Feb 5

I don’t know that staying out all night was a great idea because I was definitely working on a pretty good cold before hand, but now I can hardly talk.

Today was the first day of classes and they seem like they are going to be pretty good. The professors here kind of make me wish that I had gone to a big university at home, because then they could afford these kinds of profs. Not to say that profs at Etown are bad, but when the guy teaching my Globalization course is a former European Committee minister, its just a little hard to be better than that.

The professor for my EU class has three goals for us, and I think that we can all agree to them.
Number 1: Travel
Number 2: Improve our Spanish
Lastly Number 3: Learn something

That’s not to say he isn’t going to teach us, because he definitely is an amazing professor, he just knows that there’s no better way to learn the EU than to travel in it.

What really made my day though was a little change in itinerary. A few weeks ago I scheduled a flight to Amsterdam with Molly and her boyfriend Michael and the next day found out that I had my Language final. Well that weekend was supposed to be this Friday, Molly is still going and making up the final in April, but I changed my flight for a 30 euro fee. That sounds a little extreme, but they absolutely will not change test dates for us, the date that Molly is taking hers is a make-up day for anyone who does not do well on the Art or Language finals. So instead, I’m going to Rome and it only cost me 60 Euro more, 30 in fees and 30 in the difference of the flight.

That’s not nearly the good part.

When I get to Italy I have some time to explore Rome but then I’m hopping a train to Salerno- a small city I’ve heard of a few times before in my life with no one I know and in a country where I don’t speak the language. Alone.

But not really alone, because there are also going to be 175 cyclists there preparing for the 4th stage of the Giro d’Italia the next morning. And for the next three days after that I will be doing the same, traveling town to town watching cyclists like Basso, Ulrich and Perez tear up hills that I would consider mountains and grind up mountains I would consider impassable. Then a few days later I’ll be off to the USA. That should be good enough inspiration to get on the bike for the rest of the summer.

I promise to have more pictures of Barcelona than of men in spandex. Te prometo.

Word of the Day: Ciclismo- no OLN not the Cyclism- simply cycling

If there was one thing that could have lifted my spirits on a day when I was so sick and tired it was realizing that I was going to get to see one of the greatest bike races in the world.