Skip to main content

Ticket to Milan: booked. See you in September, Italy!

I found out that I'll be staying in Miramont for the rest of the month, so I took that as an opportunity to plan the next leg of my journey. I need to be in Modigliana, Italy the first week of September to start my WWOOFing adventure. I bought a train ticket to Milan from Paris, and then will take Italian transportation (train/bus) to my final destination.

I'm pretty excited for this train journey. It's about 7 1/2 hours, and leaves the Gare de Lyon at 6:30am. It travels through rural France before crossing the Alps. We pass through a crazy long tunnel before hitting Italy. You can read more about the journey here. (seat61.com is a great resource for train travel in Europe)

Not a bad time to wait for a train
I've been trying to get some local traveling in, too. Last week I took a quick trip to Bordeaux with Bubbles, my bunkmate. We were dropped off at the closest station and shortly found out that our train had been canceled and that the next one wasn't coming for two hours.

The station didn't have Wi-Fi, it was a Sunday evening, and the only restaurant open in Marmande was a Caribbean Cafe. We stopped to get the code, bought a couple of drinks (aka espresso for me, virgin pina colada for her) and bummed around there for a little while. We finally boarded our train after 10pm, and arrived in Bordeaux a little before 11. We checked into an Airbnb for the night and started our next day pretty early.

Our day in Bordeaux consisted of buying pastries, doing some shopping, and looking for public bathrooms (near impossible). I discovered the beauty of Hema, a Dutch store similar to Target. Toothbrush for 75 cents! Muesli for 2 euro! Definitely one of the highlights of our trip. For lunch we ate at a noodle shop similar to Chipotle, where you pick the type of noodles/rice, the proteins, the add-ins, and the sauce. Pretty good, especially after wandering around for so long trying to find something reasonably priced and delicious. Other highlights included the classic cathedral visit, ice cream, and free Wi-Fi by the Apple Store so I could latergram all my photos. We took the train back to Marmande at 4:30pm and picked up a couple of new counselors on the way.

The day before Bordeaux we stopped in Marmande at Decathlon, one of the most magical places I've experienced so far. Think REI, but with ridiculously low prices. My newest acquisition is a small backpack I purchased for 2.95 euro, and is already being put to good use:


On the way back from Bordeaux

At the beginning of August we got a huge group of new counselors. Several from France, a French speaker from Benin, and a handful of new Americans- one from Denver, one from Omaha (who went to the University of Kansas) and one from Appleton, Wisconsin. Midwest represent.  The former Jayhawk is my new running buddy, so I'm staying motivated in the mornings. Most of the counselors are veterans from other AmVil camps, and bring a ton of new energy and different ideas to the camp. I'm really happy to have them here.


We have three days left with these kids, and then the last group comes on Tuesday.

This group is really smart and into camp. They're a lot of fun, and I've developed some great relationships with them. I have a perpetual shoulder tapping contest with one kid. Every time he would catch me tapping his should he would say "I view you!" However, I subbed for his ESL class yesterday while the normal counselor was off. Now, he says "I SAW you!" Victory.

It has been abnormally rainy this session, so on my days off I've spent a lot time reading and sleeping. Last Saturday I took a hike after lunch and found a tree full of plums. I of course loaded my pockets to bring them back to camp.


Today is my last day off this session, and I hope it clears up enough in the afternoon so I can go for a walk. Otherwise, another counselor and I are headed into town for dinner to check out the African Restaurant. Will report back :)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tripaversary 2018: A life update, a throwback to the Balkans in 2015-16, and plans for the next adventure.

Three years. Three years since I hopped on an Icelandair plane to Europe, not knowing when I’d be back. Fifteen months later (not including a quick hop over in May 2016) I landed back in the states and picked up where I left off. As is tradition, I wanted to give you all a quick update on what’s been going on in the last year since I wrote a two year travelversary post in 2017 . I want to acknowledge that living in the United States is kinda rough right now. There’s been a lot of bad news coming out of DC this week, and it’s hard not to let it seep into your psyche, affect your daily routine, and darken your thoughts of what will happen next. I had the privilege of hearing NYT columnist Thomas Friedman speak on Tuesday evening. This was after the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim ban, and it wasn’t just me in the audience who was feeling hopeless, for lack of a better term. I think all of us were looking towards Friedman, a Minnesota native, to give us something to l...

"Io non parlo Italiano. Un poco, poco, poco.": My adventures in learning Italian.

The first of many, many, espresso My first hour in Italy, I successfully ordered an espresso, thanks to the brief time I spent listening to "Learn Italian!" podcasts while driving to the Capitol on cold February mornings. That was essentially the extent of my Italian. Since then, it's been two weeks of trial and error, mixing Spanish and French into what I think might  be Italian, and sitting quietly at dinner, absorbing the rapid fire of conversation from my coworkers and new friends. As anyone who has immersed themselves in a situation where they don't speak the language might know, it's very easy to zone out and stop concentrating. I learned to zone out this way at American Village- when I pretended to not know any French, I really practiced it by not even trying to understand what a camper was trying to ask me. "I don't speak French! Try again..." I continued this habit of zoning out in my new Italian environment mostly at the dinner tabl...

An introduction

Any time I tried to start a diary, I would immediately relinquish all the vital details of my current life. "Dear Diary, my name is Sophie Wallerstedt. I am 11 years old and in the fifth grade. I live in Louisburg, KS with my mom and dad, my sister Jane and my brother Max, and five cats, a dog..." I never got very far. I ended up boring myself with my own mundane details, and as a result I have multiple journals tucked away in various boxes and bookcases, only the first few pages used. But blogs could be different, right? This trip is going to be long, and I want to keep track of it, but I'm horrible with writing things down long term (unless it's MyFitnessPal - I have 2014 in my back pocket). So every time I told someone about my big trip, I also said, "you can follow me on my blog!" The more I said it, the more I believed it. Accountability, friends. That's what you're here for. Hopefully you'll also be entertained. ...