I fail at blogging in a timely manner...

due to my failure at consistently blogging, recapping the past week and a half is going to be extremely difficult but I am going to attempt to do my very best. i know i am definitely leaving out way too many things but here are the major points!

we had our first art history class on site last week which was so amazing compared to the typical lecture setting.. we went to a few churches, one of them overlooked the whole city– can't really have any complaints about class when this view is involved...

 

 

last weekend we took a trip to Chianti, and one of my professors knows a man that owns a farm in the region so we had a tour of the vineyards/ olive trees/ beehives and learned a lot about the process, and then his wife cooked all of us (about 30 students) a five course meal which was SO delicious... and each course was accompanied with a different kind of wine, along with grappa and coffee at the end. the grappa was a tad too strong for my liking but the rest was great! also, we saw the wine factory which was one of the most interesting things i have ever seen. so many awesome machines, i never knew how much went into the mass production process for something like wine. it was really mesmerizing to watch the progression, i wish i could have taken a video or something because the pictures i took don't give justice to how impressive it was!

in drawing class we have been concentrating on perspective and dealing with space, so i have been doing a lot of sketches of the architecture of places around the city– churches, towers, random streets, bridges, etc... i can put up a few of my sketches soon to give a visual of some of the work that we are doing

OH and Lapo is much more social now, he visits us during dinner almost every night now and the other day he wore a onesie and i must say, even though adult onesies are awesome and fashionable, i think that he pulled it off way better... he also has scooby doo crocs which are awesome.

also, i went to the Mercado Central (massive fresh food market) for the first time last week and it was a little too much for me to handle because i wanted to buy everything... going to kroger's is bad enough... annabella and i ate lunch there and tried out a few random side dishes with lasagna, successful of course. i ended up buying some natural dried fruit which was so addicting that i finished it off within a day.

and i went to a church service in the Duomo, even though it was in italian, it was still really interesting just to observe... and if you looked up, this is what you would see

here is the progression of courses from the meal in Chianti! be prepared for some drooling to occur

grappa looks more appetizing than it tastes

i could write way more but i have to cut this a little short! i'll be better from 

now on (for real this time)

 

there are a few ledges that extend over the river and i finally climbed onto one :)