solo eaters

there i was
reading a book (a quite boring book)
sitting solo at the diner.
i imagined myself like they do in movies
(dont say a thing)
just there to lunch with myself
utterly content.

another girl wanders in. "un tavolo per uno"
she says bashfully.
i look up and grin--im alone too, my smile whispered.

on another completely irrelevant note

these pictures just came to my attention, and i thought i would relive some glory days.

APEX 2009 IM Soccer Champs

ps/oy

for the next week, my mom and i are keeping a blog of our time in roma. so, if you want to know about that part of my trip check it out :

http://therootsearch.blogspot.com/

my last couple days in florence

well. I made it through finals week, with the help of Jordan of course who came out to visit me (yay!). we went up to Fiesole and looked out over Florence..which was incredible. Mostly we ate delicious food and talked and slept. We actually made a bunch of super good food, you guys would be proud. Poor man's caviar (eggplant, not fish eggs) and toast with frutta di bosco jam and mozzarella buffalo were definitely the best that we created. ask either one of us for the recipes, we may or may not give them to you for a small fee. or a quick massage. I would do anything for an Olivia Jones massage right now.

Seeing Jordan made me pretty home sick for my friends back in the states. I MISS YOU GUYS. COME TO ROME. but, I am going to live my last week abroad up and to the max because now I dont have to worry about hw or having to go to class. Speaking of Rome, I was initially going to meet my mom in Dublin...earlier today...but the Iceland volcano caused serious problems for the European airlines. aka, they are all still closed. RyanAir is closed until Wednesday..Lufthansa (germany) is closed until...who knows. My entire program was supposed to leave on a group flight tomorrow morning, but it was canceled because no one can get to paris or frankfurt. It has been pure chaos as everyone is trying to get home. Luckily everyone's landlords are letting them extend the lease for a couple days while we are all stuck in Florence. Not that it is really like being "stuck"...who minds being stuck in a beautiful european city for a couple extra days? im not complaining. i was only really worried because my mom was coming in and i didn't want her to be in dublin by herself. but it all worked out, as it always does.

For now, I am staying at the most excellent hotel in florence. I feel so unworthy of it, I had to dress up and take a shower to even enter the place. But I love it. My shower doubles as a sauna. I have a handwritten note from the hotel manager welcoming me to his hotel (Dear Ms. Hockett Alden haha). and I have a bed that I can lay both hot-dog and hamburger style on and nothing hangs off. I could stay here forever. But until Tuesday will be just fine :)

It was beautiful and sunny today so Melinda, Katie, Winnie and i all got gelato, sat in Piazza Repubblica, and listened to a guy playing guitar and singing simon and garfunkel tunes. he even played radiohead's creep. it was the best afternoon. I was in dire need of some vitamin d and some chillage with a gelato (soy vanilla and dark chocolate, best combo ever).

I want to put up some pictures, but haven't gotten them off my camera yet. The last pictures I have on iPhoto are from Easter. So i'll put those up. Every year Florence has this whole to-do for Easter in the Piazza del Duomo inbetween the cathedrale and the battista. This is prime because my living room window looks out over that very piazza. Anyway, they have a parade with music and everyone is in costume from the 1700s and it is incredible. The grand finale is a huge barge which explodes with fireworks. 2 oxen bring it in and while they set up the fireworks part, ladies all dressed in bonnets hand out white flowers to the droves of people that show up to watch.

weekend adventures

OHHHK! Vespa riding was just about the most fun thing, ever. I want one so bad. They just go! I hadn't gone that fast in a while, and totally needed the speed rush. Super bonus, after we finished motorini-ing, we headed off to lunch next to a lake in the hills. This was no ordinary lunch though, it was a 5 course lunch with wine and strawberry mousse. After, we went wine, olive oil, and honey tasting at the Castello Monteriggioni. Needless to say we all passed out on the car ride home :)
Saturday I went to Bologna with my art history class. Our final Helen trip! I was not that excited to go because I had heard bad things about Bologna, and because we had to meet the bus at 6:50 in the morning...ew. It was amazing, however, and I loved the atmosphere. There were tons of outdoor markets and a huge sport-court type thing set up in the center town square for kids to play soccer, volleyball and dance. There were games and performances all day. It didn't hurt that the weather was superb and that I had 3 espressos. I WAS PUMPED! My favorites were the Santo Stefano church created to mimic the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Pinacoteca. Both were beautiful, and the Ludovico Caracci Annunciation would be worth going all the way back just to see it again. PLUS, the church's gift shop had homemade chocolate spread, which I just cannot get enough of.

