Tag: nd sophomore summer

August 6, 2019 – The Suite Life on Deck (OOTD #540)

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*blog post features no actual images of me on the cruise ship

I’ve never been on a cruise before.

This trip has been full of firsts — first time in South America, first time snorkeling, first time on a cruise. Unlike snorkeling, though, I’ve actually really enjoyed cruise ship life. Unlike South America, though, as much as I enjoyed it I wouldn’t necessarily go and do it again immediately.

I liked the cruise, and I would definitely do one again eventually if given the opportunity. I really appreciated how everything was taken care of for you — there was someone to pick you up at the airport and guide you to the boat, there was someone to carry your bags to your room as soon as you got on board, there was a chef and full kitchen staff so all you had to do was show up in the dining room at meal times. It’s what I imagine vacation for rich people is like.

But since everything is taken care of for you, there’s a lot less autonomy on your part in deciding what to do each day. The boat might offer a range of options — snorkeling, kayaking, hiking, etc. — but they’re still the boat’s options. There’s no such thing as deciding you don’t like any of their options and going off on your own.

There’s also a lot of just waiting on the boat as you travel from one island to another. In principle, I don’t like that — who wants to spend half of their day in transit? But in practice, it was actually kind-of nice to have a built-in rest period during the day. I took a lot of much-needed naps.

Gratefully, I didn’t have trouble at all with seasickness. I’ve been on boats before, but only for a few hours at a time — not for a whole week. I wasn’t sure how my body would react. Turns out, it didn’t really react at all. Sometimes, if I looked out at the window and saw the waves rushing by, I’d feel dizzy, but otherwise, I faired surprisingly well. Honestly, the worst was getting off the boat at the end of the week. I felt like everything was rocking back and forth for days afterwards.

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sleepy ocean puppy

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That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my trip to the Galápagos Islands this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Top: Amazon

Shorts: H&M

Hat: Target

August 5, 2019 – A Galápagos Girl (OOTD #539)

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Does it still count as an OOTD if I’m not really wearing an “outfit” in these pictures?

The first day or two with a brand new group of people is always a little awkward. You have to be on your best behavior — no questionable jokes (even if they’re funny), no swearing, no copious complaining, especially if no one else is doing it.

And perhaps this is just a rule that I impose for myself, but no excessive requests for photographs, even if you’re on a tropical island in a continent you’ve never visited before, and you have a fashion blog that you want to post all of your trip photos to. You might want to get a photo with every cool-looking rock, but you need to exercise a little restraint — you don’t want to become known as the girl who needs her picture taken with every cool-looking rock.

In general, I try to wait until someone else asks for their picture taken — then I offer to take it for them, and follow up with “oh, and would you mind getting one for me as well?” They can’t deny taking my picture after I’ve offered to do the same for them, and they can’t judge me for asking because they asked first.

Sometimes, though, a cool photo opportunity arises and no one’s posed for the picture question yet. Maybe they’re embarrassed or maybe they’re just not into having their picture taken. In that case, I will ask first. Often, people follow suit in expressing their desire to have their picture taken. If they don’t, maybe it’s a little weird, especially if the group ends up waiting for you while you pose next to your cool-looking rock. Oh well — at least you got your picture with the cool-looking rock. The judgmental people can’t say that.

For my first day in the Galápagos Islands with a new group of friends, that’s what I ended up doing. I couldn’t go a whole day without a picture to post for a blog, so I caved and asked my roommate on the ship to get my picture next to the water.

I’m glad I got the pictures so I could share something with you for today’s post, but being honest, these photos weren’t worth the mental anxiety I put myself through to get them. There are much, much cooler photos to come from my subsequent days in the Galápagos — so stay tuned.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my trip to the Galápagos Islands this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Bathing suit: Target

August 4, 2019 – Quitting for Quito (OOTD #538)

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Oops, I guess I couldn’t stay in the US for too long.

That’s right, two weeks after I returned home from Italy/Denmark/Hungary/Croatia/England, I was back off again — this time, to an entirely different continent that I had never been to before.

