If you are my friend / family and you are reading this post please find a seat and brace yourself. I have some huge news to report that may just rock your world. Only continue reading past this point once you are sitting down and have taken three deep breaths....

I am converting. Being here has really opened my eyes to everything I've been missing in this world and I just can't go on living the sheltered life that I've been living. From this point forward I will no longer be part of the church of grape jelly, and instead am starting my conversion process into the life of a blueberry jelly lover.

Sorry for the scare, mom. If you've known me for a while you probably know that I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches more than most things in life. I ate a pb&j for lunch everyday from my first day of kindergarten until my last day of high school, and now that I'm off a meal plan and forced to pack a lunch I've reverted back to my old ways...with one BIG exception. It is virtually impossible to find grape jelly in this part of the world (or at least at the 2 grocery stores I've checked) and so I've had to resort to blueberry jelly as a substitute. I hate to say it, but I think I was deprived during the roughly 12 years of my life that I swore by grape. So long live blueberry! And if you can find it in the US please tell me where so I can pick some up as soon as I get home.

In other news, I had a very fun weekend in Lugano, Switzerland, mostly because I ate super yummy Italian food. Lugano is in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and it basically felt like we were in a different country. On Saturday we even stumbled upon an international food and art festival (Bruce, you would have LOVED this) that only happens once a year. What luck! I probably won't make it to Italy during my time here due to the fact that I've already been all over that country (thanks grandma and grandpa!) so a weekend in Lugano was a nice compromise.

I ate mushroom gnocchi and life was good.

This calzone was filled with tomato, mozzarella, mushroom, artichoke, and prosciutto. I left my heart (and my stomach) in Lugano.

One more fun thing to report: today my French class took place at a chocolate factory. We got to see how chocolate is made and ate an obscene amount of samples. The presentation was done entirely in French so I can't really tell you anything I learned, but what I do know is that there is no chocolate factory in the world that resembles Willy Wonka's factory and also chocolate is delicious and I will never stop loving it.

Ready for surgery....and chocolate tasting.

As promised, here's my canyoning video. Blogspot wouldn't let me upload it so I had to post it on youtube (embarrassing) but hopefully it works!

Insert laughter here.

This upcoming weekend I will be in Munich for Oktoberfest, so if you don't hear from me by Monday morning at the latest it's because I either loved it so much I decided to stay or I drank my weight in beer and popped from liquid overload.