Today's adventure? I'm not sure. Right now it is finishing a 15 page museology paper. It's gonna be a really cool paper though, so I dont mind writing it too much. Hopefully something cool will happen later though. I'll tell you about it tomorrow!

wow

well. it's been almost a month since i last BLOGGED!, and there is no way i can even begin to catch up on everything that has happened. I don't believe I could even recall everything i would have written had i not been busy every second of the day.

how about some highlights?

my family came to visit! minus my brother, plus my grandma. It was so wonderful to see them and wish they could have stayed longer. We ate amazing food, drank wine up the wazoo and enjoyed being with eachother. OH! we also saw La Boheme the opera in Italian. It was funny and tear-jerking and I have found a new appreciation for opera. I think my dad should take lessons.
two friends from whitman came to see me the day and the day after my parents left. Oh my gosh I cant even express how fantastic it was to see familiar people and talk about what has been going on in our lives the past semester. We all agree that Whitman is the best place in the world. We went to a Beatles cover band show and had gelato (a lot of gelato) and explored the city. Plus, Matt kept my apartment-mates happy by cooking us the most delicious food. He certainly earned his keep (not that I was MAKING HIM COOK! NOW! or anything). Really, I could have been doing absolutely nothing and still would have been having fun just being with them.

We climbed to the top of the Duomo, which (sheepish face) sadly was also my first time in the Duomo this semester. I live 15 feet from it, but had yet to step inside. The view from the tippy-top over Florence is sweeping and makes you want to sit and stare for hours, which of course you cant because people have to move through. It was definitely one of the highlights of Florence touristy things so far.

Top 3 so far: (in no particular order)

The Stibbert Museum
Chanting monks at San Miniato
Seeing the Firenze soccer team play (and kill it 4-1)

moving on.
It is finally getting warm and sunny and delicious out. I am beyond ready for some nice weather, the gray skies and cold windy rain-y-ness was starting to get to me. I've spent as much time as I can out here in the garden, soaking up the sun and trying in vain to do my piles of homework for finals next week.

finals next week. it's weird to think that I only have 10 more days in this amazing place. I am going to try and do something fun EVERYDAY for my last ten days. and i'll blog about the fun thing. OK! good, and it will keep me bloggin.

Today counts as one of the 10 days, so I'll have to do something fun for dinner and dopo cena. Melinda is having the worst week of her life (seriously everything is going wrong) so we are going to take her out and try to cheer her up a bit.
Tomorrow is already set up. I am going VESPA RIDING IN CHIANTI. jealous did you say? yeah, I know.

alicante--no pasa nada

so it's been a little less than a week (have you noticed how everytime i start a new paragraph it's with the word 'so'? i'll stop that now) since i left, most unwillingly, alicante. after spring break i had about a week and a half in florence to chill and get back into the groove of speaking italian again before i launched myself into another country to get by in a new language. luckily i went to visit a very good very old (as in ive known her forever, not that she is 90 years old) friend of mine who speaks spanish pretty much fluently so it was no biggie getting around or doing anything (dude, TMI, but even finding lactaid). to get to alicante i took the fast train to bologna, couldn't figure out the bus system, so nabbed a taxi to take me to the airport (which was AWESOME. he had a tv on his console and we watched an italian game show. so stupid and so funny), was felt up by the lady in the security line who also guffawed at my mismatched socks (at least they were CLEAN, jeez), finally landed in spain after my ipod died halfway throught Easy on Joanna's new album (yes, we are on a first name basis) and the pilot made the sketchiest landing EVER.
anyway. jordan picked me up from the airport and we did one of those romantic movie scenes when you run at the person waiting for you and get the biggest hug ever...it was like that.
jordan is living with a host family that includes her madre Mabel and her little sister Paula. both are some of the biggest characters iv'e met. especially Paula, she has the whole 12 year old attitude, but she looks like she is 19. one evening we took paula, her cousin, and a friend out to go bowling. the bowling place ended up being kind of like chuck-e-cheeses, but in spanish. there were little kids everywhere! one thing we noticed while just chillin and watching the kids was how well they all dress. Like, they are put together little children, thier hair is all done and they wear boots over their jeans and jeez. i was into tiger t-shirts and jynco's when i was that age. boots? psh.

