868

868. I have 868 pictures from Venice. 2 days, 868 pictures. Granted, I had two cameras there, and Laura had an absolute blast with my big camera, so there's a ton of pictures that are just completely random. I put a bunch on here, but if you want to see the rest they're on my google/picasa account Here.

There's a lot of pictures there, mostly of things and people, but some are so cool! So let's see. Before I start on Venice, I'll see if there's anything from last week. I guess the only interesting thing I did (wait a minute, I'm in Italy... I do interesting things all the time :)) was I joined the other art class on their trip to the Duomo Baptistry. That was cool. It was built on Roman foundations that can still be seen beneath the grates. There's so much history here! And with Mariotti at the helm, we learn it all. Story about Mariotti later in my post. A hint, I'm pretty sure she or her husband is in the Maffia. Pretty sure. We googled it. But that's to come.

So early Friday morning we left for Venice. The bus ride there was great in itself. Well at least the first half. The Pennines are gorgeous. The road is high up in the mountains, and so we drove half-way through the clouds through these green mountains with countryside villas, and it was just perfect. Funny how out of my 868 pictures I didn't get one of the mountains. Oh well. We finally got into Venice, and not 5 minutes in to our boat ride to Morano (the glass making island) our boat got pulled over. I think for speeding, but I'm not quite sure. This began our first experience with Venitian men in uniform. I don't know if it's something in the water or what, but all the policemen in Venice were amazingly good looking :)

St. Mark's Square

Alright, so the following pictures may require a bit of an explanation. We visited the glass blowers in Morano, and I have never been so amazed in such a short amount of time. First it was great when he just whipped out a glass vase in a minute. However then he started to work on his second one. We thought just another vase, but then he started pulling and twisting, and in 45 seconds, bam there was a horse!!

Yeah. Crazy.

St. Mark's!

The canal our hotel was on

View from another window of our hotel

Alright, so another situation that takes some explanation. And here's where Mariotti's maffia background comes in. We've realized that Mariotti is a wealth of information about history, art, architecture and such. However we've begun to notice that she pretty much always gets what she wants. For example, our Friday night in Venice. We all met outside St Mark's Cathedral per our instructions that night, and Mariotti informed us that we were going to get a private viewing. Impressive, right? It gets better. We enter this dark church, and she has us all sit in the center. She goes and talks to the Director. Next comes possibly the most holy experience of my life. Even if you weren't at all religious you would have been moved. In absolute silence for about 5 minutes, the director gradually turned on all the lights, one by one. It was just awe inspiring. The ceiling is completely made of gold, and seeing it in different lights was phenomenal.

And so after this great experience Mariotti gave us a bit more history, then in an off-hand manner, said "Now they don't normally do this, but let's see if they'll let us up to the alter" After a quick chat with the Director, there we were. And THEN we got to see the coolest thing ever. The director cranks this handle, and the altarpiece swings around to reveal this:
I'm fairly certain that you could feed all of Africa for a year just from all the gold, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and millions of other precious gems on this mosaic. She made a similar agreement to get us down into the crypts. So cool!! We were all left in awe after this excursion.

We had a great dinner too. By the end of our meal we were the only ones left in the restaurant, so the staff (our waiter was super cute!!) started joking around with us and keeping us company. The chef Alberto was a riot. He insisted on getting pictures with all of us, kissing him.

We were fairly tired, so we went back and passed out (due to tiredness, not alcohol I swear!) We decided that we wanted to take full advantage of Venice while were here, so we woke up at 5:30 the next morning to watch the sun come up. Soooooooo worth it :)

The city was still asleep and fairly empty. It was almost eerie. But oh so great. It was fun to see the city wake up and come to life. Fun!

After breakfast and a tour with Mariotti of the Academia museum, we decided to wander and eventually head out to the Peggy Guggenheim modern art museum. And guess what, there was water in St. Mark's!! We were so excited!!

We started to wonder what it would be like if random tourists came and took pictures of our laundry...

I'm too scared to count how many pictures of canals I have

Overall one of the most amazing trips ever. We were all pretty tired on the bus ride home. Well that is until Laura and I started a dance party. This week has been great so far. Last night we went out for Julian's birthday, and I found some Danes!! They were here for school for a few days, and they were so excited to find out that I was Danish. They taught me how to properly say Aero, the island that Grandma's from, along with a lot of other words and phrases. I just thought it was great to find Danes in Italy. Who knew? We were going to head down to Sicily this weekend, but our €30 ticket jumped to €85, sooooo we're sticking around Florence. Perhaps we'll visit some little towns around here and explore some other parts of Florence. Vedremo! (We'll see!)

