San Martin

Okay, so this is almost a week late, but with belated glee I present San Martin!

San Martin is a holiday here in Venice that celebrates gernerousity and giving. The story goes that the nobelman Martin was riding his horse one old day and came across a begger. The begger was cold and miserable, as well imagined, so Martin took his sword and cut his cloack in half to give to the begger. As this happened the sun came out and made a beautiful day.

In modern days it is a time to buy these wonderfully decorated cookies and give to your loved ones, while children go to stores and sing the San Martin song for treats while banging on pots and pans. Very loud. The song, which is in Venetian dialect- I tried very hard to learn the song, but only ever got the first line of "San Martin".

Taking the picture of these girls was a small victory for me; I was able to ask the mother in Italian if a could take a picture and she understood me! Awesome. I was also buying my own San Martin Cookie at the time.

We have another big festival in venice on friday. Something about building a floating bridge and eating meat.. oh, and the plague. I'll report back more later.

Artwork so far

Rome

Let me tell you about my adventure in Rome!

The trip to Roma was a 2 day event for us in art history. Thankfully we were told we won't have to take notes, good thing too, there was just far to much to take in. A cute story to help explain the mass amounts of stuff: In Rome there are only two Metro lines, both which close at 9 p.m. The reason being, according to the art history teacher, was that every night they do archeological studies in the subway. I'll let the pictures do the speaking for day one, but we were so lucky to have such beautiful dramatic light! It was awesome.

The art history class in full

This thing was huge. Think Mines of Moria.

Britt, both a scholar and a lady.

AJ and I feeling impressive.

There are no people in Rome, only bodys with cameras.

After a full day of learning it is time for dinner- we go to a resturant, order our food from the menu which seems reasonable, but the prices of drnks was no where. The food was so-so, and some plates had to be sent back because they were cold. Bill time came and for some reason, the 10 of us had run up 220 euro. Per que?Well those drinks, the three litters of water, three pints of beer, and three glasses of wine cost over 100 euro. That's right, a bottel of water ended up being 15 euro. As in 45 euro for water, over 50 bucks US. Well, the solution we all found? Leave what we owed for the food, service, and what was a reasonable price for drinks, and ran like hell. Running by the Trevie Fountain to the Spanish Steps to escape the explotation of a group of American girls was the right thing to do. Ah, memories.

On the second day we got up early to go to the Vacitan Museum and St Peters Basilica.

I didn't even try to take pictures of everything there- it was impossible. There was just much to much. For three hours I wandered around the museum, getting lost in halls and seeing what is, as far as I can tell, everything in the universe. From Eygptian mummies to contemporary art, there is everything! The one thing I did find specail, was these nuns across the courtyard, also looking at all of the art. How wonderful, in the eyes of the lord and art, we are all equal to learn and understand.

St Peters was amazing, overwhelming, the true grandure of faith shown in bronzen and stone. The brocque statues of various saints which were 7 times life size was amazing. The open area is also marvelous. I took a few pictures of outside, but the rain was hampering the photo taking.

Looking out from St Peters

Statue of St Peter

I went with the Gemmer family (visiting my roomie Annie Gemmer) to have some true Roman pizza. So yummy! Everything was by the kilo, and tastey as all get out. Even with the rest of Rome trying to screw me over, the nice guys outside of the brick wall around the vatican were wonderful. We got free candy for Obama being the president elect. Woot!

This was all followed by shopping, Giovanna getting seperated from us on the train, her finding us again, getting slightly lost in the train station, and some wine with prof kristina on the train ride back to venice that night. Being a "grown-up" I got to have wine too!

Donkeys and Elephants

Katie ran in the apartment today: "Who won, who won?"
Val: "We're nine hours ahead, the polls haven't even opened."

The sweet old woman in Lithography asked me if I can vote this year. As was the norm, I had no idea what she was taking about, but was able to piece together when she said "Obama." The newspapers here (note: even though I can't read Italian I can tell are subpar, just garbage) have been covering the election too.

I'm hoping for good news when I wake up on the 5th.

Happy Voting!

Halloween... a budding holiday

Happy Halloween!

So Venice doesn't really do Halloween. With Carnival and Befana (where a female witch goes to little children and gives them candy) the concept of party/drink/candy/dress up is covered. Some families are starting to do trick-or-treating here, but they go to candy stores instead of houses.

Matilde, the grand matron of the Scuola, had her extremely cute 9 and 5 year old grandchildren from London at the school the past two days. For some reason, they loved me, the little girl going as far as to hug me whenever I walked by and the boy chattering on about his favorite TV shows. I ask them at about 6:00 pm on Friday, "Are you doing somethign tonight for halloween?"

Their poor little jaws hit the ground, "Today's Halloween!?!?!?" Oops, maybe I was suppose to keep that one under wraps.

But it being so wet and rainy, there were no festive attire on my part- instead I just went to the same bar as normal and had a nice relaxing evening.

We did, however, have a house underwear party for one of the roommates design project. I didn't think everyone would be willing to pose in underwear for a poster, but shows I was wrong once again.

So this is school eh...?

I'm nicely sandwiched between finishing a paper and having a midterm next week, so I thought it might be best to ignore studying for a bit more and update the old blog. It's been almost a week- wow.

The coolest Venice thing I did this week was go to get my numero di codice fiscale. It is my goverment issued ID code so that I can get paid to work at the school. I will be keeping the lab open 2 nights a week so students can stay late and work. Some nice easy work that will put a very small, but still nice piece of change in my pocket. Tomorrow will be my first day on the job.

Anyways, getting the code required me to go unattended to a governement building and wade through some paperwork. It was by far the easiest bit of paperwork I have done here hense far. Everyone was very kind and spoke slowly to me. What was crazy was that the building used to be a church (I think) and some of the tombs still remained on the walls (I'm sure about that). But I guess that is what happens when you can never build.

Besides that school has been pretty busy. I spend all day at the lab working my little figures off, making pretty pretty art. On Wednesday the fellow Kristin and I got the screen printing shop in order, so that is now good to go! Woot! I want to make a fashion illustration of the 11 american's as pigeons and silk screen that. It sounds fun to me!

Okay, okay, I'll give this whole learning thing a shot- FINE!!!

oh, and I miss you all terribbly.

MTV is everywhere

Before I came to Italy, there had only been one popstar I had heard of: Tiziano. While it is a much smaller country than our good old USA, I never thought I would get to see him.

Well, turns out I did! While on a feild trip in Milan our class just so happened to met outside of where Italian MTV filmed and I just so happen to show up 30 mins early from lunch when I just so happen to see Tiziano be the guest that day. The crowd was able to watch him from a Megatron outside.


And what a crowd.

Most were pre-teens armed with signs.
And the man of the hour himself (in black).

See a famous Italian popstar- check!