an encounter on the bus... and then some

so the italian transportation system is pretty lax... you're supposed to buy tickets and validate them before you get on a bus/train/tram but since officials rarely check (esp on buses) we have gotten pretty lax about using the tickets that the ADA gave us for our busrides to and from ballet. eventually, it was going to catch up with us. and it did. monday after ballet. neither lizbie nor i have brought a ticket on the bus in a while, but monday, an official got on the bus and started checking that everyone had validated their ticket. we didn't have any money or passports on us and he didn't speak english as well as he thought, but in the end one of our friends used an extra bus ticket on us. really, it could've been a lot worse... like 40 euro in fines each. we'd been riding the free wave for a while; i'm surprised we didn't get in trouble sooner.

tuesday night i went to my very first wine tasting. what better place to first experience that than in tuscany? not much to say about that; we got a little lost on the walk there, but eventually found our way. then we tried 2 wines, one of which has a '93' rating from wine spectator magazine. i guess that's pretty bangin? they served some antipasti with our wine which was really good as well. i'm probably going to go back to the enoteca (wine bar) and ship a case home before i leave.

wednesday night was our last tramanto. tramanto means sunset in italian... don't really know why it was picked as the name for these events, but i digress. there's usually 3 scheduled a semester and the events core for that week has to plan it. this time around, the events core asked us, if we felt so inclined, to create a page for the memory book that is housed in the living room at the ADA. for those of us who did, we read aloud a portion or all of the page we created and then put it into the book, which is really a binder with page protectors. my contribution was inspired by the monthly "hey, it's ok!" in glamour, but fitted to be ADA specific. afterwards, the core surprised us with superlatives they had created for everyone and handed them out on certificates. i won "most likely to be hit on by an italian man," which is a fitting theme for the semester due to the blonde hair.

tonight was our last cabaret. i MC'ed with my "twin", eva, as well as performed. eva dressed in my leotard, goucher dance jacket and some leggings of mine, while i wore all black and her commedia act. we kept it simple, just introducing the performances, because sometimes, at previous cabarets, the MCs were a little over the top. lizbie and i decided to recreate the "daft bodies" video. it was fun, but now i can't completely wash away the words we wrote in PERMANENT marker on our bodies.

it's unreal that all this will be over so soon. in two weeks from tomorrow i'll be on a plane back to the us. i still can't wrap my head around it. but it is inspiring me to live even more in the moment, so i don't miss out on a single thing.