In addition to being my first time in Quito and in Ecuador, this was also my first time in South America altogether. You’d think being the closest continent to my own (North America), I would have been there before, but it’s not a super common destination for American tourists. Maybe that’ll change in the future?

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when the church is better styled than you

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So why was I in Quito? It’s kind of a long story. The short answer: I won an essay contest.

The long answer: one day, I received a mysterious email from Notre Dame International inviting me (and the rest of the undergraduate student body) to apply for what could perhaps best be described as an “academic pilgrimage” to the Galápagos Islands be led by two professors from the Chemistry Department in the College of Science. The goal of the trip was described  broadly as to “trace the steps that Charles Darwin took on his path to discovery,” and in the process, perhaps gain a deeper appreciation for how discovery — in any field of study — occurs. That’s how I interpreted it in my application essay, at least.

I never thought I’d get in — I’m studying history and international relations, and I haven’t studied evolutionary biology since high school. I technically took some science classes my freshman year at Notre Dame, but they weren’t really that rigorous. I’m not even studying the history of science. I definitely haven’t studied anything chemistry-related that I could’ve used to impress the Chemistry professors leading the trip.

I guess my essay comparing the studies of human history and natural history impressed them though, because somehow, I got in. Or maybe it wasn’t the essay — maybe it was the outfit I wore to the interview. It was rather cute. You can actually check out the blog post from the day that I interviewed for the spot here.

Before heading to the Galápagos, our cohort of six stopped for a day in Quito, Ecuador.

Now, I’m used to traveling to new cities at this point. I’m used to trying to figure out public transportation, I’m used to trying to communicate with people whose language I don’t speak, I’m used to trying to keep my head down and doing my best to not look like a total outsider. I am not used to having a personal tour guide take me around a city and act as my translator and chauffeur all day.

For about 2/3 of our day, we had a very friendly man (whose name I’ve forgotten by this point — whoops) do all of that for us. He drove us around from site to site. He dealt with our tickets. He ordered our food. He acted as our historical guide at each place we visited. He showed us the best shops and best views of the city. Everything I’m accustomed to when traveling — the wandering around aimlessly with my eyes glued to Google Maps, the putting my headphones in to try to look more like a local, the avoiding eye contact in public places (especially in Europe) — I didn’t have to do any of it. Everything was taken care of.

It was so strange and so different. In one sense, it made the trip totally stress-free — the only thing I had to think about was making sure I didn’t lose our guide in a crowd. In another sense, it felt a little like something was missing. Sure, seeing the equator and a big old Catholic church and eating Ecuadorian food was cool — but it would have been cooler had I figured it all out on my own. It felt a little like cheating.

I certainly hope you don’t hear that as a complaint. Because uh…if anyone wants to give me another all-expenses paid vacation cruise with a personal tour guide, I’ll totally take it.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my trip to the Galápagos Islands this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Dress: Forever21

July 15, 2019 – London Layover (OOTD #533)

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Best. Layover. Ever.

Here it is — the last blog from my summer European adventure. And what an adventure it was. Fitting that it should end with one last big adventure, right?

Croatia was not actually the last country I visited on this trip — it was actually England. After departing the Zagreb airport at around 1pm in the afternoon (though I’ll mention I arrived at like 7am, on account of my friend’s flight departing earlier than mine), I made it to London Heathrow a little over an hour later.

And then I sat and waited.

My next flight, the one that would take me to Chicago, wasn’t going to leave until the following day at 7am. I had a 16-hour layover to wait out. Thankfully, if my traveling has taught me anything, it’s how to handle long layovers in the airport — and the best way to handle a long layover in the airport is to leave.

And how do you leave London Heathrow? Why, you take the Underground of course!  If the tube was already my favorite public transit system in the entire world, it just got even better when I realized it was directly connected to the airport. I love metros that connect directly to airport terminals, like Copenhagen or Chicago. Having to take a bus to the nearest metro station — or worse, having to take a separate metro and pay an additional fee on top of your regular metro ticket like you have to do in New York JFK — sucks.

It certainly wasn’t a short ride, but it was much cheaper than taking the fast train, the Heathrow Express. And it got me where I wanted to go — the Westminster tube station.

