which is home of the Sacred Couer, this beautiful old church on top of a hill. Getting there involves a lot of steps and we wandered around a little bit until some kind of drunk French artist told us to try this restaurant. It was pretty affordable (and we planned on splurging on real food anyway) and we had great service as they gave us 6 free escargot (my favorite)! We had steak (my first red meat in almost a month) and came back and went to sleep.

Versailles, the palace Louis XIV built outside of Paris, is by far my absolute FAVORITE place on the entire Earth. I think I was Marie Antoinette in a prior life, I love it so much. We waited in line forever (note: by Museum Pass just to get out of Versailles line) and were vaguely trampled by 234567890 different groups. Last year it was crowded, but not bad. We walked around the palace and through the gardens to the Petite Trianon and then came back into Paris because we had a flight to catch.

There were train problems getting to the airport, however, and we missed our flight. Swiss Air is completely unhelpful (although still by far European airlines beat American airlines by 34576457%) and we had to REBUY tickets for the next flight… TOMORROW (today). Instead of paying for train/taxi and a hotel and chancing missing our flight again, we decided to bunk down in the airport, which may have been in my top 20 worst ideas ever.

Charles deGaulle is not only completely terribly set up (we may have caught our flight if it hadn’t been so insanely and crazily laid out… any reason Check-In Desks are 3 miles away from a train station??) but is completely freezing. I slept with a scarf and a dress as a blanket and was still shivering. I could not find a place to sleep comfortable because there were arm rests all over the place. We saw homeless men digging through the garbage looking for food. French soilders with machine guns were patrolling the terminal (but that is nothing new for me to see… it is like that at most major train stations and attractions in France). About 3 AM we made like nomads to find warmer ground or a store open selling a blanket (nope), we did find chairs downstairs in a warmer area we could push together to have two seats without an armrest. This terminal was the Asian terminal, however, so we were woken up as people from Eastern flights came in all through the night at the baggage claim.

We did not get much sleep and woke up at 530 AM for our 7 AM flight and almost missed it again because check-in lines were ridiculous. There is no reason to have 2 desks open for a flight of over 100 people. At Zurich the same thing almost happened as we had to cry our way onto our flight. Our trip was good however, which we realized by the time we got into Milan and we went straight to class with all our luggage and the clothes we slept in. During lunch we showered and I took a quick run to get all my nervous energy out.

I have had about 3 hours of sleep (non-consecutively) in the past day in a frigid airport and have some work for class to do, so I am going to end this here. The moral of the story is: don’t depend on public transport, take a taxi to the airport. Also pack warm because Paris is uncommonly cold for this time of year and you never know when you have to use a dress for a blanket. I am back in Milan and safe and sound and am ever so happy for this tiny twin sized bed.

Although this was over two weeks ago (it feels like so much more!)... when we were in Rome someone in our group was wearing a WVU shirt. We were walking along to go into the Coliseium and we heard people yelling… then they got closer and we heard “Let’s Go!” and then people understand and shouted back “Mountaineers!”. The group was with a WVU MBA program in Northern Italy and had come to Rome for the weekend. Funny, how small the world can be?

The title to my blog occurred a couple hours ago when my roommate Googled our Fashion Journalism teacher Benedetta Barzini. She speaks amazing English, I think mainly because she grew up and worked in New York when she was modeling. She is really down-to-earth… she told us she wasn’t a big deal or anything, but really… what not-big deals are on the cover of Vogue?

NABA, the school we are at in Milan, is really nice. It isn’t in the city center… it’s probably a 15 minute metro ride away, but it’s probably good to not be in city center so everything isn’t crazy expensive (5 euro for a coffee? no thanks…). Best of all, we have internet at our apartment… but with at least 6 people trying to get on at once, it’s kind of difficult sometimes.

We got to Milan Sunday. Being in Italy on Sunday is vaguely torture. Nothing (NOTHING) is open. We wandered the streets looking for food, only to find some chips and peanuts as apertifs.

Yesterday was BASTILLE DAY (my favorite foreign independence holiday… sorry Cinco de Mayo and Boxing Day (even a real holiday??). I wore blue and white and some waiter said “Bonjour, Madame” so the image I was going for worked.

