I have created this blog to document my study abroad experience for my family and close friends to stay updated with the events in my life while I am in Italy on the Syracuse University program in Florence. I will be studying Art History and Italian during the week, the classes will be like nothing I have ever experienced before as many of the pieces I will be studying I get to see first hand as opposed to my previous art history courses which could only provide images of the pieces through slides. To see some of these monuments, we will be venturing out of Florence for class to places in Italy like Rome (I get a private tour of the Sistine chapel for one class!), Pompeii, and many others. Also, while I plan on remaining flexible with my travel schedule throughout the semester, there are some trips that I definitely would like to take outside of the country. I would love to go to Greece to see the Island of Rhodes, which I have been told is beautiful and is also where some of my family is from. England is also high up on the list and I plan on going to London as I only was able to visit that city once in the entire month I studied in Oxford the summer before my senior year in high school. Of course I would love to go back to Oxford too and see it again (also if you happen to be a friend of mine who is traveling Europe and you find yourself in Oxford, go to Ben’s Cookies in the covered Market. It will change your life.) I hope to go to Paris as well and I can’t wait to spend a couple days exploring the Louvre. Hopefully from these trips, classes, and experiences I will have great stories and pictures to share with you all on this blog as well as possible travel suggestions if you are visiting.
So that was my brief synopsis of what the blog will be, and at this point I’m just going to go ahead and talk about what has happened with my trip so far.
Sunday, January 11/12th – The 29 Hour Day
On Sunday, I boarded a plane to San Francisco for the first leg of my flight to Italy. Arm in arm with my friend from high school, Katharine Crnko (her blog is www.kcrnko.org if you want to check it out too), we landed in San Francisco, checked into a cheap hotel by the airport, and decided to take the BART into the city for some Pizza and an Ice Cream Sundae at Ghirardelli Square. The next day we were supposed to take a flight to Paris at 3 with a group of other west coast students from the program and then take a quick connection flight to Florence. We had been advised to get to the airport around 11:30 to check in even though our flight wasn’t until much later, and being the super punctual people we are, Katharine and I decided to get to the airport around 10:45. When we got there we were informed that Air France would not open until 12:00. Because we had so much time on our hands, Katharine and I sat on a bench in front of where Air France should have been and observed as the west coast kids slowly showed up and were confused because Air France still was really late. When they finally opened, most of the group had shown up, around 16 total, and people were beginning to meet mingle. Once we were on the other side of security, we had about 3 hours to wait for our plane so we ate and read outside of our gate while making friends. When we had boarded the plane, we were sitting on the tarmac for about an hour before the captain came on the loudspeaker, saying something in French that ended in “Los Angeles.” None of us knew French but this clearly was not good as we were way up in northern California. As it turned out, the plane was missing a part and they were going to have to fly the part up from LA then install it. Not only were we already late but we were definitely going to miss our connection at this point. We wound up hanging around the airport with the rest of the group for four more hours before boarding for the second time and finally taking off around 9:30 (we were in the airport for a total of 11 hours.) After the grueling twelve hour flight, we landed in Paris but we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do to get to Florence. All 16 of us stormed the Air France counter in the airport while Katharine calmly tried to figure out with their manager what we would do. The airline wound up being able to get us all seats on a flight to Pisa at 8:00 that evening but we were told we had to find our own transportation from Pisa to Florence. We only had to wait about an hour before boarding that plane, and the ride was not bad at all. However, when we finally touched down on Italian soil and went to pick up our bags, we found out that the airline had lost the baggage of a few people and we had to wait to sort it out. Syracuse had arranged for us to take a bus to school from there, so when the bags were sorted out, we got on the bus and made it to our hotel around 1:00 in the morning. We calculated that we had been up and traveling for a total of around 29 hours through all of this chaos. It was a really confusing time but clearly this type of situation brings a group like ours together.
