First Week

So the first week of classes is over...and I guess you really can't technically call it a week of classes, seeing that I only have 2 days of class! haha. But over all, they went really well. I am excited about my classes and really think that this is going to be a great semester. On Wednesday, I had my Renaissance Art in Florence class, and then Italian again later that afternoon. What's really nice about the structure of my art history class is that it is very much like my architecture class-lecture half the time, go and visit a museum or building the second half. That's the thing that I was really hoping for when choosing Florence and the classes that I was going to take-getting the opportunity to not only learn about these historical buildings and works of art, but then getting the chance to go out into the city and see them first hand. Plus, the structure of testing and writing papers is pretty much spot on how they have been in all of my architecture and art history classes back home. Tests consist of slide identifications and essay questions where you compare and contrast. In no way am I saying that it is going to be a walk in the park (because memorization of dates and places and details has and will always be a struggle for me) but it is something that I will just have to continuously study and work on. I'm just saying that I am happy that I am already accustomed to the way that my professors are thinking :)

Yesterday was long (and felt longer than it really was) because I started early, had a massive gap between classes, it was gloomy and rainy and I was up late last night (THANK YOU MICHAEL HOPPER!) But, it was just weird to know that after I got done with Italian at 4:25, that it was the weekend for me! I don't think that will EVER happen again in my entire life. So today, it feels like it is Saturday, but the hustle and bustle outside our windows constantly is reminding us that it indeed still is the work week for everyone else. There hasn't been a whole lot going on here today. Olivia and Sabrina went and got their aprons and paid lab fees for their cooking class, the landlord came to tell us that our internet that we have been attempting to connect to wirelessly isn't the right one at all (he is going to send the internet guy on Tuesday so that we can hopefully get everything figured out once and for all!) and just a lot of finishing of homework. I started thinking about my 3 open-ended independent research papers for my classes, and still really have no idea what in the world I might do. I have a couple of ideas in terms of subject matter, so I just might email all 3 of those teachers and see what they think and in what direction they think might be a good one for me to go in. So now I've moved onto my sketchbook exercises. I think forced sketching will always be a tedious task for me. Don't get me wrong, sketching is definitely a way for me to unwind, but not when I have set things that I have to draw. I have a smaller sketchbook that I hope to take with me on excursions and I think that it is going to become half journal/half sketchbook...but we'll see how that goes.

Tomorrow we are going on our first excursion (besides Rome) with ISA to Medici Villa Petraia and I am excited about it! I haven't seen our good GA frand Cat since last weekend, so it will be great to see her!

I guess that is it for this evening. There will most definitely be an update after tomorrow-complete with a couple of pictures!