(Note Bastille Day outfit.)

Milan’s Duomo. Apparently the most impressive of the one million Duomos (churches) we have seen this month.

My roommate and I walked down along the river today and discovered Milan’s “apertif” hour (happy hour). From 7-10 you pay 7 euro and get a drink and a huge spread of a buffet: most places we saw had 12-15 things to chose from (at least) but we had already eaten dinner so we just grabbed a gellato at the end of the street and walked back home.

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The ideal of beauty in architecture in Italy and the us are very
different. In the united states if a building is 30 years old the
owner tears it down and builds a new one. In Italy, they keep their
buildings up for centuries and continue to use them. The apartments
we are staying in are midevil. They are renovated and modernized, but
the buildings themselves are hundreds of years old. I realized I had a
real American point of view when I saw some new construction while on
a train to florence and thought the apartments were way nicer than the
old ones (and probably have wireless Internet).

Being constantly on the go has taken its toll on me officially. This
morning I woke up at 11, sleeping almost ten hours. I had woken up a
lot over the morning… On saturday San giovanni valderno has a street
market that is just insanity. At 7 I was woken up by tools pounding
metal (I live on the main street of the town). I had to run down a
back street to get to the bike trail I run on everyday. The bar was
super crowded when I went to get a coffee. I think the entire town’s
population increased by 400% at 9 am today!

A quick pic taken from my iPhone (the original, the best!) this morning of the market in San Giovanni Valderno.

...doesn’t work very well.

One of the girls from Ohio University (there are 4 girls from there) and I decided in our free weekend in Tuscany we were going to go to Venice… we found a cheap hotel/hostel (It seemed more hotel than hostel) and planned on buying our train ticket from Florence this morning (We had to take a train to Florence first… about 30 minutes typically).

And as much “winging it” when traveling ends up… it didn’t work out. Train tickets to Venice were sold out, save for a +100 euro round-trip first class ticket we weren’t willing to shell out for… we didn’t want to see Venice that badly!

Instead, we had an AWESOME day in Florence, even after I quote ”...Was not impressed by Florence, it did nothing for me.” Florence, to me, isn’t particularly beautiful… it’s kind of a toned-down New York on a different river with some medieval stuff and an old banking family (the Medici). We found so much to do and see, however, mostly in the form of museums and exhibitions but it is kind of what we needed after a week of constant running (Rome, Pisa, Lucca, Sienna, a vineyard, and ALL DAY by the pool yesterday that wiped us out… all within in the past 5-6 days!)

We started heading towards the Salvatore Ferragamo shoe museum. On the way we found a small sign promoting a photography museum and for a student rate of 7.50 Euros we went in. It was AMAZING. Photography is a new passion of mine. There was a huge exhibit this one guy did of a bunch of marine stills… ship wrecks, natives, beach scenes… some of the ones, especially from the South Pacific, were amazing to see (especially ones with the locals in huts and stuff). (PS: Sorry I don’t remember people’s names maybe I will remember later on when I look at ticket stubs. Also I will add pictures). The museum had all these original negatives from the 1800s and stuff… it was so cool to see Rome before restoration on the ancient Roman remains. It also had a great avant-garde section. I think it was important for us to see as fashion majors, because this stuff was so inspiring, some of the pictures would be great inspiration for an ad shoot or something (I kind of have an interest in that as a career!)

We stopped for a panino (sandwich) then made it to the shoe museum, which was AMAZING. The shoes were insanely beautiful and it was so neat to see all the old orders for celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, and Sophia Loren. They also had the wooden casings he made shoes off of from the Duchess of Windsor, Audrey Hepburn, and Drew Berrymore, to name a few. They had a great movie about how he made his shoes by hand and what processes made them so comfortable (a piece of wood to support the sole, which all the weight of the body rests on… less then 2 inches of space to distribute a body’s weight on!).

