Florence Week 5
I decided not to make any travel plans for this upcoming weekend, so I got to spend some quality time in Florence this week.
Monday began with a very long and productive photography class. We printed our first photos which took about 2 hours of learning the process, doing test prints, and creating one final photo. I'm very happy with how mine turned out.
We then reloaded our cameras and went out to shoot new photos. I took a self-portrait for my good friend Dylan as he stood on the ledge overlooking the river. It was a pretty funny scene. I stood up between two pillars in front of the Uffizi Gallery with a timer and his black box while he was 25 feet in front of me on the ledge. We had to expose the film for a little over 2 minutes, so we got a good number of confused looks from people as I shouted a countdown. I'm surprised nobody was concerned for his safety.
The next few days I had to crack down and put some more time into my work. My classes are picking up the pace; I have about 5 projects to balance right now.
The weather was really nice and sunny, so I took advantage of breaks between classes to lay out on Piazza de' Pitti, a big plaza in front of my school outside of Palazzo Pitti (the Pitti Palace).
My industrial design studio went really well on Thursday. A few of the Italian students had noticed my sketching and soon there was a bunch of them crowded around my desk asking for tips and to look through my sketchbook. It was a pretty nice feeling since I've been fairly quiet in the last few classes as the only one who didn't really speak Italian. I feel a lot more comfortable in that class now, which is really important for a studio class. I'm sure I'll end up asking them for plenty of CAD tips since that's what they focus on over sketching. It'll be nice to learn from each other.
Toward the end of the week, the weather took a sudden turn, and all of my roommates ended up getting sick, myself included. I had to spend most of Thursday and Friday in to get rid of the cold. Luckily it passed pretty quickly and I was able to walk around the city over the weekend.
On Saturday, it rained all day, so I parked myself in a café to make some more progress on my projects. The café had a great working environment as well as some delicious food. A guy from my high school was actually in Florence for the day, so he stopped by and we had a really nice chat about our recent travels.
Sunday, I had lunch with an Italian girl I met about a week ago. We decided we were going to help each other learn our respective languages. This is something I really need, since Italian class is mostly just grammar and vocab but not a lot of conversational practice. We had an interesting discussion about our different cultures. I think she'll definitely help me improve quickly!
I'm slowly doing a taste test of all the nocciola gelato in Florence. I don't know what I'll do without it back in the States!
Ciao e grazie per aver letto!