March 10, 2011
Today in Roman Achievement we continued learning about the Roman Empire in preparation for our Emperor’s quiz. I’m starting to think that this class will be the least of my worries because today and the past couple classes Erika has given us the information about the one Emperor or Dynasty we are talking about for the day, and once we are finished (even if it is 20 minutes before class ends) she lets us leave if we don’t have any questions. I feel like the information isn’t stacking up like my other classes, so this quiz that’s after spring break should be a breeze! And speaking of spring break…we leave in ONE week! 7 days! I’m getting so excited! But every time I have an art history class I remind myself that I can’t get TOO excited, because I still have two midterms next Wednesday before I’m free!
For art history today we had to walk all the way over to this church on the other side of the Arno, so we had to book it to be there on time. Rocky warned us that it would be about a 20ish minute walk, so make sure we were prompt! Me and my roommates, Chris, and the comm. girls decided to group together and head over there, which would hopefully make it easier to find the place since we would have many eyes on maps. It got to one point when we were across the Arno that Ivy claimed we should go one way, and Kate thought we should go a different way…what to do? I knew that once Ivy tried getting to our house from the school (which is pretty easy) and it took her 45 minutes instead of 10, so I sided with Kate on this one and we told the other group we would see who got there first! Kate knew exactly where we were going and before we knew it we were in front of Santa Maria Carmine, with the other group arriving just a couple minutes after us..we won, but I’m glad they still made it on time. The only problem was that the comm. girls said they saw architect kids from our class heading out of the school and making their way over here before we started to make the trip to the church, so…where were they? Were we at the right church?
We finally saw two architecture boys heading over our way who confirmed that we were at the right church, but it was already a couple minutes after class was supposed to start, where was Rocky? And the rest of our class who started to walk here before us? We finally saw Rocky heading over who told us that he was standing at the church of Santa Maria Novella and wondered where all of us were until he realized we were at Santa Maria Carmine today. Ha. He told us that he knew people would get lost coming here, that’s why he warned us ahead of time, but we couldn’t wait forever or else we would never get in all of the information, so we got hooked up to our head sets, sat on the steps outside the church, and got started. We talked outside on the steps for a while because Rocky had to make a reservation for us to get into the Brancacci Chapel, which he made for a little later than our class was supposed to start because he knew people would be late, and eventually our whole class made it to the site. Inside the Brancacci Chapel we only had an allotted amount of time to cover all of the frescoes we had to know for our midterm, so Rocky tried to get through them quickly. Although he told us before we went inside that the frescoes were painted by 3 different artists (Masaccio, Masolino, and Lippi) and he would make us try and figure out which artist painted which frescoes once we were inside, which I actually found pretty interesting and fun (although I got all of them wrong except for two).
Once our time was up we were free to go, and Lauren and I decided we just wanted to go back home, but decided we didn’t want to go all the way back towards the school and then back home because that was too complicated, and we were actually closer to home being at the church anyways. We walked across the Ponte Vecchio on the way there, but when we turned a street from the church we discovered we were right in front of the bridge that was two over from the Ponte. We walked across it, just continued straight, and we walked straight into the church of Santa Maria Novella within like 5 minutes…I can’t believe we were so stinking close to that church, but yet from the school it took us 20 minutes to get there! Definitely a pleasant surprise! I was able to come home and skype with my mom, which was lovely, and I was able to start typing up some blogs since it was quiet and I had the internet. I promised mom that I would have all of my blogs up before I went to bed tonight because I was like two weeks behind, it was ridiculous.
When Marissa and Danielle came home from shopping around with Chris, they told me that we were going out for dinner at the steak place, and was not about to argue with that! When the time rolled around for us to meet Chris at the restaurant (which isn’t called La Galleria I guess, but I have no clue what it is actually called) we headed that direction and discovered Chris who said he had already talked to Tony, who is the guy who gave us all of the free alcohol the last time. We looked at a couple different menu specials outside before walking in and being happily greeted by Tony, he loves us! I ended up getting this menu special where I got baked lasagna (soooo good!), this meat dish that Tony recommended which ended up being a piece of pork in a Chianti red wine sauce with potatoes, and then a dessert. At first I wasn’t sure if I was very fond of the red wine sauce, but it started to grow on me and I ended up liking the dish. Marissa got gnocchi with crap which she let me try, and I thought it was out of this world! But the dessert on the other hand…it was some caramel custard which tasted really egg-y and I wasn’t the biggest fan on the planet earth. Marissa and Danielle ended up getting this dessert sampler which had chocolate drizzled all over the plate, so I would get chocolate on my spoon with a piece of the custard, which made it go down much easier! The like 3 pitchers of free wine that Tony gave us made it go down much easier as well. Haha.
We left the restaurant thanking Tony and told him he would definitely see us again, most likely soon! I came back home and started to crank out my blogs which took me so much longer than I was hoping, because the picture uploader on the site I used has changed, and you can only upload one photo at a time. Do you know how crazy that is when I’m trying to upload like 70 pictures per night in Rome? Yeah, it’s nuts, but I think it’s definitely worth it, and I’m sure everyone who is reading this would agree. I finally finished uploading everything around 1:30/2:00 a.m. and chatted with a couple friends from back home for a bit before heading to bed, excited that I could sleep in tomorrow morning!
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