one of my favorite things there was eating dinner with her family and just listening to the conversation. i could understand what was going on most of the time which was soo cool and jordan would translate what i said or details/topics that i couldn't catch. she was our translator, english-spanish-english-spanish. when we weren't eating amazing mabel food, or pigging out on chocolate con churros, we climbed up to the high point that looks over alicante. the high point also happens to be a huge old castle with never ending switchbacks and stairs to the top. it was well worth the climb to see the view of the ocean and the colorful city below.
did you say "so what was the nightlife like?" yeah, i though you did. well before i went i thought i was kind of a badass going out at 10 and staying out until like 2:30in the morning. turns out this is nothing, and if i had a spanish madre she would ask me if i was sick and be thoroughly dissapointed if i came home anytime before 5 in the morning. soooo. my last night we stayed out until the sun came up at 8, hanging out at the beach, falafel in hand, friends by my side. we stumbled into bed and crashed until 2 when it was time to eat lunch (dinner is at 9, you talk for a couple hours, digest, call your friends, and go out again at 11:30). going out with jordan and her friends was so fun and comfortable and i felt completely able to relax and have the time of my life. we danced and met tons of people and jordan (as always) knew eveyone so were able to get in everywhere (ok, except one club that we had to sneak into when the guy was looking the other way) and talk to the bartenders and the djs and jeez. i did not want to leave.
some little highlights: 6 euro boots. yes! falafel falafel falafel. eating lunch while watching people play volleyball on the beach. meeting jordan's friends. wandering the city...street art. not having to wear my big jacket. seeing the sun. mabel's pizza. trying to explain that i didn't eat meat. not even chicken. teaching the kids about the slow clap. being jealous of paula's cousins hair. oh man. and so much more.

my next adventure? family! my mom, dad, chelsea, and my gma bonnie are flying in saturday morning. i am beyond excited to see them, and i wish mat was coming too (stupid work!). all my friends want to meet chelsea and are so curious to see my twin. "there are TWO of you?!" yes, but we aren't identical. "but TWO?!"
i know there aren't any pictures on this post, cause im on the school computer, but i

OH! last night was St. Patrick's Day. Holy cow the entire city was up all night, the beer was green, and if you weren't wearing a tall floppy hat that said "stPATRICKS DAY 2010" you just weren't getting into it. i have no green things. not one. the weirdest part (and probably the best)? i didn't get pinched!

BERLIN

thanks to the bahn, we got to Berlin in about 6 hours safe and sound. it was probably the most difficult thing ever trying to find my seat and I asked countless people "scusa, wo ist" and then i'd point to my seat assignment on the ticket. Everyone was really helpful, but didn't seem to know either, so I just picked a seat and sat down. No sweat. I mostly pretended to be Italian on the train and in the public places cause it was more fun. The countryside from Amsterdam to Berlin is amazing. There are windmills and green for miles. Joanna Newsom accompanied me and James Joyce until I really just couldn't read anymore Dubliners. on arrival to berlin we had to figure out the u-bahn, s-bahn train system. it really isn't that difficult once you see how it works, but we had been traveling all day and our heads weren't quite screwed on all the way. thankfully there are maps everywhere and if you ask an older person where to go they are more likely to tell you in a slow, aww, you're lost, kind of way. we ended up staying in an amazing appartment in Mitte, the old east part of Berlin. the tub was really cool, cause to use the shower you just sat in the tub and held the sprayer thing at your face. it was so fun.
anyway. we unpacked, and headed out in search of food. we found a corner store that resembled a 7-11, but that sold alcohol and pre-mixed cocktails. so we got some wine, spaghetti, and spaghetti sauce that was in a packet. seriously, it was "just add water!" spaghetti sauce. we found this hilarious and bought it. it was dece.
the next morning we headed out early to do the real Berlin thing. megan and her mom went to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen near Berlin, but katie and I wanted to see the city, so we parted ways. First! The East Side Gallery. an absolute must if you are going anywhere near berlin, it is a piece of the inner wall (not the real border because of the river). it is totally tricked out in new art, which i was confused about, but learned that it had been restored in 2009. dozens of international artists came to paint their impression of the November 9, 1989 event.