Cinque

So I am officially in love. Yes, it has finally happened. Ladies and gentlemen, Bruno has given us warm home-made peanut butter for the past two breakfasts. I will never eat Skippy ever again. I don't know why or how I'm so obsessed with this peanut butter. I don't even normally like chunky peanut butter. But this is just amazing. Usually breakfast consists of bread, jams, a natural (aka non-sweetened) honey, granola, true yogurt (aka sourcream like, non-sweatened), coffee and tea. Except for Sunday brunches when we get warm coffee cake and sometimes eggs. But this peanut butter has just blown me away. I thought you might like to know what truly makes my days, because yes, they now revolve around food :)

But anyway, let me tell you about my weekend at Cinque. Not Cinque Terre, we've definitely shortened it to Cinque. It's that intense. Unfortunately not cliff diving intense. They lied about the availablity of cliffs to dive off of. But all is definitely forgiven, as yesterday was one of the best days. It started out early, up at 5 to catch a 5:30 bus to Florence, to catch a 6:10 train to Spezia, to catch a train to Monterosso. We were a lively crowd on the bus.

Waiting for the train to Monterosso - Ashley2 and Tessa

We got to La Spezzia a little early, so we grabbed a cafe, then headed on to Monterosso. Technically I think you're supposed to start at Riomaggiore and go north/west, but we decided to start at Monterosso. The hikes between Monterosso and Vernazza and Conriglia are the most intense, so we figured we'd start out with the most energy.

Thank goodness we did. Those were super intense! I mean, maybe not super intense, but definitely not what I was expecting. These stairs just kept going and going, and going! Half way through I just had to stop because me knees couldn't take it any more. BUT it was 150% worth it. I mean, absolutely gorgeous. Once in a lifetime type thing. Except that I really want to come back, so more than once I guess. It was about 95 out, plus a backpack, so we kinda got sweaty and gross. But once again, totally worth it :)

At Corniglia, the third town, we decided to finally stop after the hard legs. We decided to have a siesta with some lunch. Cinque Terre is known for a few things: fresh anchovies, dry white wine, pesto and raisin wine. We couldn't find the rasin wine, but we did get some delicious white wine, along with some calzones and pizza. Now remember, these are authentic calzones and pizza, aka very good :) We then picked up another bottle of wine, and well, made good use of it. Not that I"m advertising drinking here, but somehow when we stopped to go swimming in the Mediterannean, we thought it would be a great idea to drink in the sea. It was... interesting. There's a decent swell, so you have to try to keep your footing on the smoothest, most slippery rocks. It's actually a bit comical and possibly dangerous to just get in and out of the water, much less stand out in it. But once again, such a great experience. We then laid in the sun for a bit, before finally throwing clothes back on and continuing our trek.

At Manarola and finally Riomaggiore we did Apertivi and a loooong delicious dinner. Great seafood. I got my favorite, gnocchi, with shrimp. But of course I'm growing up to be just like my mother, and tried everyone's dish. They were all fantastic :) Love you mom!

Alright. Now comes the fun part. After dinner, we went and bought our tickets back to Firenze. We saw that we had to take the train to Pisa, then transfer to get back to Firenze. So we decide to remain awake on the way to Pisa so that we dont' miss it. We get to Pisa and see that the connection won't arrive until 1:10. AM. It's 11ish. EF!!!! And that's when we saw the little symbol next to the Firenze sign that looked like a bus. Yeah. Turns out it was a bus. I mean seriously? Sucks! We decided that in these two hours in Pisa, we might as well go see the leaning tower, right? Well, we saw the tower. And it leaned. I can't say that any of us were as excited as perhaps we should have been. We were so ready to just be home! I mean we'd been up since 5, and had planned on being in bed by now. But it was still cool to go see. We also discovered that Pisa has quite a happening night life. I guess it's kind of a college town. There were people out everywhere! The piazza's were packed! So that was kinda (not) cool to wander through all dirty and disgusting in our hiking gear and backpacks. But whatever. We finally fought our way onto the bus - and I mean fought. 72 seats, +100 passengers. Yeah. This all the while looking out for several pickpockets there. Just what we wanted to deal with. But after a two hour bus ride, and a taxi ride back to the villa, we were finally home! After a quick shower I was asleep by 4. I thought of staying up the full 24 hours, but then quicky slapped myself. All in all quite the day. Sunday was spent doing a total of nothing. It was glorious :) Then yesterday was classes and soccer, and tons of reading. Today was a sight visit for Renaissance Art, so we went to the Duomo and looked at a couple of things. We just had our meeting about internships. Previous to this I had my heart set on an internship in the mayor's office, so that I could learn all about small italian town politics. However my Peace Corps recruiters have talked me in to working on my application skill set while I'm abroad. So instead of even working with little kids, I'm now signed up to tutor high school students. Yippee. Not gonna lie, I feel a little bit intimidated. But it should be good. And fun. And very, very insightful. I'm also going to sign up for a conversation partner so I can work on my Italian. And make new friends. You can always do with another friend, right? Lol. This weekend is our Venice class trip, so more stories to come!

Getting to know you, Getting to know all about you

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.

In the square - you can see the amazing ceilings of the basilica, and also the speakers. I'm pretty sure at least the mayor and the Cardinal spoke. It was cool for me because I pretty much understood it. I tried to translate for everyone else, but I think I need to work on those skills

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!