Off We Go!!

I may not be posting or texting for the next couple of days because me and all of the extended family are headed to Italy for a few days and then we are visiting the Gasser vacation home in the mountains! I'm not sure if there is Internet access out there and I can only use the wifi so I don't get international charges. Here are a few pictures from today's excursion to Germany to hold you off for the next week if I can't make it to a computer :)

Good Morning from Switzerland!

It's not exactly morning here, really it's 3:20 in the afternoon, but I know all my friends are just walking up. It's been a productive two days here in Baar! After arriving, we immediately hit downtown Zurich to see the shops and be immersed into the local culture. We got to see some of the most expensive shops, my favorite so far being Tom Ford, and walk the cobblestone streets. This place is pretty much straight out of a postcard. Panoramic mountain views, beautiful Lake Zurich, and the sound of ringing cow bells surround us. The food has been beyond great and I have some new dishes I want to try out at home. And of course, they serve wine with all their meals, so I can't complain!

Last night we watched as the sun went down and lit up the mountains and visited the old city of Zug. The old feel of the buildings and the little shops and outdoor cafes along the lake were so charming, and paired with couples romancing each other it was what my new friend Nicoletta would call, "So kitch!" (Cheesy/corny/over the top)

Today we made the scenic drive out to a convent/cathedral with some of the most ornate decorations I've ever seen! They even had their own stable where we got to pet some horses. :) We ended up enjoying lunch at a little cafe/bakery called Cafe Tulipan. We ordered these very light pizzas with a long German name that I can't remember anymore. I do remember though that they were fantastic and completely un-American.

It's my uncle Caeb's birthday today so we're throwing a big party with lots of friends and plenty of food and drink. Can't wait to update everyone on more happenings! Btw, is it just me or does anyone else start thinking in the only other foreign language they know when people are speaking a different language around? I've been thinking in French for two days but they speak Swiss German in our area. Maybe I'm just weird, though I think that's already been established :)

Till tomorrow,
Liz.

A Demain, Etats-Unis!

Well kids, this is it. My very last day in the country before taking off for a 3-week tour of Switzerland. Thanks to family, my short escape to Florida has been nothing short of wonderfully relaxing. They may feel bad for making me sleep on couches for the past three days, but they don't know what a professional couch sleeper I am. Sl fam, if you're reading this, no worries! I very much enjoyed your couches :).

Now I'm sure I'm aggrandizing this flight out to Europe, what with my need to be fashion forward the minute I step off the plane, but regardless, I've only ever been on a flight out of the country once before and that was just to Mexico from Colorado. So I think I'm allowed to be overly excited this time around! Getting everything ready to go was super easy. The bank flagged my account without making me jump through any hoops and CVS transferred my prescription even though it has already been filled back home. Everything is packed up and ready for me to take on the plane. But now the hardest part has arrived: waiting on the flight to get here! It's only 11am here in St. Pete and I'm already totally prepared to hit the ground running. I suppose that's what happens when you wake up at 7:30 in the morning though.

So wish me luck as we take flight for what is sure to be the best three week vacation of my life!! I'll miss all my lovely friends while I'm gone. Plenty of pictures to come :)

A Demain (till tomorrow),
Liz.

Travel Time!

Hi kids! Please visit this site to keep updated with my journey through Europe with my family for the next four weeks. I'm flying out to Florida to stay with my Gram tomorrow morning (it's past my bedtime, but I can't sleep), and we're flying out for Switzerland on July 17. This is where I'll be posting all things travel related, along with some of the most epic pictures of the day. If I randomly stop posting, someone call Liam Neeson because I've probably been taken. Or don't. I'm probably just being lazy. Sorry. 

So bookmark this site, or add it to your homepage or whatever you do to internet stalk people. (Don't deny it, we all do it.) 

Until we meet again,

Liz

Just...thoughts.

Ok. So I haven't written for a couple of weeks, and here's the thing. It's late. I just worked one of the most annoying shifts since being hired last fall (people can be so difficult), and for the past approx. hour, maybe (probably) longer, I've had the incredible misfortune of overhearing the drunken therapy session happening outside my bedroom window. But me being me, thankfully my half-asleep brain decided to make the best of the situation by reminding me at least my life doesn't suck as bad as the people's outside my window. And as far as this post goes, I may as well write since I'm surely not getting any sleep.

Here are the situations.

