Friendsgiving in Tahoe!!

Winter has come!!

Thanksgiving is definitely the most American holiday out of all, and it is almost exclusively celebrated in the United States. However, when foreigns come to the U.S., having a traditional thanksgiving is a MUST-DO! For this reason, nine of my international friends and I decided to drive for nine hours and stay for the whole holiday time in an awesome Airbnb apartment. in Truckee, close to Lake Tahoe. We did so many fun things, including cooking an awesome traditional thanksgiving dinner and a ski trip!! Let me tell you about some of the best moments of these amazing four days. 

On Wednesday, after morning classes and a quick grocery shopping, we left for the longest drive I have ever done in my whole life. From Santa Barbara to Lake Tahoe it takes NINE hours!!! Isn’t it crazy?!? Well, as soon as we arrived to the apartment, we were so tired that we took a group picture and then we went straight to bed, in order to get a good rest before spending the whole day cooking for the thanksgiving dinner!!! Yaaay! 

Yoga challenge!!

On Thanksgiving day we woke up, had breakfast together, and then we started cooking the amazing turkey and the side dishes. Peeling potatoes, making gravy, preparing deviled eggs and so on! The turkey took 4 looooong hours to get ready, and we were all staring at the oven, starving and craving the awesome food… At a point the starvation drove us so crazy that we started to try to accomplish yoga challenges… OMG… sooooo hungry!!! Finally, as dinner time was approaching we set the table, put the food on it and started to sit down. We all, enjoyed the meal and, like a family, we talked and laughed while savoring a delicious dinner.

The following day, we went to check out the beautiful Lake Tahoe and Tahoe City. In comparison to Santa Barbara, it was sooooo freeeeezing… We walked on a pier an felt the fresh air gently touching our skin. It was col, but regenerating and refreshing, overwhelming. About an hour later we left to visit Tahoe City, a cute little town with lots of small shops and restaurants. After a day of walking in cold whether, we were absolutely ready to go back home for some board games and hot chocolate. 

Snow time!

Saturday was the ski day!!! I couldn’t wait for a day on the snow and for throwing myself down the slopes with a snowboard. We went to a ski resort called Sugar Bowl and spend the whole day there. My friend Brian had never skied before and so I thought him some basic techniques and he improved so quickly! It was so much fun to spend time together and snowboarding in slopes never seen before! All sore and tired, we drove back home and played some Jenga and other games all together!!! It was the last night that we could spend together and we got the most out of it. Like the previous nights, we stayed up till super late and partied almost till the following morning!

Sunday came and we had to drive another nine hours… instead of getting on the 101, we took the road that cuts through Yosemite National Park. We were surrounded by awesome panoramas and the time flew by… We got home at about 10.30pm, exhausted but more happy and satisfied than ever before. I loved it.

Is Climate Change Real?

Prof. McIntire and Prof. Green

This Wednesday November 16, 2016, the leadership of 2020 A Year Without War, of which I am a part of, organized a great and mind-blowing event: CLIMATE CHANGE: Are We Responsible? The debate was between the SBCC faculty members Professor Mark McIntire and Professor Adam Green. In the debate, Professor McIntire was supporting that climate change is not due to human activities, and Adam Green was instead supporting that climate change is real and it is greatly due to the human impact on the Earth’s environment. How interesting was it going to be? Would it be a great turnout? I’ll tell you soon everything about it.

OMG.. Too many people!

The event was initially held in room A-160. However, as soon as the time of the event was approaching, more than a hundred students that couldn’t fit in the room were waiting outside the class to hope for having a chance to get to see the debate… The event organizers and myself were starting to worry on how we could have fixed this situation. Who could have expected more than 200 people to attend?!? Fortunately, one of the faculty members managed to have permission to hold the event in a bigger room and a flow of hundreds of students slowly moved form one the room in the Administration building to another room on the third floor of the EBS building. Successfully, we moved all the people but still a lot of students were waiting outside, disappointed in not having the chance to assist to the debate.

22 people watching!

Here comes my part! As 2020 AYWW Public Relation Vice-President, I decided to stream the event live on our Facebook page!!! In this way the numerous people who were missing out on the event would have had the chance to check it out from the 20202 A Year Without War Club Facebook page. Setting up the phone in order to live-stream the event was a bit of a challenge, but in the end I managed with the help of a 2020 AYWW volunteer to stabilize my phone and stream 1 hour and 35 minute of debate! It was impressive to see that 22 people constantly for the whole length of the event watched the event while I was streaming it! Wooooww!!! Besides, I found out later that in another CC room about 20 other people were watching the event live from the page live-stream!! Isn’t it impressive?? I would have never imagined that the event would be this successful… Amazing.

Possible future Graphic Designer

First successful Poster!!!

