I'm going to London!

In a month, so it'll be a while before anything of interest happens on the English front, but it's still ever so slightly my reason for life right now. I fly into London, take a train and spend a wonderful weekend with one of my very best friends at Oxford. Sleeping on her floor for free. Yay for freeness.

Life's been kind of put more or less on hold lately because both of my banks are acting idiotic. One more or less doesn't acknowledge me as a customer (aka, doesn't let me sign in online) and the other has frozen but un-frozen but hasn't really my account. Woot! I've been literally penniless for a week now, but I finally have 50euro of my very own! I'm doing a happy dance for Bank of America!

I spent an amazing weekend with my Italian class in Umbria. We stopped in Cortona, Assissi, Spoleto, Orvieto--I think that was it, but I'm not entirely sure. I will put pictures up of the utterly breath-taking views, but unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries half-way through the trip, so there aren't as many pictures as there could have been. (I would have bought more batteries, but I had no money for some reason...)

I descended the 258 stairs down the St. Patrick Well, which is only named for St. Patrick because it resembles caves in Ireland (I think possibly I maybe got through the Italian text?) The views were spectacular, but even I'm getting tired of words like this. Breath-taking, beautiful, pretty even. I need to find new synonyms.

My art restoration class went into the church at Santa Croce. I feel like it's really the only place I've seen any hint at the flood (whose anniversary is coming up Nov. 4). You can see the water line on the walls, the paintings are still undergoing restoration (which made it ideal for my art RESTORATION class). It's amazing how high the water got. Ah, memories of New Orleans houses.

If my banking gets sorted, I have an incredibly free weekend at the end of the week. Pompeii sounds like a good place to head (if it stops raining.) We shall see.

Pictures soon!

I'm More Interested in Tuffa Than Spike Lee

To start, here's the fabulous picture of Spike Lee (and son?) that I took:

This was at the Italian premier of the Miracle at St. Anna, which my school ever so kindly arranged for its students to attend. The movie was very good, although it was dubbed in Italian so I really only understood half the words. (Nothing like jumping in feet first?)

It's funny, because I look in the newspapers and see them making this big deal about how outraged Italy is at the film having been made. Not a single Italian I've talked to about it has a problem with it. It's historical fiction and everyone knows it.

That was two weeks ago or so. More recently, I made a trip to Siena with my art history class. The town is amazing--completely beautiful with ancient brick buildings and an extravagant church, but I'm glad I'm studying in Florence rather than there.

Most exciting in my nerdy opinion is that I got to not only see a tuffa wall, but touch it. (Tuffa is an incredibly important stone in the history of Roman architecture. When dry, it's rock-hard, but when wet, you can cut it like clay. Much architectural progress was made because of the stone's properties.) It made me think fondly of freshman year art history.

And here's the tuffa wall, if you wanted to see it: