Midnight train to....Ljubljana

This week has flown by...it really seems like just a day or two ago that we got back from Rimini and San Marino and yet I'm sitting here waiting to walk to the train station to go on another trip! I guess it's a good thing it went by so quickly, because it certainly wasn't my best week here. Nothing all that terrible happened, it was just a lot of little, frustrating things that added up to a terrible Monday and only sightly better Tuesday.

The main problem is the whole law school application process. I got off to such a good, productive start, and then I kind of hit a brick wall in terms of motivation for writing some really fabulously persuasive personal statements. Then two professors I had asked to write recommendations were a little mean (in various ways), which was discouraging. But at this point I've kind of put it on the back burner until I get back from Slovenia...I've rounded up enough recommendations, requested my transcripts, filled in all the easy parts of the many applications...now I just need to finish up the essays and I'm not going to try and force that or I know they won't be well written. But on top of making myself anxious about that, I was in charge of house dinner this week along with Tom and we definitely decided to take on one of the more ambitious menus so far...chicken fried chicken (Tom's little project), mac n cheese, cornbread, and peach cobbler. Cooking for twenty is hard enough. Cooking a southern meal in a country that doesn't really sell cheddar cheese or cornbread mix only compounds the complexity. In leiu of cheddar, Kayla helped me pick a few other cheeses that we hoped would work well together and we also bought a TON of the other necessary dinner ingredients at Panorama (that Italian version of Wal Mart). That whole experience was just stressful based on how much we had to buy (35 peaches, 3 pounds of pasta, bags and bags of flour, pounds of butter and cheese) and how massive that store is. Then we carried it all miles back to Casa Artom.

Being the slow, nervous "chef" I am, I basically camped out in the kitchen all day yesterday trying to pre make as much of the dinner as possible. I cut butter in to tiny squares for cobbler, grated 6ish pounds of cheese for a few hours, pre-mixed the cobbler topping, etc. Luckily the students had class most of the day so I had the kitchen to myself to make as much of a mess and experiment while they were downstairs. I was most nervous about the mac n cheese, so I ended up mixing up the cheese sauce well in advance and when we taste tested it, everyone was really pleasantly surprised...probably myself most of all. Rhianna helped make the cornbread ahead of time so the ovens would be free for mac n cheese and cobbler and Kayla cut all 35 peaches in to tiny slices. Despite all the planning, we still had some oven issues (both in terms of how crappily the ovens here cook and in terms of capacity constraints), and Tom didn't get back from the gym until less than an hour before dinner, so frying the chicken was a hurried, intense little experience. Somehow everything was ready at almost exactly the same time except for the cobbler, which baked as we were eating, and so we sat down to see how it tasted. I was so pleased with how everything turned out. I do not cook often and do not cook much outside of cookies, so mac n cheese + cobbler was taking on a lot for me. People really seemed to enjoy it, though, and most people had seconds of the mac n cheese while we were waiting on the cobbler. The recipe I used for cobbler said "serves 4" so I multiplied it by 5, after all, there are 20 of us, 6 of whom are very hungry boys. We had so much cobbler...you'd die if you saw how much it made. We killed one giant dish of it last night with vanilla gelato and everyone ate the rest for breakfast/lunch today...so I think they liked it : ) I'm so glad it went well...I would've felt bad if my house dinner had been the first disastrous one...but I don't think I'll be throwing my hat in the ring for the task again any time soon!

Today was a lazy day...just a few trips to the grocery and hanging out in the house...I'm trying to rest since this weekend's trip is a little non-traditional (and my backpack is super heavy). Our train goes from Venice to Slovenia tonight at 9:30, but will get in at 2am, at which point we'll hopefully find the hostel really quickly and then crash. Then we're spending all day tomorrow and Saturday in Slovenia, but taking the train home late Saturday/early Sunday (2am to 7am). For some reason the Venice-Slovenia-Venice route is only served by night trains despite the mere 4 to 5 hour distance...so, we're being flexible (we=me, McKinley, Kayla). I think it should be a fun trip though...Slovenia is supposed to be beautiful and we're staying in this cool hostel that used to be a prison (received rave reviews from the kids who went from my group when I studied here). The only potential downer? 50+% chance of rain all day tomorrow (I swear my travel luck, weather wise, is so much worse this time than last...). If I don't melt, stay tuned for pictures of Slovenia!