C’era una volta in Sicilia…

The Sicilian sun was already shining through the window when I woke up today. Claudia and I spent the morning with some friends wandering around Vittoria, her hometown. Outside the Teatro Comunale, the city theater, we found a carretto Siciliano, a traditional Sicilian cart, only about five minutes after Claudia had been telling me as we checked out a tourist gift shop filled with replicas of these carts that there are pretty much none of them left in Sicily. Together we stopped at a cafe for some coffee with cinnamon, something I'd never tried before. We visited a beautiful old church and admired a view over the fields surrounding Vittoria. We also got a kick out of the locals and their driving skills. We had lunch with Claudia's parents and I can't deny that the home cooking is a going to be a major bonus of celebrating Christmas with an Italian family.

In the evening, we went out with some friends and checked out an art exhibit featuring work by the Sicilian artist Eva Montanari who art has been shown across Europe and the US. The exhibition was called C’era una volta, or Once upon a time, and depicted fantastic scenes from many fables. I particularly enjoyed the magical teapot scene on your left. After dinner with Claudia’s parents, Claudia and I went out with her cousin Valeria and her friend Serena and I tried some typical Sicilian cinnamon-flavored liquor. Everywhere we went Claudia ran into all sorts of old friends. I noticed that the concept of personal space is completely lost on Sicilians. When they greet each other, they rub their palms across their friends' cheeks, grab their chins, pet their hair, and sometimes even stroke their shoulders and poke their stomachs. Fortunately, it seems they reserve this for people they've already known for a bit. All the people I met were very kind, the food was wonderful, the city was beautiful, and the weather was excellent. Everything seemed so stereotypically quaint and Italian. I couldn’t believe I was really here to spend my Christmas. My first day in Sicily just felt somewhat magical, like something that might be captured in one of Montanari’s paintings.

Arrivederci!

All good things must come to an end, and so today I had to say goodbye to some of my dearest friends here in Italy. It was bittersweet: on one hand I felt incredibly fortunate to have had them in my life, but on the other hand it seemed unfair to have to leave them all so soon after we'd met. Still, we made the most of our last night together, sharing dinner, drinks, an evening out, and a very late night of YouTube videos to compare national senses of humor. By the time I found myself in lab at 8:30am, I felt incredibly exhausted but had a smile across my face and my heart. We always say at MIT that you can only pick two of the following: school (or in my case, lab), sleep, and friends. I felt as though I were back in my MIT environment and had obviously made my selection last night and this morning. After so many months away from the sensation, it felt good in that masochistic MIT way. This afternoon I dragged my suitcase with me to the cafeteria and had the good fortune to eat lunch together with my friends one last time. Afterward, my closest friend even accompanied me all the way to the bus stop and gave me a couple wonderfully appreciated hugs. It touched me that as I closed out my six-month stay here in Pisa I didn't have to take the final steps out of town alone.

I can't deny I'll miss them loads, but leaving them puts me that much closer to the seeing my old MIT friends for one last term and it also brings me that much closer to my return to Europe. I'm certain some of us will meet again. As it turns out, I already have an invitation for Thanksgiving 2009 and several guests who've promised to visit me next September in Paris. Pisa's been wonderful, but I suppose it's time to close this chapter of adventures and open the next. After all, I'm not flying home until January 18. As they say in Italian, arrivederci, which means to the next time we see each other!

The linguistic mélange that has become my modus operandi

Sometimes it’s good to have some ex-patriate friends, even if not from the same country, most especially those who share your native language. It's great to know someone who can really understand certain experiences, like being told in Italian, "My how you are big!" (the adjectives big and small are used to refer to height and not weight) and realizing for the first time that you’re starting to get rusty in your native language. While chatting with my Austrian friends, I kept on forgetting English words or finding myself uncertain of the appropriate phrasing to the extent that they even teased me about it. Last week while preparing for my interview in Paris (which was conducted in English) I unintentionally began throwing in French vocabulary words with English pronunciation. Worse yet, I didn’t even realize until my mother caught my mistakes while I was practicing with her. I’ve also begun using strange phrasing such as, “Would you like to take a coffee with me?” and “I’m becoming habituated to this,” both of which are more or less direct translations from what one would say in Italian when trying to express these ideas. It’s good to know at times like this that no, I'm not completely crazy. Or at least, this is not an indication of whether or not I am.

Proud to be an American

Across cultural, political, and geographic divides, we can all sing along to Born in the U.S.A., all cheer on the same Americans at the Olympics, and all feel pride when we look up at our flag on the Fourth of July. Though much may seem to divide us on a daily basis across the US, as Obama said in his acceptance speech, we are the United States of America. We share a sense of unity one may never find within the European Union. Think back to September 11, for instance: When the twin towers toppled, it wasn’t New York that was under attack but America. We all felt touched by the horrors of that day, whether from an urban central or the most rural stretches of America. I do believe our money reads well E Pluribus Unim: from many diverse backgrounds, we are one nation.