1. The Damaged Girl.
You know her. The girl with daddy issues and the bad stepmom, the one who sleeps around and talks about it loudly in public rather shamelessly, the one who is way too young to be at this party and throwing her life away by dropping out of school. She's lost her drive. She talks a lot, seeks pity, but acts tough. And I probably feel worst for her of all the people she's around right now. Why? Because I know what she could have. I have it. Not to sound snoody or anything, I just chalk it up to making halfway decent life choices and realizing I have baggage, but choosing to actually face it and deal with it and forgive myself and others for it rather than repress it with sex, drugs, and alcohol only to have it rear its ugly head at the least opportune moment. I have to admit that I've been blessed. My family is in tact, which is a miracle in and of itself these days, and despite what my parents say, we don't struggle financially. I haven't made it through life without my own battle wounds though. I deal with abandonment issues as a result of being adopted, I've had heartbreak, I've felt like a failure and I've been told I'm not good enough. But here's the thing: I'm not giving up. I'm still fighting to prove that I can follow my dreams, that I am worth it. I'm not giving in to normality. I want to live to be abnormal. Extraordinary. There are millions of people being average everyday, and it scares the crap out of me to be one of them. Despite the hardships I have seen and will face, I won't be the damaged girl. I won't give up.

2. The Weepy Drunk
"After my boyfriend broke up with me, for like 15 minutes this butterfly landed on my arm and just stayed there and I knew that it was my grandpa telling me I could get through this." Ok. Listen. I understand you're inebriated, but sweetie, death doesn't work that way. And right now, I'm just thankful that I am in right enough mind to understand that. And please, stop yelling. It's 2am. I have to be awake in 6 hours. Young America, your walls are too thin. (This was really more of a rant than a revelation, sorry.)

3. The F-Bomb Dropper
In case you were wondering, sir, this is not Nagasaki. Quit dropping bombs. Right here in this situation I am thankful for a diverse vocabulary. In the case of this rather profane sir outside my window, I would enjoy indulging in other loquacious terms to contrive the perfect word picture. Yeah, take that, f-bomb dropper. You probably needed to Google a few of those words. And you're welcome. Now you have something slightly more elaborate for your next adventure in sentence formation.

Ok, so that first point was all nice and fluffy and wonderful and motivating. Sorry those last two were mainly rants about how annoying it is to live with a window right next to the steps at this apartment. If you live here and you're reading this, it's not you (well, at least I don't think it was...). I like you guys, I really do. But seriously, keep it classy. Or at least let's try for one step up next time. Maybe not so much weed right outside my window. My room reeks. Yeah, that'd be nice.

Alright, till next time (and I'll try to not let it go so long in between my next posts) (seriously this time),
Liz.

Hey Monday

Oh my gosh. I realize I have been quite absent over the past couple of weeks and I am so sorry! Things got super crazy with finals and work and packing up my old apartment and shoving everything into my little car and moving it all into my new apartment and going on a mini vacation to Grand Haven, Michigan. But now I am happily settled into my new place, enjoying its many quirks (to put it nicely), and making friends with all my new neighbors, so I can finally get back to writing! Yay!

First of all, my apartment. You guys. It's an experience. Day one of living here the neighbors saw me shut my door and then immediately started pounding and singing carols to me to coax me out to party with them. Little did they know, there was no way I was getting out of bed after working all morning, moving all afternoon, and dancing all night at Amy and Luke's wedding (which was amazing). I was exhausted, it was midnight, and I just wanted to crack open my book and drift off into hazy dream land. Sorry, guys. It wasn't you, it was me. So naturally I couldn't turn them down on night two. Turns out everyone is pretty great. And we're getting a "house" puppy. You have no idea how excited I am to welcome that little ball of fur into our "family". (Literally a ball of fur. It's a husky!) But aside from the perks, there were some interesting quirks to the place. For one, as soon as I turned on the living room light, a bulb started flickering in a very horror movie-esque fashion. Creepy at night, especially when you're the only one in the apartment. Two, the first shower I tried to take probably took about 10 minutes longer than usual because I couldn't tell if I got all the shampoo out of my hair and the stream of water barely reached my body. Seriously, we had like, zero water pressure. Rough for a girl with really thick curly hair. Third, there were bugs EVERYWHERE. Centipedes in the bedrooms, ants in the kitchen, a giant ant crawling up my arm (yes, I did squeal and almost die). But after spraying the place down with our trusty cleaning supplies (probably not actually intended to kill bugs, but this is college and you have to be resourceful), I haven't found anything creepy crawling up any more of my limbs. :)

So ok, once everything was settled in and I was getting ready to leave for Michigan for the weekend, guess what I did. Seriously guess. No? Ok, I lost my darn phone. My pretty much still brand new iPhone. And I'm about 90% sure it just grew legs and walked away because it's nowhere to be found, and it has to be somewhere in this apartment. (My money is on the ants...) Thankfully my wise old mother (not to insinuate that you're old mom......) told me I should keep my old phone instead of giving it to the nice Verizon man to recycle just in case something happened to my new one. So after over half an hour on the phone with customer service, I am with a phone. It's a total junker, but it sends texts and it makes phone calls, which is good enough for me! But I am on a continual manhunt for my iPhone because I miss unblock me.....yes really, I miss my puzzle app. Haters is gonna hate.

