It has been quite some time since I have updated. I keep this blog for my parents and some of you guys at home but I mainly write it for me. It’s my way of documenting my time here so I am disappointed that I have to recap the past four weeks in one entry. So yeah, this will be a long one.
Four weeks ago seems like absolutely forever ago. That’s pretty much how all of my time here has felt, actually. It’s been over two months since I arrived here and I feel like it was a lifetime ago. So four weeks ago is hard to remember but I make notes of the things I do to help me remember what to write here.
The last night that I updated this was a Tuesday night. Tuesday nights here are typically fun nights with my friends, and we had recently found an Italian bar here called Kitsch, which has some good apertivo. That night my friends and I went there and met up with some Italians who we had found through putting up a sign somewhere that said we wanted Italian language partners to help us learn the Italian language. A guy had responded to Marissa and we met up with him and his two friendgirls at Kitsch that night. By the time I got there, half of our group had already been there chatting with them for a couple hours. I sat down and was at first not interested in them at all. If you know me at all, you know this flaw I have: I have a seriously difficult time letting myself meet other people once I have an established friend group. I don’t like letting other people in. So like I said, I was really not interested. But after a while of listening in on their conversations, testing my own Italian figuring out what they were saying, and learning that the two girls were studying art, I became interested. The guy sounded hilarious and the two girls were so easy to talk to. So I eventually jumped in and joined. I learned that their names were Laura and Gabriela, but I can’t remember the guy’s name. It was really fun to talk to each other. They spoke fairly good English, but they were meeting up with us because they wanted to learn it better too. It was interesting to see them help each other out with English words just like we were helping each other out with Italian words. We loved talking to them for hours and once again I was annoyed at myself for keeping my guard up so long to some really cool people. They eventually complained about having to get up early for school/work the next day and we had to say goodbye, but my friends and I stuck around the bar afterwards and had a good time with each other. I spent the night on defense against Krissy’s blame on me for whispering about her every time I talked to Giancarlo, but all in good fun. Krissy can’t figure out whose team I am on. =]
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| San Gimignano's awesome countryside |
That Friday I got up early and headed to San Gimignano, a small classical Tuscan town, with Krissy, Jon-Michael, and David. We left the train station at 8 am and it was so worth spending the whole day there. I wound up spending the day using Krissy as my impromptu model and going around and doing what I do best: photographing her. That girl is so beautiful it is easy. I taught her how to use my 5dm2 and we photographed each other, the place was so beautiful I wanted my own pictures too. It’s funny when sometimes I liked her shots better than I even liked my own. Eventually we met back up with the guys for some of the best gelato I’ve ever tasted. The “World Champions” banner hanging in front of the gelateria pulled me right in. San Gim is known for its white wine so they even had Vernaccia flavored gelato, which I had to try. I also had cinnamon gelato on my cone too, which I liked so much that I went back for three more scoops a couple hours later. Hehe. Earlier while me and Krissy had been off photographing, the boys had found a trail outside the walls with an apparent spectacular view of the tuscan countryside, so we grabbed some panini and vino to head down there to have the rest of our backwards lunch. And spectacular it was. We found a little small bench outside the walls and panino’d and vino'd it up down there and enjoyed the countryside. San Gimignano is beautiful. That was a rather fun day, I really liked hanging out with just me and Krissy. That night in Florence though, yikes. We decided to celebrate Jon-Michael’s 21st birthday that night because his actual birthday was over fall break during which he’d be roaming Egypt alone. Let’s just say… solo-celebrated he sure did, helping him home was an extreeeemely difficult hour-long tast, neither he nor I will be drinking any red wine for a while, and he didn't make it to the chocolate festival the next day.
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| Choco festival! |
That’s right, the chocolate festival. Eurochocolate. Don’t be fooled though, I was quite disappointed and I don’t even like chocolate. We got there and assumed it was something like the wine festival had been a couple weeks ago where we bought a card and got to spend points for tasting at different tables. So we each paid 5 euro for a chococard and then couldn’t figure out how to use it. We wandered around from booth to booth for a while, freezing our butts off, and I was disappointed to see that not many tables were offering tastes of their chocolate. You just had to buy it. I reeeallyyy wanted to buy a bar of cinnamon white chocolate but just couldn’t bring myself to spend 3 euro on it. If I would have known that would have been the only thing I wanted to buy all day, I probably would have just sucked it up and paid for it. But I walked away, sadly. At one of the few tables that did allow tasting, I tasted chocolate grappa. Have you ever tasted grappa? I had never even heard of it before coming to Europe and meeting Giancarlo. It’s basically a really high-content alcohol made from all the leftovers of the wine making process, like the skin and stems of the grapes, and it’s so so bitter. I hate it. But somehow I have tried it about 5 different times now, each time thinking maybe this time I’ll like it. Why? I don’t know. And chocolate grappa was none the better. Gross. We eventually found some booths that would punch our chococard and give us some free stuff. The first thing we got was this silly little purple fuzzy cell phone holder with the Milka logo on it. Are you kidding me. We paid 5 euro for crap like this? So at this point I decided the whole day could go one of two ways: whine about the crappy nonsense swag, or make it fun… Make it fun. The area around the free stuff booths was constantly packed and we lost Giancarlo, Liz, and Steph, but Ricky, Marissa, Krissy and I decided to just go find the rest of our swag booths and take swag pics along the way. Some booths pleasantly surprised us with big free chocolate bars, but others like the Milka booth or the one where we got a single packet of fake sugar (think Splenda) were [a] disappointing [b] easy to make fun of. Oh well. We made the best out of the cold, rainy day anyway. We got home umbrella-less and it was pouring on our walk home from the train station, which I chose to make fun as well. These are the days.
We spent the rest of the weekend studying for midterms. However, studying for midterms here is nothing like studying for midterms at home. I had a photography exam the next day, and like you might guess I didn’t do much studying for 10-15 questions on the technical side of photography (examples: What are the three ways to adjust your exposure? What does SLR mean?). I did have Food and Wine on Tuesday though, along with two art history midterms on that Wednesday and Italian on Thursday. I’m not getting credit for Food and Wine at Cal Poly, so I didn’t put a ton of effort into that one either. I am getting a bunch of credit for art history though, so I spent essentially all my studying time on those two midterms (I found myself really missing you and our silly study habits, Megan). I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I wasn’t so much memorizing dates and artist names for Great Masters but that I actually knew what I was looking at. Studying for Iconography was actually quite enjoyable too, man I love that class.
Well the more I write, the more I realize I have to write, so I'm breaking this enormous four week post into 4 or 5 different entries. I have so much to write about and I don't want to forget any of it. I'll post the next half about my parents' visit tomorrow. =]
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