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best 16 hour layover ever

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I don’t really know what I was looking for out of this stopover. I mean, I’ve already been to London and I’ve seen the majority of the tourist sites that one can see in an afternoon while waiting for a connecting flight. I’ve seen Big Ben and the London Eye and Westminster and all of the major sites that were in this particular area. I just wanted to go again, to feel what it felt like to look across the bridge and see all of the tourists clamoring to get photos with the ferris wheel. I even joined some of the tourists and got a few photos of my own.

From there, I went to see something I hadn’t actually seen on my 2017 London trip: Hyde Park. Amanda and I had originally had this on our to-do list, but it got cut for time and because everything we read online suggested that it wasn’t really that spectacular of a park.

And to be honest, from what I saw on this tour, I agree. I think perhaps, I just went at a bad time, as it looked like whole sections of the park were closed off for a music festival that was about to park. I also didn’t have enough time to walk the whole thing.  I did get to glimpse some of the gardens, which were lovely while they were in bloom. It was no botanic conservatory, but for a free place to walk around for an hour and get some pictures in the fading light for my blog, it was perfect.

My last stop before heading back to Heathrow to spend the night sleeping on a bench was Tower Bridge herself. This was another site that I think I may have glimpsed in passing during my 2017 trip, but I never got around to paying a proper visit to. I don’t know if walking across the modern London Bridge and snapping some pictures as the sun set counts as a “proper visit,” but it was very pleasant nonetheless.

And even if it doesn’t count, I guess that just means I have all the more reason to go back to London one day. Oh well. You don’t have to ask me twice.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Coat:Vintage (thrifted, Ecseri Bazaar in Budapest)

Top: FreePeople

Jeans: Hollister

July 10, 2019 – What Rhymes with Zagreb? (OOTD #529)

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All I could potentially think of was “Maghreb” but I don’t know how I’d be able to utilize that for a blog title.

My trip to Croatia did not turn out quite as planned: for one, my school friend whom I was visiting with got sick the day before I arrived, meaning we were unable to visit any of the other cities we’d been planning to go to. Instead, we spent the week in Somobor with a day trip to Zagreb and to Brezîce, Slovenia.

IMG_2352

At first, I was disappointed: everyone goes to Croatia to see the beaches, which was a part of our original plan that ended up getting scrapped. Instead, I mostly saw a small town outside of the capital. However, as the week went on, I realized I didn’t mind spending the majority of my time in one place — it helped me to get to know the people I was staying with better. I did feel a little badly about potentially overstaying their hospitality’s welcome, though. I’ve never met more kind and generous people than this Croatian family; I wish there was some way I could repay them.

And I did get in little day trip to Zagreb itself. My friend needed to go to the hospital, and so her cousin, her cousin’s sister, and I tagged along for the drive into the city. My friend and her cousin went to the hospital and left her cousin’s sister, Nina, and I to hang out for a few hours in the city.

Zagreb I think wins the cutest European city award for me. It’s tiny compared to larger cities like Rome or London, but it is its size that makes it special: it feels like something out of a storybook. With its color palette that relies heavily on pastel pinks, blues, and yellows and its location nestled into the lush Croatian countryside, it could easily pass as a water color background in a Disney fairy tale.

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it’s all croatian to me

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Would I ever move here? Maybe not — it’s a little too quiet, kind of like Copenhagen was. But unlike Copenhagen, which seemed almost eerily happy, Zagreb had a more somber, melancholy air that I appreciated. It felt more authentic, less tourist-driven. Maybe it’s the recent memories of the Yugoslav Wars that haven’t quite healed, but I got the sense that behind the picturesque imagery, Zagreb had more of a story to tell.

Unfortunately, though, I was only there for part of a day, and so I did not get to uncover it. Maybe I’ll get to go back one day and try, though.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Coat: Vintage (thrifted, Ecseri Bazaar in Budapest)

Top: H&M

Skirt: Pull&Bear

July 1, 2019 – The Grand Budapest Student Dorm (OOTD #523)

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*post does not actually feature any images of said dorm.