we kept walking past the gallery and crossed the Glienicke Bridge - the 'Bridge of Spies' - sweetest name ever, and happened upon 3 public pieces by the artist Blu (this is Blu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4) which blew my mind. they are huge!
if you are interested in public art, street art, or graffiti, Berlin is the city for you. It is everywhere. and some of it is really impressive and thoughtful.
the center district was next because i just had to see the Reichstag. it had been built up in my head for so long. i wrote a paper about cristo and jean-claude wrapping it, and we learned about it in german visual culture, so i was beyond ready to see the thing. it still blew my mind when we came up the u-bahn. it is MASSIVE. and the square outside it sprawling and empty and i can only imagine what kind of events have taken place in that momentarily deserted area. i can't imagine wrapping something that huge. from there on we wandered the city, no destination in mind, so we saw a large number of impressive buildings that i have no idea what they were.

we stopped in every thrift store we could find, and in a couple kaffee shops and a soup place where guessed what we were ordering. i've never experienced not being able to read anything on the entire menu before. except coffee. that was it. thankfully everyone speaks english, although we tried our hardest not to. my 5 or 6 words in german are thoroughly ingrained in my head and even now i think to say Dankeschön to italian people.
later that night we went on a pub crawl and met up with our 4 other crawlers. i guess tuesday nights aren't big night-on-the-town nights. it was pretty freakin' cold, too. there was a guy named Yal from Norway, a German girl named Simone, and an Israeli guy named Daniel, plus katie, megan, and I. since it was such a small group we got to do whatever we wanted really, and they just showed us the cool spots to go. My favorite was Club Zapata where they had a fire shooter and sweeeeeeet music. finally some good ol' europop. the upstairs of this club was an abandoned artists gallery type-thing, that also had a couple very cool bars. During the day it is a squatters haven, and it still houses squatters more or less legally, or tolerated at least. Simone, as we are climbing the stairs, says "ok, if anyone asks you if you want to buy drugs, let me deal with them" we all nodded our agreements. it was very chill though, and we sat down and talked for a long time in the cozy dimly-lit red bar.
after a long night of dancing and meeting people and getting plum tuckered out, we discovered that the s-bahn was closed. it was time to figure out the metro at 4:30 in the morning, which was quite the experience, but we did it! home safe, we ate leftover spaghetti and watched music videos on German MTV. there are the craziest videos on there. some new, some really really not new. they definitely love Kesha's Tic-Tok though. wow, like every 5th song.
we woke up the next morning and I WANTED TO MUSEUM. so we went to the Berlin Gugg and saw the coolest exhibition called Utopia Matters (http://www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de/e/ausstellungen-utopiamatters01.php) which was such a great thing to see because it summed up the german visual culture class I took in the fall. it put all of the Nazarines work up to the De Stijl and further into perspective. paintings are sooo different in person. it was so cool to see what i had studied. i kept regaling katie with little facts, im sure i was pretty annoying but i just couldn't contain my mouth. after the gugg, we headed off to the Neue Museum only to find that the permanent collection was closed until the 12th of march, NOO! but it was cool to see the museum and the area surrounding. we decided to walk back to Potsdamer Platz because it wasn't that far and we wanted to see more of the city, but we walked in the opposite direction and ended up who knows where, surrounded by little falafel\kabab places. so naturally we stopped, got some AMAZING falafel, baklava, and asked where the nearest u-bahn to Alexanderplatz was.

I absolutely love public transportation. the bahn's were just too cool. the people watching on trains is just about as amazing as the ride itself as well. german little kids are adorable, and i loved just listening to conversations. no idea at all what was being said, but it was beautiful none the less. german is definitely my next language. i could keep talking about this trip forever. there are so many little things about Berlin that make it more than just any other big city. some of my favorite things were the little smiles you get when you say gutentag instead of hallo, the guys selling currywurst on the street in their laps, CHOCOLATE, the pace and flow of the people getting on and off the trains, ordering a different pastry every morning from the bakery around the corner (the lady was so nice, i was trying so hard to pronounce the words and she was very patient with me, and even helped when i was wayyyyy of base), and the sky. stormy skies are beautiful and i have never seen them quite like they were in Berlin. im going back at some point. 3 days was not enough. i will be back.

Amsterdam and Berlin

SO. This is so hard to write about. You know when you have an experience and it was just so jam packed and full of EVERYTHING. Like a massive burrito. Well my spring break was like that, and it's hard to translate all the flavors into words. I will, however, do my best to dole the highlights.