My Austrian friends were talking about how funny it seems to them that Americans are so proud of their nationality. They’re proud of being Austrian too, they said, but it’s not such a big deal. Just last week my Spanish friend was talking to me about differences between national responses to terrorist attacks in the US and Madrid and he too said that it seemed strange that Americans responded with such nationalistic pride, with flags suddenly appearing on windows, cars, and many articles of clothing. It is true: after the terrorist attacks, I proudly, perhaps even defiantly, placed a flag on my window and began wearing the stars and stripes with some degree of regularity.

It occurred to me that for us, nationality isn’t just something we were born into, and it’s not just something we can take for granted. Sure, I was born in New York, and my parents and even most of my grandparents were born into this citizenship, but in the not-so-distant past most Americans’ families made (and many are still making) great sacrifices so that we could call our country home. Our nationality is something earned.

And it was interesting to think about my nationality in this way. For goodness sake, the governor of California, as my friends pointed out, is an actor from Austria. The president-elect’s father was a Kenyan immigrant! Did you know that this year Kenya declared Thursday, November 6, the day after Obama’s victory was announced, as a national holiday in his honor? It sounds funny, but think about how powerful of an idea that is—you too can move from a country as small in the international political arena as Kenya and raise your child to be the leader of the most powerful country on earth. How many times in human history has this been possible?

Ours truly is a nationality unlike any other. There is no American “face,” no American genotype, and even fairly little in the way of national history and traditions. We are united in our differences, in our belief in the ideals upon which our nation was created, and in the faith that there will always come a brighter tomorrow. It’s a nationality which brings people together not so much around a shared past as a common focus on the future.

I think our nationality offers a fresh, exciting launching pad from which to explore the world. For us, anything is possible. True, this means that perhaps only in the US can you find laws such as the one in Pennsylvania which forbids citizens to sleep on top of their refrigerators on their front lawn. For more entertainment, you can always check out dumblaws.com as I did with my Austrian friends. America may sometimes be quite silly, but it’s also quite optimistic. We see ourselves as living in a land of endless possibility, an attitude which fosters a national optimism on which I thrive. Even if my country has made some awful mistakes, even when my government shames me and I watch my fellow countrymen maintain an embarrassing image of us overseas, I am incredibly proud to be an American. I am most certainly an American at heart and I always will be, no matter where I choose to live.

“The Queen is not amused” and Other Viennese Adventures

At 5:45am on Friday morning I was already dozing off as my train left Pisa Centrale. I hadn’t exactly slept since flying home from Paris as that evening was my last opportunity to see one of my closest friends before he left Pisa for the holidays. A few hours later, I found myself in a café in Rome with my breakfast of a cream-filled croissant and a caffè al ginseng. All in all, it would have been hard to justify lamenting over the raindrops I had to brave before returning to the station. A few more hours, an extra train ride, and one flight later, I arrived in Vienna.

As I walked through the gates at the airport, I was greeted by two friendly faces, Susi and Marie. When I wrote about my adventures in Prague, I briefly mentioned that I’d met a few friendly Austrians. These were those very same girls, all these months later. We’ve been writing ever since we met in our hostel that evening in late August. Leaving the airport, we headed back to Susi’s to drop off my things. Marie then showed me around Vienna for a couple of hours. We walked through the campus and split a warm soft pretzel at our first Christkindlmarkt, the Christmas markets for which Vienna is famous. We wandered through the university and stopped at another Christkindlmarkt in front of the Rathaus, Vienna’s city hall, which was magnificently decorated for Christmas. In fact, the entire façade had been converted into a large Advent calendar. Every night in December at 7pm one can watch the next window being opened to reveal a new Christmas painting and officially take Austrians one day closer to Christmas (which interestingly enough is celebrated on December 24). We passed Parlament, Vienna’s grandiose Parliament building before which presides a large statue of the Greek goddess Athena. Later that night when I opened my email, I discovered that I would indeed have the chance to spend the next few years living in Paris. Even though these girls and I had only spent a single evening together, they were so happy for me when they found out. It was amazing to have such friends with which to share my exciting news.

