Random Walk Through Campania

Hey Family and Friends,

Its been awhile since I have written in this blog thing. Joe and I have safely and happily left the Abruzzo region of Italy and now are west of Naples in Avellino. We are staying with a wonderful family that run a farm here. They grow hazlenuts, walnuts, almonds, figs, saint fruit (my new favorite fruit), and WINE. They grow an old sweet grape called fjana, and its super old from like the 11th century. They make wine and everything else organically. Somehow they skip the femermeation process...still unsure how that works...
The daily chores range from cutting and burning wood, gathering walnuts and chestnuts, and cooking. Ieri (yesterday) we baked hazelnuts and made REAL LIFE nutella!! It was more poignant than the store bought kind, but Joe made it snazzy but adding Miele (honey). These days I think in Italian, especially by myself. I think my learning curve is pretty logarithmic at this point and I need to get out a dictionary and learn some new everyday words. This may not be that useful down here in Naples, because many people speak Napolitan, which is a whole new language mixing greek, spanish, latin, and italian. It reflects well the stormy past of the city. The weather is lovely down here! Today I spent the day in Northern Naples selling fruit and nuts at an organic farmers market. For those that know me well it isnt that far from my volunteer job at school, but selling to boisterous Napoliteans instead of the Princeton Upper crust is a little different...as you can imagine.
At Rosas farm, we eat really healthy food everyday, and my body is healing from the jabs that travelling can dole. Joe and I have a new record of 4 weeks of time spent together! Our previous record was three when we went to Peru. I think I will load pictures sometime soon or our trip so far. We have to capture one of these amazing sunsets over Mt. Vecuvius.


So the past week, we spent time in Rome with two lovely couchsurfer hosts, Stephanie and Annie. For those who have not surfed, you HAVE to. Its without a doubt the best way to see a city, and its free. We spent three days exploring Roman night life, museams, fontanas, and cathedrals. St. Peters Basillica was OUT OF THIS WORLD. It was one giant statement that hey, we may or may not be the foremost relgion in the world, and they guy leading us...may be the spokesperson of god. It was very cool. Religion here is sort of neat, its very reminiscent of a polytheistic religion. Catholicsm in my mind, mabye from history classes has always been a grim and unyielding set of rules...but here I realize more than ever it is super colorful, and truly had to be in such a colorful place! Saints here are very reminiscent of polytheism, and probably had to be from Italys Roman roots...okay i am done speculating...
The Sistine Chapel and the Popes Museam of Art was truly breathtaking. We almost didnt pay the moeny to go, because we are truly poor, but came out so much richer.

This evening Joe and I snuck into a soccer stadium and kicked the ball, (who we named Claire), around. These are the small highlights of these beautiful days. It might have been the chocolate covered fig I ate earlier...unsure.

For the adults that might be reading this, do not worry! Joe and I think of grad school almost everyday and get more and more excited to go. It is the glorious stable light at the end of this crazy tunnel.

Our future plans go so far: We leave Italy from Rome on October 18th for Barcelona. We plan to swing through Granade, Toledo, and finally end up in Madrid for Halloween to see Ryan Corces. Then on November 3rd we fly to Cairo to meet my love, Jess, who will hopefully guide us through Egypt and the holy land(s). Finally we will buy a ticket to South Africa at the end of the month from either Tel Aviv or Cairo. Need to do that soooner than later :)
If anyone reads this, can they send me an email telling me what in the world is going on over in the US right now? I really dont want to be stuck in Europe because the dollar doesnt mean anything anymore!! Just kidding thats probably not the case at all.

Alright Thats all Folks! Ciao Belli!
Namita

Our First Post: Namita and Joe's Ridiculous Adventure

Dear Readers, Family, and Friends,

This is the first of hopefully many posts that will hopefully help other graduates through their way around the world.  After successfully completing our senior years at Princeton University, Joe Rokicki and I, Namita Bisaria, plan to set off "adventuring" this next year around the world!  It all sounds very grand, but as we are in the planning period of our adventures we are running into a few ruts here in there in terms of logistics and money.  

To begin, it is important that we lay out the premise and history of our travel.  Joe and I met in our integrated science coursework together, he is an electrical engineer and I am a molecular biologist.  We are both going to graduate school following our "gap year" and he is studying synthetic biology and I am doing "systems" biology ( which I don't even know what exactly that entails).  We have been backpacking, naively so, to the Yucatan region of Mexico and the Southern part of Peru.  Both of these incredible trips showed us that we work well together as traveling companions and have a miraculous "magic" about our journeys such that everything always works out no matter what ridiculous thing we attempt.  It might be that we are incredibly optimistic such that the most dismal of situations can have a hidden upside that we find (like the freezing night I spent on a beach in a blanket but got to see the sunrise).  Who knows.  

It is important to note for various reasons that Joe and I are NOT romantically involved and will never be for the remainder of our traveling relationship.  This is an important factor to our dynamic and moreover for our family and significant others.  

Our motivation to travel is as most backpacker's motivation: to see the world and learn the local language, colors, customs, and cultures of the places we visit.  We want to travel light and live off of our ability to talk to people and make connections.  Rather than jump from hostel to hostel, we want to stay in a place and learn and contribute to the landscape there, whether it be working on an organic farm, joining an local arts, health, or education organization, or playing and organizing soccer.  There are a couple of organizations we have been in contact with or researched for our trip: World Wide Opportunities for Organic Farming (WWOOF), World of Good Fair Wage Fellowship, Grassroots Soccer in Africa, and Sarala micro-financing institution in West Bengal/Calcutta regions.  We are also going to visit some of our much cooler and more organized friends who have received fellowships to do humanitarian projects abroad, such as our friend Katy Digovich who won the Compton Fellowship to setup an AIDS adherence program through text-messaging in Botswana, and Emmie (I don't know her last name Joe), who received a Fulbright to teach English at a school in Indonesia.  If anyone who reads this has other organizations that need volunteers and moreover will GIVE MONEY for us to travel please post!  

Our current status is as follows:  We need funds to travel.  We estimate right now that it will take over 9,000 dollars to travel for a year comfortably.  Who wants to travel comfortably?  We will need ~ 4,000 dollars to pay for the RTW airfare alone (see Star Alliance RTW trip fares).  We have some idea of where we want to go but it isn't definite.  A potenial trajectory goes: US-->Brazil--> Argentina-->Italy?-->South Africa-->Botswana-->Mauritas-->India-->Signapore (with other parts of SE Asia)-->Indonesia-->Japan-->New Zealand-->US.  Those are at least the places that we have talked about going.  Who knows at this point, it really all depend on getting contacts and money.

Finally, we will be updating a traveling "Manifesto," contributed to by Joe and I, in order to keep our relationship and motivation during travels safe.   

Thank you for reading!

Namita Bisaria

Joe Rokicki