Or maybe pictures would best describe? Ill do both. First, coming out of Florence was crazy because we were delayed TWO AND A HALF hours, but, as is Italy. We just wanted to GO! Anyway, we got there and (the Amsterdam airport is seriously clean) hopped on the train over to Centraal. Our hostel was called Vita Nova, and if you ever go to Amsterdam you MUST stay on this hostelboat because it is amazing and you are on a boat in the harbor right next to the NEMO museum. Whoa. And a pirate ship. No joke. The manager is named Roy and he is by far the coolest hostel manager I've met. Not that I've met LOADS OF HOSTEL MANAGERS but I bet by far he is the coolest. He took us to one of his favorite bars in town and we met all his friends and played music on the jukebox and danced with this couple from around amsterdam. Plus there was a tree of hats that you could just pick your favorite one and dance in it. We also did some educational things believe it or not (Im gonna keep saying 'we' because my housemate was with me during everything, so I must give her credit too). We went to The Rejksmuseum and saw countless Holland masterpieces, including The Night Watch by the one and only Rembrant (check this out: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/attachments/QTVR/rijksmuseum_rembrandt_leerlingen.mov). What impressed me even more were the doll houses though. There are two humongous doll houses that are complete with furniture, dishes, wallpaper, drapes, inhabitants, and candlesticks. They were fascinating and reminded me of that movie Babe. The same day we headed on over to The Van Gogh Museum, which was having an exhibition of Gauguin at the same time, so there ya go! Did you know they were housemates? And totally didn't get along. There is a theory that it was Gauguin that cut off Gogh's ear after a scuffle...hmm.
I loved Amsterdam. It was such a friendly city. And I didn't ever feel in danger or nervous about anything. Totally safe. Plus, they love bikers there, they have lanes and traffic lights just for people on their bikes. There are bikes EVERYWHERE! Piled everywhere. Some of them are really old and funky and a lot of them have been painted and have fun additions. For example, there was a mom pushing a wagon filled with her three, 5-ish year old sons in it, in front of her bike! It was so cool. I want to have one of those that I can push around my dog in. Or my millions of books that I just have to have with me at all times. I'm sure I'll have those eventually.

Jeez, I can't write about Berlin right now, it is time to leave the computer and jam. I'll add berlin on tomorrow. BUT! Here are some pics from 'dam:

im studying but...

i thought i'd put up a picture of my one and only silk screen print!

enjoy

the best friday ever. plus saturday morning

Last night Melinda came home and asked if we would like to go to an exhibition opening at the Palazzo Strossi her contemporary art history teacher told her about. A resounding YESSSSSS sent us on our way, after getting museum-artsy-opening-classy ready of course. We sauntered into the palazzo feeling ever so cool and realized we were probably the only americans there, let alone the youngest people there, most were in their early 30's and up. It was awesome. They had a table set up for wine and other refreshments and a long line was forming at the opening to the exhibition. As we reached the front the ladies letting people through the line asked if we had tickets. Tickets? I said questioningly in Italian. A man came over to talk to us and I pulled the we are american students studying here in florence at SACI. LUCKILY!! He knew the president of SACI, they are apparently neighbors, and he let us in as long as I promised to tell Signora Maidoff that Leonardo from Palazzo Strossi says hello. Will do. I felt pretty cool because all of this happened in Italian. shabang! Anyway, the exhibition was called "Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art". It included several other artists as well, who had some seriously cool works (even some Americans! yay) (http://www.strozzina.org/e_index.htm) was absolutely fabulous and I had such an amazing time. I had a short but amusing conversation with an Italian man who asked if I knew Richter's work. I said a little bit and explained why I liked the piece in front of us Canaletto. He asked if I was German after that (everyone thinks Im German) and i said yes for some reason and he started speaking to me in German. Oh boy, so i had to say oh no, haha! im not german, my mistake.
My favorite works were Richter's abstract pieces (his portraits are also very well done). Im not a huge fan of his landscape/still life paintings although I think his technique is pretty cool.
This one is called Uole I like the bright color, but it feels too exposed. In Canaletto his bright colors are obscured by great washes of black and white. The color gets to creep out every once in a while. Like a secret. Ok, or it's like when you have really cute underwear on, and no one knows it but you, but you still walk a little taller all day.

