Of Tourists and Boats – Italia Week 2
David Bertschinger is a KWC junior majoring in physics. He is spending the Spring 2010 semester studying in Rome. He will be providing regular updates to KWConnect.
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Waking up in Firenze is getting to be very addicting – until I realize that we are still living out of suitcases in a hotel. And, my room is a mess. I assisted at Mass in the duomo on Sunday morning. It was crowed and in Italian, but otherwise relatively impressive.
Mid-afternoon, a few tour guides gave us a practical tour of Florence and showed us several sites, including a bridge market, the post office, our language school and the bookstore. Afterwards, I returned to the hotel and turned on my TV to find Forrest Gump. In German. Life is different here.
Monday saw the beginning of intensive language classes. We have class from 0900 to 1330, but it is divided up into three segments, with breaks in between. Our professoressas are very nice. Our grammar teacher mixes Italian and English to help us out but she says that will end tomorrow. Our conversation and vocabulary teacher does knows hardly any English in my opinion. But she engages the class, and we catch on to what she is saying eventually.
After class, my fellow future engineer friend Maria and I decided to get lost in Florence for the next few hours we had until our welcome cocktail at a bar downtown. And lost we got. But Florence is a very hard city to stay lost in forever, as long as you are up for some major urban hiking. We found the residential side of the city, complete with tall apartments and sandstone colored houses.
Our second day of class was more challenging, but I’m still enjoying it despite the stress. After class, I grabbed a quick sandwich (they are very cheap, and amazingly good too) and boarded the bus for our day trip to Pisa. It was rainy and cold once we got there, and we were a miserable crowd. However, we all made the best of it and took our touristy photos with the Leaning Tower, and learned a bit about the history of the Cathedral for which it was built to be the bell tower.
He's gonna push it over!
Wednesday was the first relatively average day I’ve had here. Class went well; it’s very hard to keep up with our second teacher but maybe I’ll pick up Italian through some form of auditory osmosis. Afterwards, Rosanna held an academic meeting in which she discussed our classes in Rome and some of the expectations for them and I found out that I am in all the classes I signed up for.
Our first quiz was on Thursday but I found it encouragingly easy. After class, Maria and I visited the Da Vinci Museum. What an amazing tribute to the original mechanical engineer! They had full scale replicas of many of his designs that he drew, including his tank, both of his most famous one man gliders, and a mechanized suit of armor. There were dozens of models of his many other inventions such as cantilevers, pulley systems, bridge designs, and ball bearings. I was right at home examining and “geeking out” at the hands-on working models, as I’m sure many of you can easily picture.
After dinner was the opera, and, while fascinating on some level, I could not stop from nodding off. I left at the intermission with a huge majority of the rest of those Americans that went.
The five-hour bus ride to Venzia (Venice) gave us a bleak view of a foggy, snow-blanketed Northern Italy. Once in the city, we hopped off the bus and onto boats to head up a channel to our hotel. My colleagues needed reminding that we were in fact “on a boat” but I got everyone connected with their inner T-Pain soon enough.
It snows in Venice once every 10 years ...
Venice is a beautiful maze of calm waterways, meandering sidewalks and tall bridges for the sidewalks to cross the waterways. There was an art gallery tour that fascinated me as I recognized many of the Titian, Caravaggio and Bellini paintings. But after four hours of walking around to different galleries, I was more than sufficiently beat. I grouped up with some friends and went out to a nice restaurant for dinner and enjoyed some delicious Italian pizze (pizza).
A good Italian dinner ...
Saturday, I woke up sick, but I tried to not let it stop me for too long. Another tour departed our hotel this morning (starting with a short but exciting gondola ride!) and we visited several 15th century seats of government, as well as Piazza di San Marco and the cathedral itself. We even went underneath a building to see an old stone prison of medieval Venice. After the tour, I headed back to the hotel for a long afternoon’s nap.
No streets in Venice ... only sidewalks and canals.
I’m very much looking forward to being in Rome, settling into my apartment, and starting a regular class schedule. There has been so much going on, and there is still so much left that we’re doing. I need a break…
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