Food and Travel Blogs...
...make me miss Italy more than anything I can ever imagine. But, being miles and years away from being there or being able to afford going back, all I can do is gaze longingly at the pictures posted by lucky ex-pats who live there now.
And, of course, make Italian food. Via racheleats, I've stumbled upon the italian dish, which has supplied me with inspiration for tonight's dinner. SInce my dad refused to let me cook for him for Father's Day (he wanted to go out), this is my post-Father's Day gift to him: roasted pepper & mozzarella bites, spaghetti with roasted tomato, garlic, and pancetta, and nutella and banana pastry pockets.
I'm very, very excited to make these things. They're all incredibly and surprisingly easy to make, which is great as a starting point for my goal to eventually pursue harder recipes (macarons, cannoli, making my own puff pastry dough, etc etc etc.) Italian food is brilliant in that it provides recipes ranging in various levels of simplicity (or complexity), but amongst all ranges there remains a high quality of taste (:
...and the wonderful part of all this recipe searching is that it's lead me to even MORE italiaphile blogs, including ms. adventures in italy, bleeding espresso, and miss expatria.
On a totally different note, I've been jobhunting lately. There was a significant sag in productivity for the past month due to the fact that my laptop, which held the only copy of my revised/updated cover letter and resume, had broken down in Italy. My dad took it to China to fix it, but they failed, and it wasn't until two days ago that it became functional again.
EIther way, I started an application for Peacecorps, but I don't know if I'll finish it. Part of me wants to challenge myself, see if I can really do 27 months in a country, possibly as the only American there, possibly with no running water/electricity/amenities that I love so much (ie tampons that have plastic applicators...if they don't have them in Europe, they won't have them in Africa...). The other half of myself is scared shitless, and feels sick in the stomach every time I think about leaving behind everything and everyone I hold dear for so long. This isn't study abroad, after all, where I lived in a complex filled with other students and my main worries were making it to class on time and figuring out where the best clubs and bars were.
But then again, it's always been a bit of a dream for me to go to Africa and do volunteer work there. I think it would just be so fulfilling to be able to go and a) experience something so completely different in culture and locale, and b) do work that actually takes place somewhere that desperately needs help (not to say that we don't have places like that in the US...just saying that the situation there is far graver)
Then of course there's always the fact that it looks impressive on a resume. I hate to admit this is a factor because it makes the fact that I'm considering Peacecorps so trite and shallow, but it's true, and it's something that I have to take into consideration, especially given the fact that I am on the lower end of the spectrum for T25 law schools.
In any case, there's plenty of other jobs I'm applying for. It's just something that I started thinking about recently, and it really made me think about the kind of person I am. /lame. :P
Still obsessed with tumblr. I can't stop looking at it and fiddling with it. Once I have more of my dSLR photos from Cinque Terre, Greece, Berlin, Istanbul, and Sicily uploaded and ready I'm probably going to unleash a deluge of travel photos onto it...good thing my sister taught me how to use the queue option (I swear to god my sister should be the older one...she teaches me so many things, hahaha!)
And, of course, make Italian food. Via racheleats, I've stumbled upon the italian dish, which has supplied me with inspiration for tonight's dinner. SInce my dad refused to let me cook for him for Father's Day (he wanted to go out), this is my post-Father's Day gift to him: roasted pepper & mozzarella bites, spaghetti with roasted tomato, garlic, and pancetta, and nutella and banana pastry pockets.
I'm very, very excited to make these things. They're all incredibly and surprisingly easy to make, which is great as a starting point for my goal to eventually pursue harder recipes (macarons, cannoli, making my own puff pastry dough, etc etc etc.) Italian food is brilliant in that it provides recipes ranging in various levels of simplicity (or complexity), but amongst all ranges there remains a high quality of taste (:
...and the wonderful part of all this recipe searching is that it's lead me to even MORE italiaphile blogs, including ms. adventures in italy, bleeding espresso, and miss expatria.
On a totally different note, I've been jobhunting lately. There was a significant sag in productivity for the past month due to the fact that my laptop, which held the only copy of my revised/updated cover letter and resume, had broken down in Italy. My dad took it to China to fix it, but they failed, and it wasn't until two days ago that it became functional again.
EIther way, I started an application for Peacecorps, but I don't know if I'll finish it. Part of me wants to challenge myself, see if I can really do 27 months in a country, possibly as the only American there, possibly with no running water/electricity/amenities that I love so much (ie tampons that have plastic applicators...if they don't have them in Europe, they won't have them in Africa...). The other half of myself is scared shitless, and feels sick in the stomach every time I think about leaving behind everything and everyone I hold dear for so long. This isn't study abroad, after all, where I lived in a complex filled with other students and my main worries were making it to class on time and figuring out where the best clubs and bars were.
But then again, it's always been a bit of a dream for me to go to Africa and do volunteer work there. I think it would just be so fulfilling to be able to go and a) experience something so completely different in culture and locale, and b) do work that actually takes place somewhere that desperately needs help (not to say that we don't have places like that in the US...just saying that the situation there is far graver)
Then of course there's always the fact that it looks impressive on a resume. I hate to admit this is a factor because it makes the fact that I'm considering Peacecorps so trite and shallow, but it's true, and it's something that I have to take into consideration, especially given the fact that I am on the lower end of the spectrum for T25 law schools.
In any case, there's plenty of other jobs I'm applying for. It's just something that I started thinking about recently, and it really made me think about the kind of person I am. /lame. :P
Still obsessed with tumblr. I can't stop looking at it and fiddling with it. Once I have more of my dSLR photos from Cinque Terre, Greece, Berlin, Istanbul, and Sicily uploaded and ready I'm probably going to unleash a deluge of travel photos onto it...good thing my sister taught me how to use the queue option (I swear to god my sister should be the older one...she teaches me so many things, hahaha!)