Two Days of Not Much

Nothing much of interest today or yesterday.  We stayed at Santa Chiara both days and had class.  Yesterday, we had to meet Ann at 10 am for her class, during which we discussed the use of wood for statues in the Renaissance period, namely that it was more often used indoors, in life-sized sculptures, was painted, and that the previous two added to its realism and ability to imply that the people from the bible were actually people and were better able to bring viewers into the stories it tells. 

Then was lunch, a rice and bean soup with broccoli, I liked it a lot, followed by thinly sliced pieces of salami, prociutto, and other meats, and a caprese salad of extremely bright red, sweet tomatoes, insanely fresh and soft mozzarella cheese and chopped basil; very delightful and Italian. 

For photo class at two we watched the touching film “Life is Beautiful”.  Some of the scenes had been filmed just around the corner here in Castiglion Fiorentino and a good chunk of it was in the nearby town, Arezzo, which we visited last week. 

Dinner was spaghetti ragu, a nice tomato based meat sauce (not the nasty jarred stuff we have in the states), followed by sliced turkey with gravy and their fennel salad.

At dinner Ann broke the sad news to us that there would be no laundry service this year.  Apparently whomever they had doing it in the past was too expensive and not quite reliable, so they just decided to cancel it completely.  This means that we have to either hand wash all of our own clothes, or take the long hike down to the local Laundromat and pay an exorbitant sum (5, 7, or 9 euros per wash load depending on the size of the washer, plus 4 or 5 per dry) to have it washed for you… soap included, apparently.  I chose the latter (the following day, Thursday), mostly because I can’t stand the feel of line-dried clothing.

After dinner I had my most disappointing experience with gelato save, perhaps, the night I didn’t get any: some odd flavor called A.C.E., I think… which I’m completely baffled by.  It’s extremely bright orange and has a picture of an orange, a lemon, and a carrot on the name placard… it sort of tasted like orange sherbet but not quite; and a lighter orange apricot.  Not bad, but not great, slightly peachy, as you would expect.  They looked pretty together on the cone, at least.  Oh, and although I took my camera with me, I neglected to put the “film” in, so without a memory card, I had to ask a fellow, Vanessa, to take this shot for me. 

Today we got to sleep in until our class at 10:30 during which Ann asked for volunteers to create the shapes of buildings so that we could see the difference between building design/city planning from the viewer’s point of view, which was more common early on, and from a bird’s eye/god’s eye view as we do it today and became more common in the late 1400s.  Lunch today (sans A&M) was a cold rice salad with celery, peas, wedged hard-boiled eggs, and pieces of sausage that had the consistency of a hot dog, followed by parboiled cold vegetables (which tasted like celery), and pizza.  The rice was good, I just avoided the celery, I ate one of the carrots but couldn’t get past the fact that it tasted like celery, and had three pieces of pizza.  It wasn’t very hot and wasn’t as good as some I’ve had, but it wasn’t bad.

After lunch we went through the second and third set of images for photography, the five from Arezzo and the five from Castiglion Fiorentino.  Of the former, I had one in the top ten, a photo of Amanda, one of the students in the program.  I was very happy with how it turned out and she seems to like it.  Of the latter, I had none that made it into the top twenty but I like the one below of Beth (the blonde) another in our group, despite her seeming horrified over it. Oh well. Enter my chance to wash clothes, which was important, as I’d run out of clean underwear and was quickly running out of other necessities, like everything else.  I took Twilight Watch down with me to read while I was waiting, and in very close to an hour, I had washed and dried most of my clothes… a green cami managed to stay out of the wash and two other tanks hid from the dryer with my linen pants that needed to be line dried.

Skipped out on the last day of Italian lessons, as word was she was going over numbers, which I’d had plenty of thanks to the copy of Rosetta Stone I have.  Dinner was spiral pasta in pesto which the cooks failed to prepare enough of, which was sad, followed by thinly sliced roast beef, mashed potatoes, and a nice salad. 

Gelato tonight was an old favorite after yesterday’s semi-failure, strawberry and peach.  I had been thinking of getting strawberry with this gorgeous looking dark chocolate but they ran out before I got up to the front.  When we left after eating, she’d replenished it. :( Some other day, perhaps.

On the walk back home, we discovered a heart with a cross made out of flowers on the street in front of our facility.  We’d noticed someone tracing the shape out in chalk when we were leaving for the gelateria but weren’t sure what the purpose was.  We did decide to take some photos of it (see below) and a police officer was kind enough to shine her headlights on it to give us more light. When we got inside and inquired further, we were informed that there was a confirmation ceremony at the church next door tonight and it was set up for the procession to the church.  I even got to see the procession just a few minutes ago as I was typing the blog content up!

Tomorrow is Florence trip #2.  It’s going to be another early morning train, 6:55 am.  Since it’s almost midnight now, I should be getting to bed.  Until tomorrow!