It turned out to be a fun night and we all felt super classy and artsy and cultured while walking home.

Then this morning we decided to go see the crystal exhibition at La Specola because crystals rock. I could not stop thinking about liz p. I just knew the whole time she would be loving it, so I fed off that energy and absolutely loved it. Liz, dude. CRYSTALS. There were a bunch of little kids in the exhibit, and one little girl in particular took a fondness for Winnie and kept speaking to her in Italian. She was pointing out all of the rocks she liked and would say things like "I like this rock because it is pink and it glitters". She was really cute.

I'll leave you guys with some pictures of crystals. Just because they are so cool and everyone should look at crystals.

ash wednesday and the specola

This week has been a week of WHOA! moments. After celebrating Fat Tuesday earlier this week, a good friend invited me to mass the follwing day. I'm pretty sure she thought that I was Catholic/Christian/Episcopalian/religious, because she was very surprised when I asked her what ash wednesday meant.
At 6 we walked over to St. Thomas episcopalian church a couple blocks away from Santa Maria Novella. it is an English speaking church and there were about 15 people in the pews when Reverend Mark walked up the nave to his spont in the front. It was so cool to hear him speak in the stained glass filled echoing room and watch his hands make the motions of the cross and the blessing gesture. I had to sneak peaks over at Katherine every once in a while to see what I was supposed to do, especially when we went to kneel and receive the sacrament (which included a big glug of wine and a styrofoam disc that i had no idea what to do with, so i ate it (right? im pretty sure I was supposed to eat it)). One awesome thing was that each of the bibles held on the little shelf type things in front of us had english on one side of the page and another language on the other side. Mine had english-german, and Katherine's had english-italian. The song books were in Elglish-Swahili. So cool. The whole point of ash wednesday is to remind you that you were born from dust and the whole universe and everything was created from dust. At the end of his sermon, we all lined up again in the front and had big crossed marked in the ash of palm leaves on our foreheads. It was pretty cool, and a wonderful experience that i've never had before. It also forged a deeper relationship with my friend, I can tell our friendship got stronger because of this experience in church that i shared with her. Mostly i think it helped her to trust me and really see me as a friend instead of an acquaintance. It's interesting how religion can tear people apart and just as easily bring them together.

TODAY! oh my gosh, THIS MORNING! I went to the coolest museum ever. It is called La Specola and is generally a museum of natural history. BUT! it is set up like an old cabinet of curiosities. They have every single animal you could ever think of catergorized into separate rooms, anatomical studies casted in wax, crystals, an entire basement filled with animal skeletons (which I am going back to tomorrow morning to sketch because we could only glance at it today), and sooo much more. It is the kind of museum my teacher calls a "dream space" because everything you see, or certain things i guess, remind you of events, pictures, moments in your past that are dreged up from the depths of your memory. It was incredible the change in energy I noticed from my classmates. Everyone was talking and animated and recalling stories of back home and when they were kids. I was having a field day. Seriously I could not have had a cooler time. Everything reminded me of a bio class I took at whitman (Kate Jackson, RAD) and of trips with friends to the NY museum of natural history, and the Bodies exhibit with my family and Heather, and uncountable other things. I cant wait to go back tomorrow. I am still hyped up and cannot stop thinking about it. The next step for me? im going to try and figure out how to create an art museum that sparks this type of dream space excitement for the general public who haven't studied art. Museums of natural history have an unfair advantage because everyone has had experinece with animals and rocks from daily life and in required science classes throughout school. I want to see kids jumping up and down for their parents to COME LOOK AT THE ANNUNCIATION MOMMY!

Next weekend is spring break! I cannot wait to go out and explore Europe.

too good to be true

We have a long break from field trips for Helen's class (thank god, a break) so we've been able to roam Firenze a bit more and see what the city has to offer. Turns out there is a lot. Last weekend was the Vintage Market. If you ever have the desire to see EVERY single Italian hipster all together in one location, this is the event for you. It was awesome to see everyone all decked out in their old duds and taking pictures with their super old cameras. whoa, dude, super vintage.
I was a bit disapointed because everything was obscenely expensive, but I guess that's normal for vintage stuff right? It was worth it to just look and feel totally unwelcome (i unfortunately am nowhere near trendy enough to be perusing this market) and be overwhelmed by all the stuff and all the characters. As my Italian gets better and I feel more at home here i find myself trying to be less and less AMERICAN. I speak in Italian as often as I can until I exhaust my vocabulary..which is limited...but growing everyday. I can follow conversations and know mostly what is going on around me at any given time.