It took a very long time for me to decide to go to Budapest after Rome. Here’s what happened: when I booked my plane tickets from the US to Europe, I booked a date to get to Rome that aligned with my start day for work. Then, to go back home, I booked a date from Zagreb, Croatia that fell approximately two weeks after my last day at my internship. I knew I needed to end up in Zagreb at the end of those two weeks, and that I needed to vacate my room in Rome two days after the end of work, but I didn’t have any plans for where to go in between then.

By chance, a friend of mine messaged me while I was in Rome and told me that I should visit him in Budapest, where he had just completed a year of study for his master’s degree. This friend has actually featured on my blog before: his name is Bilal, and he was one of the madrasa students from Pakistan whom I met during Madrasa Discourses in Nepal and Qatar. Bilal and I had become closest friends during our time in Nepal and Qatar, and so I was ecstatic when he suggested I visit him in Europe. Plus, Budapest has always been somewhere I wanted to visit, and now I had an excuse.

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eye don’t see what the big deal is

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Apart from the part where I tumbled down a moving escalator at the Fiumicino Airport and broke the handle of my suitcase, the travel from Rome to Budapest went relatively smoothly. It was a super cheap ticket on Whizz Air (yes, that’s actually its name), but it did the trick and got me where I needed to go.

I stayed with Bilal in his dorm room on an air mattress, though I ended up having to switch rooms with one of his friends (and then switch rooms back again) because a housekeeping lady saw me and they’re not supposed to have overnight guests in the dorms. It wasn’t the most glamorous sleeping arrangement I’ve had during my travels (though it beats the time I slept on a bench in the lobby of London Heathrow — more on that later), but again, it did the trick. No Grand Budapest Hotels for me.

On my first full day in the city, I visited the Parliament Building, the Danube River, the Budapest Eye, and St. Stephen’s Basilica, most of which I just looked at from the outside and had little other interaction with. Parliament was closed to the public, the Danube isn’t exactly a river you just go swimming in, and the Budapest Eye was overpriced to ride on. St. Stephen’s Basilica was the only one with both free and practical admission (as all churches should be, in my opinion).

At one point in the afternoon, after I’d finished visiting all of the major tourist sites within walking distance of each other in the city, I wound up having to wait for Bilal for a few hours to finish up an assignment at his university. I decided to sit in a bookshop for a while, where I read The Little Prince and The Old Man and the Sea for the first time. I don’t often just sit and read books if they’re not required for schoolwork (the most recent one I’d read before then was Shortest Way Home, Pete Buttigieg’s autobiography, which my friend Joe lent to me and that I had to finish within a week in order to give it back to him before he went back to England).

It was refreshing to just sit for a while and read something short and poignant, a description that applies to both The Old Man and the Sea  and The Little Prince, but especially to The Little Prince. If you’ve never read it before, I highly recommend that you do. It’s probably my favorite thing I’ve read in years, and perhaps one the best children’s stories I’ve read ever.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Dress: Thrift

Jacket: H&M

June 28, 2019 – Arrivederci (OOTD #522)

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My final weekend in Rome, I finally visited the Vatican Museums.

 

 

I was there in Rome for a whole six weeks, literally 30 minutes away from the Vatican by Metro, and I never bothered to go until my final week. It wasn’t out of a lack of interest, believe me — when I was first preparing to go to Rome, I knew that the Vatican was on the top of my list of things to see.

As it turned out, though, I saw a lot of things before I got around to the Vatican. The Colosseum, Roman Forum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, a climate change protest, a movie studio, a vineyard, a couple of Italian cities, and even a Danish city — some of which weren’t even places I’d intended to go in the first place — all wound up getting crossed off my list before the Vatican.

But don’t worry — I wasn’t about to allow myself to leave Rome without seeing the Vatican Museums. After fighting with their outdated website trying to find a day that wasn’t completely booked until December and finally settling for one of their special extended nighttime hours, I shelled out the 20 euro admission fee for tickets.

And I’m so glad I did. I’ve discussed things that I did this summer in Europe that I don’t think we were worth the time or money — but the Vatican Museums absolutely were worth every euro. I could have spent hours in the Sistine Chapel looking at the ceiling, and a couple more hours looking at the single Francis Bacon painting they had.