On Saturday morning, Susi and I set out to explore Vienna but were sidetracked by a beautiful old-fashioned chair we found discarded near her apartment. Susi decided this was to become her throne from which she could decree, “The Queen is not amused,” an expression Austrian people love to say in English whose origins none of us could quite elucidate. After returning to her apartment with the newfound treasure, our day began. We passed several beautiful historic sites including the Vienna Opera house on our way downtown. Reaching the center city, she first pointed out the Hotel Sacher which sells the Sachertorte, a famous dark chocolate sponge cake with fruit filling and chocolate icing. The original cake, whose official recipe is still kept secret, was first made in 1832 by Franz Sacher and is considered to this day a Viennese delicacy. Walking along streets crowded with tourists and Christmas shoppers, we reached the square that houses both Hass Haus and Stephansdom, a large modern building and Austria’s most famous gothic cathedral respectively. After a brief tour through the church, we continued our travels and soon reached Hofburg, the imperial palace and official residence of the President of Austria. This area has been in use for Austrian governments since the late 1200s though the building itself has been expanded many and has seen many changes over the years.

That afternoon Marie met us at another Christkindlmarkt outside the Nationalbibliothek, the National Library. Together we ate kasekrainer, a type of bratwurst filled with cheese, a delicious local specialty. Afterward we wandered along some major shopping streets where I discovered that fancy, exotic looseleaf tea in Vienna is remarkably inexpensive. Marie and I spent some time late that afternoon in another Christkindlmarkt (they’re everywhere in Vienna) where we ate some traditional Viennese cream-based desserts. We arrived at Susi’s apartment to share some kaiserschmarrn, a typical Viennese dish of pancakes sliced in small pieces and served with jam and powdered sugar.

After dinner we went to the train station to meet Eva, the third Austrian I’d met in Prague who had just arrived in from Linz in northern Austria to spend the weekend with us. It was actually quite remarkable how much Prague’s architecture and its public transportation system resembled Vienna, and I was particularly amused given that I was touring Vienna with the girls I’d met in Prague. That night a bunch of friends gathered at Marie’s apartment. Over several rounds of Uno they even began teaching me some basic German. I found that Austrian German is much softer than pure German, and by the end of the night I was aching to actually begin studying this language too. For now, my friends left me with a list of words to study:
grün (green), gelb (yellow), rot (red), blau (blue), schwarz (black), weiß (white), violet, braun (brown), orange, bitte (please), danke, (thanks) and Ach du heilige scheiße (Oh, holy shit)

On Sunday, Eva, Marie, and I went to Schloss Belvedere, an imperial castle built in the 1700s which now serves as an art museum. We saw a special exhibit in Lower Belvedere, Gustav Klimt and the Kunstschau, commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Kunstschau modern art exhibition in Vienna. I was particularly enticed by Klimt’s Der Kuss (The Kiss), a remarkable painting. Upon leaving the museum, we stopped at the Christkindlmarkt outside Upper Belvedere to share some chocolate covered strawberries while I drank some punsch, a warm, flavored wine served all over Vienna in the Christmas season. One can choose from a variety of flavors and this stand happened to offer an irresistible one called “After Eight,” flavored with mint and a large bar of chocolate, and served with whipped cream.

Together, Marie and I went on to the Schloss Schonbrunn, the castle of Kaiser Franz Joseph I and Kaiserin Elisabeth, known as “Sisi.” We walked up to the Gloriette, built on a hill behind the castle in 1775, from which point we admired an impressive vista over the city of Vienna. I hadn’t really appreciated just how large this city is until that moment. Before we left we took a tour of the Christkindlmarkt outside the castle where I finally learned just what is the Christkindl: the Christ child who comes on Christmas Eve and delivers the Christmas gifts to Austrian children. In Austria, Santa Claus and a frightening second character for the bad children arrive together at the start of December to usher in the Christmas season. It’s kind of like Santa’s sneak preview appearance before he sets off to deliver presents to all the other children who expect his arrival a few weeks later.

Escaping the cold that evening, Marie and I visited Susi who had prepared some wiener schnitzel, a traditional breaded meat. Afterward Marie and I ventured over to Donauinsel, an island on the Danube River where concerts are held in the summer. From here we found Eva’s brother’s apartment where we spent some time before Eva, Marie, and I returned to Susi’s together. Late that night Marie took me home with her since the next morning she would be the one taking me to the airport.

After a full weekend of introductions to many Austrian specialties, I thought it would be fun to share something American together, so we woke early and cooked some French toast (despite the name, a thoroughly Americanized dish) which we ate with apples, cinnamon, ginger, and whipped cream. As we walked to the metro after our regal breakfast, I noticed several packs of obviously trendy high-school-aged girls on their way to school, each sporting streaks of a vibrant color in her hair. It’s apparently much more common and seemingly less rebellious for people in Vienna to dye parts of their hair in various neon shades. The metro stations in Vienna are also notably energy-efficient: the escalators sense movement and only run (or only run at full speed) when people want to ride them!