Thursday commenced the LONG awaited Chocolate Festival. This is the most amazing place in the world. It fills the Piazza Santa Croce with white tented vendors and the smells of hot chocolate. All of the chocolatiers go balls to the wall for this festival. There is chocolate molded into any and every shape you could imagine. Winnie got a chocolate pipe and 2 white chocolate sheep yesterday. Katie got 2 mint truffles and I got un'etto di tartuffo chiocolatta scuro. Unfortunately we ate all of our chocolates last night. Fortunately we are going back tomorrow to stock up on the last day.
The hot chocolate is unlike any hot chocolate i've ever had. It is thick and pretty much straight up melted dark chocolate. Con panna or senza, it is AMAZING. Kind of like pudding, but better. Swiss miss will always have a place in my heart, but jeez. This is bringing some heavy competition.


Tonight Katie, Winnie and I are having a little house party so we bought dark chocolate at the festival. The guy had it shaped into giant legos. What a fabulous place. So we bought the chocolate, and this morning we finished our ingredient purchases with mascarpone cheese, sugar, ladyfingers, eggs, espresso (i'll post later on how using our Moka went...), and Prosecco! Tiramisu here we come.

<3 until later

Medici Villas and Vinci

This weekend we went to Vinci with my class. It was the last fieldtrip before spring break. So I have two weekends now to do whatever I want! I’m definitely going to stay in Florence for next weekend (this coming weekend?) and explore outside the center, perhaps try out the bus system. ACTUALLY! This Sunday Florence plays Rome (homegame! Yes!) so that will be an amazing game. I have to remember to wear PURPLE. Sunday, as it turns out will actually rock. I’m going to a carnival about an hour away on train with my friend from Malta, Justin, and a bunch of his friends that are coming up. I really can’t wait! And Thursday is the chocolate festival in Piazza Santa Croce. CHOCOLATE! Yes yes yes. It’s going to be a great week.

Anyway. VINCI! WAS! AWESOME! It was the loveliest feeling to get out among the green stuff and feel the sun. It smelled like rosemary and rain. On the bus we passed hills covered in vines and lushness. The houses all had smoke coming from the chimneys and it couldn’t have been more stereotypical “Italian countryside” which all of us soaked up and snuggled in. We saw some of the Medici Villa’s on our way over, which are insane. They would use these villas every once in a while. It’s like those people in PC who buy multi-million dollar mansions to use for two weeks a year. I decided if I were to have been a servant in one of those houses back when, it really would have been the life. You only have to take care of the Medici for two weeks then you get the house to yourself for the rest of the year. They did have some spectacular gardens and grottos that were filled with animal sculptures (more unicorns! Jeeeeez!). I most enjoyed the sculpture of a girl wringing out her hair by…shoot…we actually didn’t learn who sculpted it. OK, well from the tip of her hair, water falls into a bowl and then falls again into a bigger water fountain. It is really beautiful. Hercules Strangling Antaeus was also one of my favorites by Ammannati. It is a terrible subject, but the figures are so graceful, they look like they are dancing.
Vinci was the really fun part because it had stopped raining and the sun came out. We saw Leonardo da Vinci’s supposed birth house (I signed my name in the log book…yay! It says my name then SACI 2009 with the 09 crossed out and 10 written next to it. Great.). Helen, our prof, walked us around the Museum of da Vinci that has a bunch of his contraptions in large scale so you can see what he had come up with, he was brilliant, to say the least. My favorite was the bicycle. There is no way wood wheels would work over cobblestone, and turning would give you a bit of a problem, but he totally had the right idea. bus driver parked us right next to a rosemary bush so before we all loaded up to go home we stuffed our pockets. The driver laughed at us, but I’m sure he appreciated the aroma wafting around more than the bus smell. Buses all smell the same. They’re pretty narsty. Anna, the TA in the class is so cool. I sat next to her to and from Vinci and we chatted about the ups and downs of living in Italy, semantics, Helen, grammer, and Italian Pop. She knows so much! It was fun picking her brain, plus she's gonna make me a CD of her favorite italian pop songs...AWESOME.