For the third week that we were in Italy, I never really did get around to taking any pictures. It mostly has to do with the reason that we moved into a villa, where we'll be spending the next couple weeks doing classes and there's not much to take pictures of. I like to take pictures of scenery and other things like that. I'm not the type of person that just goes around taking pictures of random people in the middle of class.
We got into the villa Sunday evening and got a run down of the whole place. We were introduced to some of the staff and got a tour of the place. There are many patios scattered around the place for people to just sit back and relax. It has a student lounge area (which we don't really use), a little room where you can play pool (still have yet to find the balls and sticks), an exercise room that is very....nice...you could say. It has an eating area where breakfast, lunch and dinner is provided at certain times of the day. The entire villa is huge. Its been around for a couple centuries and has a ton of rooms for the family that owns it, and for any staff that may work here. Next to the villa is a pretty good sized castle that has been around for a couple centuries, but is not open to the public because its under renovation. So, it sounds like that is out of the question.
After we had gotten to the villa, we got our first meal, and it was pretty good. It was a normal Italian meal where you get bread in the beginning, followed by a first course, second course and dessert later. We get a bottle of wine per table for every dinner, so some people start to get feeling pretty good.
Over the week, we get breakfast at 8, lunch at 1, and dinner at 7. Breakfast is interesting. Its been the same everywhere that we've gone to, where it consists of small portions of dishing yourself up and having some coffee to go along with it. I'm not really a big fan of the breakfast because the meat just doesn't taste like home. I miss bacon and eggs and all the good, greasy American stuff. I do like the bread and coffee that we get.
Lunch is almost the same as dinner, except we don't get a first course or dessert for lunch. Most of the meals consist of a lot of pasta, some vegetables and a little meat on the side. I almost feel like I'm going vegetarian sometimes. Can't really complain about the bottle of wine that we get at dinner each time.
Its pretty much like that through the course of the whole week for meals. As for classes now...
We have a few classes over the week. This week is different because we have 3, when we're supposed to have 2. We usually have a class in the morning, a break and lunch, then a class in the evening. The classes for this week are Art History, Clay, and Italian.
Italian has gotten to be a bit frustrating. We had it twice this week and learned some basics in being able to communicate in Italian. It just gets frustrating because we're being taught and the instructor keeps talking to us in Italian. It's like, "I have no idea what you're saying!" I realize that its good in that it could help us, especially in being in Italy, but, communication could be a bit easier. There's a lot of memorization to be had with this class, but I guess any language class could be like that. Its not a walk in the park to learn a new language.
Before we even came to Italy, we were supposed to have read our Art History book and taken something of a pretest. The Art History class for this week was a few times and lasted around 3 hours each class. It mostly consisted of reviewing us for a competition that we were having at the end of the week to see how far along we had come and also acted as a test. We talked, we went over slides, we were put into groups. There were 4 groups and they were for the Italian Bowl, which was the competition/test in jeopardy style. Our groups met and somewhat studied with each other....in the end, my group won. We got cookies! ;)
Clay class is something completely separate from the other classes. We started our first class with Rhett introducing us to clay and excercises to work on your clay and get bubbles out and what not; keeping it wet, rolling it, pinch pots, etc. We had to get started on our first project, which was to replicate a piece we had seen over the few weeks. This was what I had talked about in an earlier blog post. The bocoroo pieces; which was red clay turned black from the firing. I replicated a piece that had a pretty simple design, but not simple in creating. It took me all week and I probably put about 10-12 or more hours into it. It ended up being the largest piece in the class and I put a lot of work into it and was pretty proud. I don't have any pictures, but I do have a picture of the original. They look similar to each other, but its not perfectly replicated.
This project was time consuming in that I had to build it up slowly and slowly to the top. The hardest part was the handles. You have to do those just right, or they can break off pretty easy. A lot of the people had trouble because some of their pieces broke, they were too much of a perfectionist, or their handles mostly likely broke. Its not that they messed up, its just that handles are very hard in getting to stay, making sure they dry right and stay on. Some peoples broke after they were already dry because they picked it up by the handle and it just snapped. Mine was very heavy and sturdy.
That about wraps it up for this week. I am down with my first clay project and have to start my second one for the 4th week. I was still unsure what I was gonna do for it by the end of this week. But, the project could be anything we wanted, but it was encouraged to be something that you seen over the weeks that inspired you. Until the next post...probably tomorrow...
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