I went with a couple of my Notre Dame friends whom I had wound up spending quite a bit o time with this summer. They were the ones who went with me to Florence and Naples, and so by the end of my six weeks, we’d gotten to be good friends. I was the first one of the interns to leave, so it was kind of them to agree to get dinner and visit the Museums before I left.

But my Notre Dame friends weren’t the only people I had to say goodbye — or “arrivederci” to. There were also my two supervisors from my internship, Fr. Felix and Sr. Sheila. My final day at the office, they took me out to lunch, and I gave them each thank you cards telling them to keep in touch. I wrote extensively about my internship experience at the Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation Commission in this blog, so if you’d like some in-depth reflections, check there.

 

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the future is full of pastabilities

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Lastly, there were my friends from the Lay Centre, whom I honestly only got to be friends with in the final two weeks I was in Rome. What took me so long to make friends? For one, when I first arrived, most of the other students there were preparing for their final exams and didn’t have much time for making friends with a random American girl who was only going to be there for a little over a month, especially when they’d already been there for a whole semester (or more) and established their friend groups. Additionally, I spend a lot of my time towards the beginning of my time in Rome not actually in Rome — for three weekends in a row, I left the city and went to other cities or countries entirely. Admittedly, that wasn’t exactly the best practice for making friends at home.

But towards the end, as I got more comfortable with the Lay Centre community and the other students finished up their schoolwork, I discovered that I absolutely loved it there. I wish I had spent more time there in the beginning and gotten to know the people even better. In the end, I made at least three English friends, an Irish friend, an Italian friend, and three American friends. I don’t know when or if I’ll get to see them again, but if I’m back in the area again, I’ll definitely try to stop by.

And with that, my six weeks in Rome and my internship came to a close. As I mentioned, I wound up having farewell lunch with my bosses, farewell dinner with my Notre Dame friends, and farewell drinks with my Lay Centre friends — so I felt pretty farewell-ed out by the time it was time to go.

Time to go — but to go where? The European adventure doesn’t end there; there are two more weeks of traveling still to write about. Check back tomorrow to see where I went after Rome!

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Dress: Forever21

June 8, 2019 – Comrades in Copenhagen (OOTD #514)

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Wait, this isn’t Rome.

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swish and flick

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Everything I’ve ever heard from Americans who go abroad to Europe is that you need to try to visit other countries while you’re there. Even if you have a “home base” of where you’re going to be spending the majority of your time (for me, Italy), you should try to take a weekend or two and visit a neighboring country. It’s just so much cheaper and easier to visit other countries when you’re on a continent with 44 countries, versus when you’re on a continent with three countries separated by pretty much all of the other continents by two giant oceans.

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hej og farvel

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And, very importantly, their infrastructure and public transportation is just so much better than what the US has. It’s cheaper and easier to go from Italy to France than it is to go from Kentucky to Indiana. You can get a bus or a cheap flight and be in a completely different culture — different language, different politics, different food — in just a few hours and for just a few hundred dollars, at most. In comparison, it takes a whole day of driving and/or flying to go from Lexington to South Bend — and they’re not even that different (Lexington has hills and is just generally a more beautiful place, but that’s beside the point).

Anyway, Copenhagen! Why did I go? Mostly, it was just the cost. My friend (and former roommate at ND), Anna, was studying abroad in London during the same dates as I was interning in Rome. We wanted a city somewhere in between the two where we could meet up and spend the weekend in an AirBnB, and, after a quick flight search on SkyScanner (not sponsored, by the way — I just really love this website for finding cheap flights), Copenhagen ended up being the best choice.

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joining a hippie commune, see ya never

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I arrived early afternoon on a Saturday. After dropping off my things in the room, Anna and I decided to just go for a stroll. Naturally, we had to see Nyhavn (the strip of colorful homes that look like Legos along the water), the Little Mermaid Statue, and Christiania (the hippie commune with a special legal status). We also saw some things that were a little off the typical tourist path — a man selling weed, St. Alban’s Church, and graffiti telling us to go home, to name a few.