Once my old/new phone was sufficiently active, my old roommate Kristin picked me up from my new place and we were headed to Michigan for a weekend of fun at the beach and seeing our old friends. The drive up was really great. Polar pops, 90s playlist (thanks, Spotify!), and pretty much no major traffic. Once we got to Em's, we prettied ourselves up for girls night out. This is where things get good. So we go to this bar on the corner called Kirby. It has three levels, which coincidentally correspond with the ages of the people in attendance. The top level is for those of the middle ages. Like, your parents' age. Street level was those in between their clubbing phase and their top level phase of life. You know, still trying to cling onto their youth by dancing around in front of the live cover band like this is spring break gone wrong? Yeah. That age. Now that left the three of us with the lower level, also called the Dark Room. Sounds pretty ominous, right? Yeah. Should've headed that warning. So we get downstairs and the first thing we see is lasers. Laser lights everywhere. I had to remind myself that I was in small town, coastal Michigan. However, the people in attendance really made for a great combination with the ambiance. It was like people who were either out of college or who decided higher education was not their forte, who are trying WAY too hard to "liv it up!" like their still in college. The dj was good, so at least the place had that going for it. Mostly though, it was a hot mess. People dancing on each other like it was a bad high school homecoming, people way too old to be drunk out of their minds, drunk out of their minds, and men with cheesy pick up lines trying to get you to go home with them. Yikes. Not my scene. I'm far more of a pub girl than a club girl. Like, the HIMYM (how I met your mother) bar, McClaren's. A place you can have an actual conversation with a person, the atmosphere is nice, and the alcohol is like a bonus. But despite the dismal start, the weekend quickly picked up when we decided to spend the day at the beach on Saturday. It was hot, but armed with a good book, a few gossip magazines, and Lake Michigan, we were prepared for a good time. Turns out if you're white, you should wear sunblock even if it's only May and the UV rays aren't that intense yet. We got so sunburned. Like, crispy burned. Like an entire day's worth of applying aloe still hasn't really calmed it down. Whatever though. My mother always said beauty is painful and after a couple of days, my shoulders will have a nice golden tan to them, thanks to the 1/4 of me that's Mexican. We ate the local grub, numbed our legs in the cold waters of the lake, and had the awkward moment of seeing our bartender from the night before who sucked and thus also who we didn't tip well. Successful weekend if I do say so myself.

Well, I think that's sufficient for now. Feel updated enough on my life? I hope so. Otherwise I may have to call you out on a stalking problem...

Ta-ta for now!
Liz

Ya Dig?

Do you ever have those moments when you see something and you're like, "Oh, I have to have that!"? Yeah? Me too. There are a few things out in the world of fashion that I've been seriously diggin on that I want in  my wardrobe so I can wear them every day! So I thought I'd share them with you all, and hopefully I've found some things you love too! Let me know what you think. :)

First of all, this trend of floral pants is way up on the top of my "to buy" list. I mean really, how stinkin' adorable are these?!

Seriously. And then I want to pair them with something like these:

For the blouse, I would definitely roll the sleeves and tuck the front into the pants, possibly to show off a cute belt!

I'm also seriously loving fun colored blazers, like hot pink and purple and cobalt blue. And the hair in that picture? So much love!! I wish so dearly that I hadn't chopped all mine off so I could dye it like that! Also, I'm totally into everything of the modern flower child genre of clothing. Flowy maxi skirts, crochet tops, head wraps, and feather designs on shirts and accessories. Given, I was pretty much raised by repressed hippies, so this is probably just a product of my youth finally expressing itself. Man, can you tell I'm a psych major? :)

I'm also totally into birds. Maybe not so much the actual animal, but their silhouettes. I enjoy a good mural painting session, and I'm thinking about painting a few around my room when I move into my new apartment. Something along the lines of this:

I love birds on necklaces and as a print for tops as well. They can be a really fun, quirky addition to a more subtle outfit.

Share with me what you're loving this season!!

Peace and love,
Liz.