I have had many doubts about my future career… I am always so interested in many different things and I find it so hard to focus on just one thing! I like to gain knowledge in every single field from astronomy to environmental studies, from film production to mathematics, and I just believe I will never stick to one thing in the future… I just love experimenting and learning new things!! Lately I had the chance to put my self up with Graphic Design… What an experience!! Let me tell you everything about right here in this post!

Since I started this busy Fall 2016 semester, I have found myself involved in numerous activities, programs and clubs, and most of them have as their main focus to gather up students and building a community at SBCC through the organization of events. Well, in most of the things I am involved with I am usually the Public Relation Vice-President or the Historian, and therefore I am responsible for the marketing of the events. How can you market an event if you don’t have a poster to advertise it? …yes, without having any knowledge about graphic design, I found myself to be the responsible person to create the posters of every event. OMG… A totally new world for me, and a fairly challenging one!

Upcoming event!!! Come to this!

The first time I had to create a poster was for the event Pondering Politics, organized by PTK. My first attempt was a total failure… We ended up contacting one of Michael’s friends, the PTK Leadership Vice-president, in order to have a decent poster done in time… So embarrassing. My second attempt was much more successful!! In order to make the poster for the Faculty Colloquium PTK event I sought help from the great SBCC graphic designer, Melanie Belanger, who gave me some essential advice in order to create a poster on point!! From that day, I have been much more comfortable in the creation of posters, and I feel like I could even pursue this career! It is so much fun!!! But I still think I’ll most likely stick with film production, though…

After making other posters for 2020 A Year Without War and Phi Theta Kappa, I won’t look at posters in the same way. They seem easy colored piece of papers with some pictures and lines of text on it, but they are much more than that! Balance, composition, details… Everything must be taken into account! I have never thought that graphic designers had to go through all that… Amazing profession!

Dorantes Memorial lecture with W. Kamau Bell

This Wednesday, at the SBCC Garvin Theater was held the Leonardo Dorantes Memorial Lecture which takes place every year in November on the SBCC campus. For who may not know, the Leonardo Dorantes Memorial Lecture was created in honor of a Mexican immigrant who attended Santa Barbara City College, and who “died in a race-related tragedy in November, 1990”. Since then, a lecture was established in order to spread awareness as concern racial and ethnic differences. The lecture brings always notable figures to speak and engage the SBCC faculty and students to heighten respect toward anybody regardless their ethnicity.

Kamau and I

This year, the guest speaker who was going to hold the lecture was the astonishing stand-up comic and television host W. Kamau Bell!!! Even if during the time of his lecture I had class, my amazing public speaking professor Cameron Sublett decided to cancel class and have us all attend the Memorial Lecture. I am soooooo glad he decided that because the speech Kamau delivered was simply breathtaking, eye opening and, after the outcome of the recent presidential election, tension reliving. Two hours flew by so quickly while he was braking down this though topic making everybody in the audience laugh but at the same time reflect. Besides, since W. Kamau Bell is an African-American, most of the people were expecting a lecture about the racism and disrespect toward black people. However, he was able to include in his speech an analysis of the discrimination of every ethnic minority, smoothly shifting from one to the other. It was unbelievable.

I believe that this lecture had a particular impact on me, and I think that what Kamau touched upon was mind-blowing and inspiring. In fact, as an Italian International student, I wasn’t aware of how big the ethnic and racial discriminations are in America. The highly varied American society is a unique environment that most European countries don't get to experience, and therefore the racism discussion rarely comes out. However, since I got here I have learned to appreciate this amazing variety, and I really hope that in the near future everybody will be able to recognize that the way we appear is not what describes us, and that what actually counts is what we think, how we act and who we are as an individual. Differences should be embraced and not penalized.

After the presidential election, a number of racial and discriminatory acts have already started to spread allover the nation and even here at SBCC. In fact, already two episodes of discriminatory acts have already taken place on campus. With this said, now it is time to come all together and show that being humans is learning to live with each other with love and respect. Please, let’s show everybody that ignorance is not the answer, but what we must embrace is a behaviors based on understanding and acceptance.

Here an important and inspirational letter send out to all the Ambassadors by our supervisor Shelby Arthur:

Lastly, I would like to add that we need to take action in order to produce real change. We need to act non-violently and raise awareness through pacific protests and anti-hate events. A great and inspiring event to which I just took part was the March in Santa Barbara against Trump! Thousands of people joined and pacifically marched down State Street chanting and spreading love and peace against the hate that exponentially increased after the election. The fight against homophobia, racism, sexism, the destruction of the environment hasn’t started with Trump election, but he gave us an even greater reason to make minorities have their voice heard. Let’s keep fighting for a better world.

CHANGE (with an exclamation mark)

Every year, the Honors Program decides a new topic for the honors classes offered and for the Honors Conference which takes place at the end of each spring semester. In particular, the honors topic of the school year 2016-17 is CHANGE! and I believe that with what has lately happened the topic chosen is the perfect one. In fact, after the election results I am foreshadowing great CHANGE to come!!!