On the way to the shoe museum we saw an ad for an Impressionist Exhibit at a museum, so we headed there. On the way we stopped at the Costume Museum at the Pitti Palace, an old Medici palace. We went through the Costume Museum, which was really cool. They restored the clothes Cosmi and and Eleanor Medici and their son were buried in from the 1500s (and by restore I mean piece together on a table what hadn’t deteriorated) . I am pretty sure the Pitti Palace was Louis XIV’s inspiration for Versailles… the set-up is kind of the same, the gardens in the back are somewhat similar… but of course, Versailles blows Pitti Palace out of the water!! (Which is what King Louis was going for, I am sure!) ((Catherine Medici and her advisor were buddies with King Louis, so he had to have been influenced by it, even if he never saw it in person…)

We finally made it to the Impressionist Museum, which had a really cool set up that was different from any I had seen before. There was a big interaction thing for both kids and adults… it was called “The Mystery of the Dead Impressionist” (I am not sure who was dead, some famous impressionist I can’t think of… not Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Gangauin… someone who was friends with Van Gogh and Monet, I am guessing… hmmm). Anyway… so you got this basket (and I am going on assumption, I, unfortunately, did not get to play) and you go around and look at all these paintings and play with lights and stuff and figure out who killed this guy. This stems from the whole purpose of the exhibition, which is that they used x-rays and high-tech stuff to prove that Impressionists planned all their art out and didn’t just wing it, like it looks like they did. There was also this awesome Van Gogh doll with a removable ear you “are supposed to give to someone you love”. For anyone who is interested (and if anyone reads this… I hope they do even though it is tres long), they sell cool Impressionist finger puppets a card store on Walnut Street (Krazy Kards maybe it is called??) in Shadyside in Pittsburgh… they also sell a Marie Antoinette doll with a different dress and a pop-off head I am “dying” (haha I am rather tired and thought that was ironic) to have (HINT HINT I WOULD LOVE THAT ANYONE WHO IS READING THIS… PRESENT TIME????).

So that was our fun adventure in Florence. I also walked by some amazing stores I was not appropriately dressed to go in… Dior, Tiffanys, Gucci, Burberry, Armani, Chanel, etc. etc. etc.. I have all the time in the world (or two weeks) to that in Milan starting on Sunday.

I am planning a mega-long run tomorrow morning since I have absolutely nothing to do so I am going to leave Bug Villa (Where I can get on the internet and get eaten alive by mosquitos and hopefully not die of West Nile at the same time) and get ready for bed. Ciao!

Me at the Ferragamo shoe museum!

((Last summer I threw a ton of coins into the Trevii fountain (I am superstitious) and made my return to Rome on Saturday!! Needless to say I threw more in this time as well…)

Just a quick update more than anything. I have been online for about 2 hours and have done little more than look for train fares, etc. for our two free weekends and talk to my best friend, as well as upload pics like MAD on facebook! I thought I would let everyone else on a little of the fun!

We went to Rome this past weekend, which was my second trip to the Italian capital (in the past 365 days, no less!). I LOVE ROME! Not as much as Paris or London, but close. I love Rome thanks to my 3 years of Latin class so I was basically an expert on the subject. We had a Canadian professor from the Rome University of Fine Arts as well as Rome University acting as our guide and telling us about everything.

Things I saw I haven?t before:
-All of the Roman forum
-Various churches (the country of Italy is, as a whole, just filled with churches as New York City is filled with Starbucks ((which I miss like crazy, by the way)).
-Tombs of the Popes under St. Peters
-Other things I will remember later.

I wanted to see the Popes last summer but unfortunately didn?t have time. I snuck down there this time and it was AMAZING. You could just feel the holiness in the room and my friend who went down with me who isn?t Catholic also said the same thing. It was definitely the strongest at John Paul II and St. Peter?s tombs (i mean, it is HIS basillica!)

A few pics, Sienna and a vineyard (As well as my daily morning run) in the morning! Ciao!

Me in Rome at the Coliseum last summer (please remember no luggage = no hairdryer, straightner, make-up, or clothes!)
Me at Roman Baths (so you can see the Fiesole ruins reconstructed kinda) in Bath, England last summer.
Me at the Coliseum this summer!
Design in Italy 2008!!

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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!)

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!