It's March!

March 1, 2011

It’s the first day of March which is probably why on the day to school this man was whistling so loudly and beautifully as he rode his bike. I really don’t think I have ever smiled so large or been so delighted by someone whistling…what a great start to a great month! But I can’t even believe we have almost been here for two months! It almost makes me sad to think about because that means our time here is going to be quickly ending once we hit spring break and all of our trips that we have planned for April. But for now my mind needs to stick to schoolwork, and today in Roman Achievement we finished talking about the Pantheon and did went through a little review because we are having our midterm on Thursday! I feel like everything we are learning seems so much more important now that we actually went to Rome ourselves and got to experience the things we were learning about. Miss Frizzle bought a movie in Rome that is a 3D virtual reconstruction of Rome which she played a little bit for us to get a visual of a few different things that we needed to know for our exam. I have already started studying for the exam and think I have a pretty good heads up about the material…hopefully studying tonight and tomorrow will go well and things will turn out more positively than my Comparative Media midterm.

Today we had to meet for art history near the Duomo at Palazzo Medici Riccardi. This was a building that was owned by the Medici family just like tons of other buildings in Florence…they’re like the Rockefeller’s in New York. But the cool thing about this building was that the Medici were so wealthy that they were able to have their own chapel inside of this building/palace with the consent and approval of the Pope. They had hired priests that would come into the chapel to have mass for the twelve or how many ever people could fit into this small chapel. We actually got to go up into the chapel which was quaint but very elaborate and pretty. There were frescoes covering the walls in which different Medici were painted as well as many other important figures of the time. I just thought how crazy is it that a family would be so wealthy that they didn’t even have to leave their home to go to church. Despite their wealthy-ness/greed, I really enjoyed the tour of the chapel and looking around the palace.

Today after class I really wanted to crack down and study because my Roman Achievement midterm is in two days…eek! Luckily Miss Frizzle gave us a pretty detailed study guide of what we needed to know, but it was just a matter of reading all of the material to review and memorizing certain dates and going over the different buildings and their significance that we saw while on our field trip to Rome this past weekend. But I know I can do this because I have already began to study and I can put aside all other things (Danielle and I told Marissa that we are not allowed to watch any t.v. shows online until after Thursday!) in order to study for this midterm.

I took a break from studying to skype my parents and found my grandpa sitting in front of our computer, which was a nice surprise! I told them about my weekend in Rome for a while and answered a bunch of grandpa’s questions. I feel like I don’t talk for a very long even though it probably is more than an hour, and eventually mom announced that dinner was ready. I suppose that worked out the best anyways because I was getting sleepy and still wanted to do a little more studying before bed. However, I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night because all I could think about was Mariah, and today when I found out the sad news that they had found Lisa’s body in her car, studying couldn’t have been any harder. I tried reading for a while but found my thoughts drifting, so eventually I allowed myself to fall asleep due to exhaustion because I knew I could catch up with studying tomorrow.