Day 6

Posted by Unknown , Monday, June 04, 2007 5:27 AM

5-31-07

CT 7:51

IT 2:49

My God, it’s been a long day.

This morning we woke up early (much to my late-to-bed dismay) and met at the school at 11:00. From there we went to the Gli Uffizi (“The Offices” – the Medici offices). Unfortunately, as we were tourists, we were knocked around quite a bit. Once we finally got inside and Dr. Bane and Paulette had our tickets, they went to see about tickets for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 at the Odeon, a restored opera house turned movie theater. We went inside and had to check our bags at once because we might have some sort of bomb. Then we went in to the most impressive art museum I’ve ever seen.

The Gli Uffizi, first and foremost, is huge. It has more rooms than we could enter, more art than we could ever see, more statues that we could read about in Italian (there were very few English captions). They had quite a few statues from the late Roman Republic/early-mid Roman Empire years. They had an entire room dedicated to the myth of Niobe. She challenged a god, saying she had more children than that god. That god, in perfect Greek mythological style, condemned all of Niobe’s children. The entire collection of statues, which included all of Niobe’s children running with Niobe at the pinnacle of the room protecting another child was extremely impressive. Other bits and pieces were funeral alters and pieces of huge statues that would have possibly been comparable to David, though from antiquity. We saw the “Birth of Venus” and “Spring” – two of the more famous paintings in the museum. We also saw some Michelangelo paintings as well as a Leonardo da Vinci. They also had a special exhibit over Albrecht Duhrer’s engravings. It was a simply amazing museum. It bought a 16 Euro guide book, which was worthless, but I was all in all impressed.

But we were still lost in that huge monster of a museum. We all had to be together when we left to get our bags at once, since I had the ticket and so no bag would be left behind, so we had to wait for everyone to show up. We had gotten into the museum about 12 or 12:30 and came out around 2:50. We waited on everyone to show up, got our bags, and then asked each other what we wanted to do. We ended up getting cheap vendor stuff (I got an excellent ham and cheese calzone) and ran to the university to read what we hadn’t read for Dr. Bane (for the class we were to have at 4:00). We chatted instead, though, and were relieved to find out that class had been totally rearranged due to Dr. Bane’s earlier troubles with the airport.

Class was a lot of fun. We didn’t cover all that we were supposed to (and class ended 30 minutes early due to the lights going out), but Paulette came back with our tickets for the Odeon. We then set out across town to the Odeon and the fresh pasta place people kept talking about, window shopping along the way. Haley tried to talk a vendor down on a leather bag by saying $25 (for a $70 bag – I told her it wasn’t going to work), and Kim slowly shopped the other leather vendors.

We then set out to find the Odeon and the pasta place from there. We found the Odeon pretty quickly, but we were lost on where to find the pasta place. We finally found a Chinese food place with cheap prices, but no pasta. They went into Tiffany’s and other places like that, and I stayed outside and looked around.

Once it was finally time for the movie, we ran back to the theater, gave our tickets, and went to the snack bra. There were lots of alcoholic beverages at the movie, and I decided to try the second nastiest drink in the world after Gem Clear – Limoncello. It was so disgusting it makes me gag just thinking about it. I gave it to Haley, who drank it all with Kim and then got a bottle of champagne to get rid of the taste.

The movie was really good. I like it pretty well compared to the others, probably right up there behind the second one. After we got out of there (intermission and all), we found out Kim and Haley had drank the entire bottle of champagne between them within the first twenty minutes of the movie, and wanted more. We laughed until our sides hurt at their exploits of falling over in the bathroom, running out of champagne, etc. They wanted to find more champagne for their other roommate, so we went and found champagne – at a Chinese food store (which was right after I gave away a gelato because it had chocolate in it – I think we know who was living in “excess” that night). They asked the guy to open it, when they didn’t realize it had a screw top, and he nearly killed us with the shooting top.

Afterward, we finally went to their apartment, woke up their roommate, and talked for nearly three hours. It was a lot of fun, and we have lunch plans tomorrow.

Rachel and I walked back to the apartment, talking about religion, news, and war (interesting for us, I think). We got back to the apartment and could not get in, for whatever reason. We had to ring the doorbell for Katie to let us in.

We had talked about writing today, so when I stumbled upon a short story on my computer that I hadn’t finished, I let Rachel read it. I can’t decide yet if it was a bad decision or not, because she laughed at some of my word usage and said some of it definitely showed my personality (I had a history bit in there). I’ll take it as constructive criticism, I think – but it’s hard when the first work people read is one you held personally as one of your best… and they laugh.

I’m so tired…. But so excited for tomorrow! We’ll be shopping and cooking pasta. Nuthin’ better.