let me bring you up to date

Okidoki here is what we haven't covered:

Venice: was freakin expensive man!! I got there at 9 pm and it was just surreal. I paid an arm and a leg for the vaporetto and when I got off at my stop there was nothing there. Just creapy dark little windy streets. Where people, ya know, don't like speak english or anything. My instructions told me to follow the signs for piazza grassi, but in typical italian fashion there were no signs. I stopped like 5 people until I finally found it. it had NO SIGN, just a little lantern with "albergo san samuele" printed on it. WTF MATE. I ate the worst most overpriced lasagna ever, then went to bed.

The next day I walked to San Marco were people were letting pigeons sit on them and probably all dropped dead a few hours later of some horrid disease. San Marco was amazing, then I walked around for a while, took a nap, then crossed the canal to check out the Accademia, which was obviously closed and underconstruction, so I did some more wandering--all with a map, of course. I had no desire to die.

The next day I lazed around a bit, then headed for the Escuela San Rocco. Then I lost my map. EEK. I weasled my way into the giftshop for free and bought some San Rocco stuff, then checked out another church. I then tried to find my way to the train station to pick up my train tickets and only missed it by a couple hundred yards, WOOT. I am a navigational genius. I then took 2 hours or so to walk back to my hotel from the train station. Then the receptionist was creepy and trying to hit on me so I ran. And by ran I mean I locked myself in my room that he had a spare key to and barricaded the door, HA. TAKE THAT.

At this point I was out of money and tired of traveling, so I ended up canceling my hotel in Milan, and I'm glad I did because I HATED milan. it was ugly. It took me half an hour to figure out where to store my luggage. I bought a map and was trying to orient myself when some girl came asking for directions. I let her look at my map and then she invited me to spend the afternoon with her and her cousins. We went to see if there were any tickets for the last supper (obviously there weren't), then checked out the Duomo, which would have been amazing if it weren't covered in billboard advertisements. I split with them and grabbed some lunch, then walked back to the station and almost missed my train, lol.

Overnight trains are not fun and I am never going on one ever again.

This past week has been busy. I'm too cheap to go to the doctor so I've just been trying to stay off my feet as much as possible. I had some trouble in one of my classes that ended with one student getting suspended and three getting 4 hour detentions, so they all want to, you know, kill me. I tell everyone I'm afraid of getting shived on the playground. Anyways the Dean was supposed to change my classroom and do all this stuff and he never did and things got all confusing so we didn't have class on tuesday. The rest of my week was fine. My thursday afternoon classes were cancelled so I spent an hour sitting with one of my students, Zarema, who is a political refugee from Russia.

Yesterday I finished cleaning my room, and today I am scrubbing our disgusting grease coated kitchen from top to bottom. its a bitch on my skin and nails, but I think well worth the effort.

The rest of the weekend will be spent cleaning and lesson planning and enjoying having the place all to myself.

in the meantime you all need to go to my house and play with the puppy for me.