The first big event of the Honors Program happened right this Monday and it was called Prof-Off. The event consisted in a discussion about change with Doctor Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar, Professor Mark Sanders, and Professor William Dinklage moderated by Professor Melanie Eckford-Prossor. The professors loved expressing their opinion on different topics concerning change and the student audience was really engaged and interested in the discussion. I really loved taking pictures of the event for Phi Theta Kappa, and I really enjoyed the conversation!

Sad and scared
about the outcome..

The day after the Prof-Off it was the fateful presidential election day… My friends and I were super interested in getting to know the outcome, and we decided to meet at a bar to follow the progress of the election night. We were almost sure that Hillary Clinton would be the without any doubt the new president elect, but we were TOTALLY wrong!! I’m glad I didn’t bet any money on the outcome of the election because since the beginning Donald Trump was winning… Well, our hope were up and we watched the election night till 2.00am in order to understand what kind of future we would have had to expect. Now Donald Trump is the American President Elect. As an international student, will I be able to remain in this country? Will I be able to start a career and become successful as the American Dream has promised? I have no answer to this questions right now… I just hope that love will triumph over hate, acceptance over discrimination, and unity over separation. 

Color Run, Always Fun!

Happy, Healthy, Hearty

This weekend I had the splendid opportunity to participate to my very first Color Run!! And guys, it wasn’t a normal color run, and let me give you three quick reasons why it wasn’t ordinary. First of all, it was in Los Angeles and right for this event some streets and stadiums of this super busy and crowded city were closed and decorated!! Second, it was specifically called The Color Run Night, and therefore, it took place at night, and the colors that were thrown on people would glow in the dark. How cool is that?! And lastly, it was with five very awesome people who made everything even more special!! Too cool to be real… But it happened!!

Saturday late afternoon, my friends and I left the lovely Santa Barbara and drove toward the super busy and trafficked Los Angeles. In the craziness of this town’s streets it took us there hours to arrive to the color run location, but it took us just a few seconds to get ready for the adventure! In fact, after a super quick check-in, getting a super cool t-shirt, and glowing tattoos we were ready to RUUUUUN!!!! Ok, I have to be honest, we ran just the first 600 feet because of excitement… when we burn off all the excitement, we pretty much walked, talked and enjoyed being around happy and healthy people!!! Don’t tell anybody, but even a mum with a stroller with two kids in it passed us, but you know, sweating it’s just so annoying!

And here we are!

With glowing lights on our heads and comfortable snickers, we walked through 5 different color stations with people throwing color powder onto us, and each one of them was marking a kilometer. Besides, there were two other stations in which there were soap bubbles with color powder in them that after being popped would color all of us!!! The vibes of this environment were making us feel relaxed, happy and all colorful! For the first time in my entire life I had the chance to feel like a unicorn and spread happiness and colors everywhere!! Yahoo!!! I simply loved this experience, and I can’t wait to attend another color run maybe in another American city!!!

School is important but…

Since I started blogging, I have mainly talked about how many things I am doing for school, how involved I am in school, and how important are the school activities I am participating into… Well, I believe that if now you think that my life is school, and that school is my life you have a total wrong picture of me!! I have also a normal social and healthy life outside classes and school related activities!

The Squad

First of all, I want to tell you everything about the past awesome Halloween weekend! This year, my friends Dianne, Brian and Alex and I decided to experience the American Halloween in a total different way. In fact, on Friday afternoon we all left to go to a Music Festival in San Bernardino called Escape! It took us about three hours by to get to the festival location, but as soon as we arrived we immediately felt the Halloween vibes! Everybody was dressed up in the most creative ways and the music festival venue was filled with  decorations! It was impressive how many people were there and were dancing non-stop! We danced all night, too, at while artists such as the Chainsmokers or Hardwell were playing!!! I think you have been living under a rock if you haven't heard the Chainsmokers’ big hit Closer on the radio. Well.. I am just obsessed with that song, and seeing the artist who created it playing it live was awesome!!!!

Scary Farbod...

The weekend adventures were not yet finished… In fact, after coming back to Santa Barbara from the music festival, I was already ready for some more music! After a day of laziness in my bed I wore again my super firefighter costume and I went to a party near to my house.. You know… Party… here in Santa Barbara it is very common to think that party must always turn out in an “Isla Vista Halloween Riot”… However, I am here to say that if you don’t want to go look for trouble, just don’t spend any Uber money to go to some random party in IV and keep it local! We all know that it is impossible to stop college students from partying, but it is possible to party in a safe and responsible way. For this reason, when I decided to go out Saturday night I called four of my friends and we all went to a party close by in which we knew it would have been fun but safe! So.. Stay away from Isla Vista during the festivities and enjoy partying with people that you know!