Orientation Week:
The rest of the week has been a whirlwind of trying to meet people, information sessions, trying to get all the correct documents to the right people, orienting myself to the city and trying to fit in with a completely different culture without offending anyone. Luckily, Syracuse’s registration process was ridiculously easy and I wound up getting my first choice classes which include
- Botticelli: Analysis in Depth
- A class on Etruscan and Roman art and society
- A Renaissance Architecture Class
- And then Italian III which comes with a Culture and Community class
I am extremely excited about the Botticelli class as he is one of my favorite artists but my Renaissance classes in the past seem to have only mentioned him briefly. For this class we get to go to Rome for the day and have a private viewing of the Sistine Chapel!!!! Also, I am really excited for my Etruscan and Roman class because we get to visit some of the ancient sites such as Pompeii. I have studied ancient art quite a bit and I am so excited to get to experience these spaces first hand. I am clearly very excited to be taking the Renaissance Architecture class as I love the subject and also it will help me understand the city I am in on a deeper level because Florence is really one of the epicenters of Renaissance architecture (I went to the Duomo for the first time today… so amazing!). It will be nice to start Italian up again because I really would like to be conversational by the time I leave. I am currently speaking in a broken mix of Italian/English to my host family but they know more English than I know Italian so, so far I have been taking it easy but I need to push myself more. Also, it’s really interesting because I have been trying to use Italian when I am out to order things or in public but people just assume I am American because I am blonde and will only talk to me in English. I went to buy a hair dryer at an electronic store a couple days ago and I went up to one of the clerks to ask him a question, I said “Scusi, vorrei trovare qualcosa” and the man looked at me and said, “I don’t speak English” which I found strange as I had started the conversation in Italian. Also, when I am walking around with someone, usually Katharine, every time an Italian has come up to us to ask us something, they have come up to Katharine first because I guess they assume she’s Italian and I am clearly an American. I then have to be the one to talk to them because Katharine hasn’t taken Italian yet but the dynamic is really interesting.
My Host Family:
My host family is amazing! It is a mother, a father, a 14-year old son, and a grandpa. They live in this beautiful house that is about a 20-minute walk from the school. It is furnished beautifully, has a lot of space, a garden, a veranda, and a great room to watch the flat screen tv in. Katharine is my roomie and we live on the top floor next to the son’s room and we share a common room with him which is really comfortable and has an Ethernet cable and most host families don’t have internet so we are lucky. The house on the inside is very American but on the outside is not really a form that I have seen before. It is very narrow, about 3 stories, and is seamlessly connected to the houses on the sides of it. It is closest to a town house I guess but each house is still very individual. The connected townhouses in this area usually take up an entire city block. While everyone claims to know the best gelato place in the city, my host brother says that the one by our house is the best and I think I believe him because at dinner every night when he is asked if he likes his food he responds with something along the lines of, he likes ice cream. We are going to try that tomorrow I think. I’ll let you all know the name and if it is good when I go because clearly you must know THE best gelato place in the city! However, I am convinced that my host mom makes the best pasta in the city, tonight she made a fresh tomato sauce with penne and it was definitely the best pasta I have had in my life. She also made a bruschetta yesterday that blew every other bruschetta I have ever had out of the water. It’s interesting because the flavors are definitely fairly simple and clean and yet she knows just the right combination to make it taste perfect. Also, if you are a friend from home/ family member you clearly know how attached I am to my dog Rusty. My host family has an adorable cuddly black cocker spaniel named… Black. Not nero which is black in Italian, but black. The dog is very cute around dinnertime and always is hoping for scraps. On our first night, our host mom put Black in the bathroom so he wouldn’t beg and when the parents went to clean the first course, the son went to the bathroom and let black out. Then we started eating the next course and the parents noticed Black was there and it was quite cute because they sort of fake reprimanded the son and then put the dog back in the bathroom. Every time the parents got up, this happened again, it was definitely like a comedy.
Exploring:
I haven’t had much time to explore yet. I don’t have class until 1:00 on Monday so I plan on getting up early, taking a map and just trying to orient myself to the city on my own. As I previously mentioned, we did see the Duomo today. As an Art History major there are so many works and buildings that I want to see and this was at the top of the list and getting to walk around it and experience it fully was like opening a present. I had a meeting to go to so I couldn’t stay long so I would like to go back and spend more time observing it. Next weekend I think we are going to Assisi or Ravenna .
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