On the plane, applause, some whistling, and a few “bravo!”s as I landed in Rome reminded me that I had indeed returned to Italy. I just smiled and shook my head. I couldn’t believe how lucky I’d been to have met such nice girls fairly randomly in Prague. Though I decided to take these girls up on the offer of a free bed in Vienna because it sounded like a great chance to see a new city, I hadn’t realized just how awesome they were. Having friends scattered across different cities makes Europe feel a lot smaller. I can’t wait to have the chance to return the favor and host them once I return to Europe. Between the friends, the beautiful architecture, the new language to learn, the different but distinctly enjoyable cuisine, and the amazingly affordable tea, I have more than sufficient motivation to plan a return trip to Vienna before the next year comes to a close.

Oh, Paris...

It's been four years to the day since the letter arrived from MIT.

I got in.

Grad School Interviews

When it rains, it pours, or so the saying goes. After months of emails, applications, and waiting, this week I had some activity on both of the grad school fronts I’ve been pursuing. Monday night I learned that Prof. Henry Markram invited me to attend Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Hiring Days, an interview and orientation session held on January 15-16 in Lausanne, Switzerland. This really was quite an honor as Prof. Markram is an incredibly exciting professor. He is head of the Blue Brain project, a high-profile project sponsored by IBM and run through the Brain-Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). This project, described as the neuroscience equivalent of the Human Genome project, seeks to map out the neural microcircuitry of the human brain and reconstruct the brain through computer simulations. The project is ground-breaking and joining it would be no less than thrilling.

Twenty-four hours after getting the exciting news, I was in the air on my way to Paris yet again. Of the 129 initial applicants to the Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris Ile-de-France (ENP), I was one of the final six left by the time Interview Day came around. After sending in a paper application in late September, I had also phone-interviewed in mid-November and finally there came this: an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris, but not exactly a vacation. After arriving in the heart of Paris shortly after midnight, I got a few hours sleep before a long day of interviews, presentations, lab visits, and finally a three-hour dinner with the ENP staff (at an undeniably quaint, quite enjoyable restaurant in the 11^th Arrondissement called Chez Paul, 13 rue de Charonne). The experience was very much like dangling a particularly savory piece of bacon just out of reach of a very hungry puppy; I could hardly bear hearing all about the program all day without knowing whether or not I will be accepted.

By the time the day was done, I was very pleased to meet up with Jeremi, my good friend and fellow Fifth Wester (in other words, a person from my floor in my dorm) who’s studying abroad at Ecole Polytechnique this year. (On a side note, I had a very happy piece of news that evening when checking my email: indeed a place has been reserved for me to move back onto Fifth West, the place I’ve called home for the past three years, so that I can live with my best friends for my very last semester at MIT.) Jeremi and I settled on a heated, covered outdoor deck of a bar to sip vin chaud and enjoy the company of someone so very familiar so far from home. It was incredibly refreshing to spend a bit more time with someone who needs so little explanation to understand me so completely. By the time the bar closed, the metro had already stopped running so we took a late-night meander through Paris while continuing our conversation. Wandering aimlessly through cities with friends has always been one of my favorite activities (just check facebook). When you make that city Paris, it’s hard to find much about which to complain.

Despite the late hour at which I ultimately returned home, I made an early start for my free day in Paris. After a quick tour through the Luxembourg Gardens, I found the famous English-language bookshop right by Notre Dame and immediately understood why my Scuola Normale friend majoring in Italian and French Literature at Oxford spoke so highly of the place. Just look at how many books have been jammed into this place! And in perusing through the store, I had to resist the temptation to buy at least a few of them. Supposedly this store is also a great way to find yourself an Anglophone, presumably lit-geeky (more or less the anti-MIT-style, potentially more socially adept) network, which could come in quite handy if living in Paris. After this I took a grand tour of central Paris, hitting many of the major tourist sights and generally walking the streets to get a feel for mid-day Parisian life in the Christmas season. Today I even wore my glasses just so that I could soak in as much detail as possible in this city so rich with beauty. (That's la Madeleine, the church in the center of la Place de la Madeleine, pictured on the left. There are some trendy and quite pricey shops in this area of Paris.)

Finally I caught up with my friend from Ecole Normale Supérieure, Gabriel, over coffee at a little café for my last couple hours before flying home. For the first time together we managed to speak exclusively French. Though living in Italy obliterated my ability to speak Spanish, it has somehow improved my ability to speak French. I found myself seated with a native French speaker, chatting and laughing, feeling quite relaxed (even if still far from fluent) in the language I’ve so loved and studied so long. It really made me smile and was a wonderful way to close up my sixth and final visit to Paris in 2008.