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.