Alright. Well. I am on my way to becoming a Florentine. I am now officially a student of Florence :). It feels like I just got here, but at the same time I feel as if I've been here forever. Perhaps that's just because we've all bonded in the Villa. In such close quarters, spending so much time together, most people here feel like old friends. Everyone usually has at least one class with everyone else, and if not, there's always breakfast, lunch, dinner, soccer, bocce, library, well, you get my point.
Now here's a note for my dad especially. Ready for this? Classes are great! I've got European Societies, which acts as my Political Science class. This is taught by a professor from the University of Florence, Professor Recchi, who I kid you not, is the italian double of Mr. Bean. It's almost creepy. I keep expecting him to just smile at us akwardly and mumble Hello from the back of his throat or something. But he's turning out to be a really great professor. A little intense; as soon as he took a poll to see what languages we all knew, he assigned us newspapers to start reading on a daily basis. I've got the Athens Times (which I've found in English) and Le Monde (which I haven't found in English). But at least we're keeping up on global events. My European Encounters class is taught by Professor O'Barr from Duke. This will be looking at all of the traveler's that have come to Italy and how they've portrayed it. I've never taken an anthropology class before, so this should be interesting, and fun. Study of Renassaince Art is with Professor Mariotti, who I've already described to you. We already did our weekly sight visit on Tuesday, and I don't beleive she'll ever fail to impress me. We've got our class portion today, which is actually my only class today. Hopefully I'll fill this time volunteering at a local school soon. Then my last class is Italian. There are only two other students in there with me, Kristine and Julian, so we usually just end up sitting around the table talking. Our professor is actually an Armenian who was born in Italy, but she's quite fascinating. We've decided that for our conversation days we'll go to the local caffe and sit and have Apertivos, since class is at 6 anyway. (Apertivos are taken pretty seriously here. It's sort of like a Happy Hour, but everyone does it. It is mostly a drink or two, with perhaps some olives or fruit or something. It's meant to open (aprire) your stomach an hour or two before dinner)
Let's see, so that's classes. Monday night was fun: All of Tuscany, but especially its capital Florence has the Festa della Rficolona, or roughly translated the festival of funny dressed women. It's totally not what it sounds like. Historically, September 8th was the Nativita' della Madonna, or the birth of Mary, which was celebrated in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata. The peasants and mountainfolk would sell their goods there. However in order to get a good spot for their carts, they would leave the night before, and use burning rags and paper on the end of sticks to light their way. The young Florentine children then would make fun of them, especially the women, because of their poor appearances and unstylish clothes (Italy is a fashion captial after all). And so currently on September 7th, there is a big 'parade' type walk to the Basilica, where everyone meets and watches speeches, is blessed, and listens to children sing. It's also a traditional part for kids to hunt these lanterns. Historically they threw watermellon rinds at the lanterns, and if they hit one, it would light on fire and burn in the center of the street. Now kids have these cool spitball typedart guns, I guess you would call them. And people still light them on fire in the middle of the street, in the middle of hundreds of people. Could you ever imagine darts and fires being allowed in the US? No way jose. But it was so fun. That night we ended with a trip to the English Pub downtown, which may or may not have been worth it; good atmosphere, but overpriced and touristy.
The past few nights we've been good about not going out during the week and have just walked down to get gelato from my good friend Fabio. One € my friends, it's the way to go. I've also been spending more time in the library than ever before. For one, it's kind of hard not to when I literally live in the library. Like, you have to go through at least one room of the library to get to our door. It's hard to complain of going to the library when it's less than five steps away. And I've also surmised that I'll actually HAVE to stay on top of my work here, because there is no falling behind. With an average of less than ten people in each class, I'm pretty sure everyone would know if you hadn't done your reading. So Ashley is going to be a good girl this semester. Darn it.
We're off to hike Cinque Terre this weekend, which should be GORGEOUS!!!! And hopefully warm, because I am SO cliff diving into the Mediterranean. Ciao!
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