Copenhagen is a beautiful place — perhaps the quaintest and cutest place I visited while in Europe the whole summer. It was perhaps a little too quaint and cute though, at least for me. I like a little grit to my cities — that’s why I love New York and Philadelphia so much, and that’s what I appreciate the most about Rome. It was also super expensive in terms of the cost of food and cost of admission to places. Our flights may have been cheap, but not much else was.

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reflect on this:

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I decided it would be a great place to retire — you know, after I’ve gotten rich and famous and I just want a quiet place to relax at the end of my life. After retirement is also probably the only time I’ll ever be able to afford to live in Copenhagen. I could definitely see myself as a little old lady biking along Nyhavn and buying my produce at farmers’ markets and chatting with the weed dealers in Christiania.

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look at this stuff, isn’t it neat?

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That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Dress: Thrift

Jacket: Thrift (Clothes Mentor)

May 26, 2019 – Days In (OOTD #508)

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Even in the Eternal City, you can have a day where you just feel like going nowhere.

 

 

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greetings from the 1930s

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Or maybe you don’t even feel like going nowhere — maybe you do feel like going out, but you can’t muster the motivation to haul yourself out of the house. Maybe the day began by feeling like going nowhere, but by late afternoon, you realized you’d made a mistake. But by then, it was late afternoon, and it wasn’t going to be worth the effort to go anywhere.

 

 

 

Besides, you’re in Rome by yourself. You have no friends to go anywhere with, not yet at least. The best tourist sites have admission fees and huge lines, even on a rainy day like this.

 

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*dean martin plays in the distance*

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So instead, you content yourself with taking the time to do your hair and makeup as if you’re going out and as if you’re going to have your picture taken in fun locations with your friends. The problem, then, is that after you’ve taken all this time to look nice, you feel like you have to at least take some pictures to document all that hard work you did. To compensate for having a useless day, you should at least go out and scout for some good photography locations.

Oh, and did I mention you still have a partially twisted ankle from tripping on the steps to the metro earlier in the week? 

So instead of venturing off somewhere fun for pictures, you’re stuck in the garden of the place where you’re staying. To be fair — it’s a beautiful garden with a gorgeous view of the Colosseum, and you’d been meaning to get some pictures there at some point anyway. But it doesn’t really satisfy your urge to get out and do something, because ultimately, you didn’t really get outside of the garden gates, and you didn’t really do anything but get some photos.

Also, while you’re outside, you end up slipping in the wet grass and twisting your ankle again, which really sucks.

But that sort of thing has never happened to me, of course. I always start my day with a clear purpose, and I don’t waste whole days sitting around my room doing my hair and makeup when no one’s going to see me. That’s just silly.

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Dress: Thrifted

Blouse: Forever21

May 22, 2019 – Sotto Il Cielo Di Roma (OOTD #505)

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Not even a week into my time in Rome, and I already twisted my ankle.

I wasn’t even doing anything exciting. I wasn’t running or riding the metro or sitting on the back of a Vespa. I was walking home from work, switching the song playing on my phone, and suddenly my whole body pitched forward. I didn’t quite faceplant, but I rolled my ankle pretty hard, making the walk home pretty painful. It took about an hour and a half, when it normally only took about an hour.

 

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buongiorno di roma 🇮🇹

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Thankfully, I didn’t have work the following day, and so I could rest up and let my ankle heal a little bit. The injury wasn’t bad — not bad enough to warrant getting it checked out by a doctor —  but it was a major inconvenience. For about a week, all I could do was hobble around slowly, which is not something you want to have to do in a brand new city.

As you can see in some of these pictures, I wrapped a sock around my ankle in an attempt to prevent myself from hurting it further. Because my boots are black too, I hoped that, at first glance, no one could notice that I had wrapped a sock around my foot in an impromptu cast. Socks normally go on your feet, not around them.

Still, I tried not to let my ankle prevent me from going out at least once a day, even if it was only to hobble around slowly and hunt for a place near my house to take pictures for my blog. You might notice that in most of my pictures here I’m sitting — can you guess why?

That’s about it for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one with more updates on my life in Europe this summer. Don’t forget to check me out on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Bloglovin, Twitter, and Tumblr! For business inquiries, shoot me an email at lensembledujour@gmail.com!

Jacket: Thrifted (Clothes Mentor)

Dress: Thrifted