Goodbye, my love

I've been terrible about keeping up with this blog but I guess this semester has been busier than I had anticipated. In the past few days, I've been writing three Art History papers: one about Mannerism (ew), one about Venetian art, and one about Leonardo's Annunciation. But as of yesterday, I'm done with my junior year of college. Last night was the last supper and today is my last day in Florence. I leave early tomorrow morning to fly home to Florida.

Yesterday I bought a hoodie on the way home from my exam. It's immediately my favorite article of clothing. I also bought a small square piece of art from one of the art vendors near the Pitti Palace.

In a way, I'm excited to be headed home. There are people at home who I miss a lot and I'm excited to start working again because not having a job the whole semester has been weird. However, this has been the best four months of my life and I'm going to miss Florence so much.

I loved being able to travel outside of Italy but nowhere compares to this place. I'm going to miss the long wine-filled dinners, the cappuccinos, Nero's class, everyone in this crazy apartment, basically having a home in two rooms, getting a vegetarian sandwich at Natalino for lunch four days a week, going to La Loggia 983778672 times a day, walking so much every day, etc... I'm going to miss this place a ridiculous amount.

Spring Break: The Netherlands

I never made a post for the Netherlands part of spring break but that was a while ago so this will be a sort of condensed version. We spent four days in the Netherlands. We stayed in Amsterdam and took two day trips to Haarlem and The Hague. We went to those places to check out museums like Mauritshuis to see paintings like Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.

Amsterdam highlights include Rembrandt's house and the Van Gogh museum. The Van Gogh museum is easily one of my favorite places ever. I love everything about the Netherlands. The people are nice (and pretty much everyone speaks English!). I loved seeing the two smaller towns as well. I could definitely see myself living in Amsterdam! Also, dutch pancakes are delicious.

When we were booking fights, it seemed difficult to get home from Amsterdam so we decided to fly out of Brussels instead. With less than a day in Brussels, we decided to go to Rene Magritte's house. Brussels was freezing and difficult to navigate. However we stayed at a real hotel that night and the beds were incredibly comfortable.

Magritte's kitchen

Spring Break: PARIS

On Thursday evening (of a fairly stressful midterms week!), I left for spring break. We flew to Paris (then took a long bus ride and short taxi ride) and got to our hostel late at night. Since I only was able to sleep for 10 minutes the previous night, I was just happy to go straight to sleep, even on the top bunk of an uncomfortable bed and with two strangers also in our tiny room.

In the morning, we made our way over to the Louvre. I had been once before (four years ago) but that was before studying Art History so I was pretty excited about going back. After showing our student visas to get in for free (pretty awesome!), we spent five hours looking at beautiful art. My favorite artists I saw at the Louvre include Rembrandt, Vermeer, Steenwyck, Claude (Lorrain)...and of course I enjoyed seeing work by Leonardo & Michelangelo even though I've been seeing a crazy amount of their work recently.

We spent that evening admiring (and eating dinner near) the Eiffel tower. The next morning, we took a train out to Versailles. It was cold and rainy for most of the day. We didn't walk through the entire palace because Mary mostly wanted to see the hall of mirrors and I had already been there. Plus, even though the whole place is beautiful, the gardens are pretty much my favorite part. We had tea and desserts in the cafe/tea house while we were there. I had earl grey tea and a vanilla/white chocolate eclaire. Mary had a tiny piece of chocolate cake (with pieces of gold on top of it) and citrus tea.

Next we went to Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame. We waited in line and actually paid money to get into Sainte Chapelle but it turned out to be even more majestic than I was expecting it to be. It's a small church, especially in comparison to Notre Dame, but I would probably go back to Paris just to go back to Sainte Chapelle. Then we went to Centre Pompidou. They had a special exhibition of Mondrian/De Stijl which was awesome. They even had some of Mondrian's tree paintings, which made me really happy to see. We ate dinner near the Pompidou. I got a raspberry julep with my tomato & mozzarella salad (basically the only vegetarian dish Paris has) but it was way too strong so I couldn't even finish it.

On Sunday, we went to the Musée de l'Orangerie. It's a small museum but I'm really glad we went because they have an incredible collection of Renoir's (and a bunch of other awesome artists, too). I love impressionism.

Then I took a train out to Vernon so I could take a bus to Giverny to see Monet's house. When I got to Vernon (an hour away) I was told that Monet's house isn't open in the winter. So I had a terrible time waiting around in Vernon, which was like a ghost town. I was really unhappy when I found out that the next train back to Paris was in over two hours but I did find a cute bakery for coffee and macaroons. The vanilla macaroon was the best of the ones I got. I was so happy to get back to Gare Saint Lazare. That night for dinner, I had french fries and white wine. It wasn't really by choice. Paris hates vegetarians more than any other city I've been to. =/

On Monday, we went up to the 56th floor of a skyscraper to check out a view of Paris from above. Then we went to the station to buy train tickets to Amsterdam and wait around in a freezer of a train station. Even though it was uncomfortably cold, we watched Ratatouille on Mary's tiny ipod nano screen. I'd been wanting to watch it for a while and I loved it.

The Louvre

I love seeing people do master copies.

Cupid and Psyche

Eiffel Tower at night

Versailles

Gardens at Versailles

Sainte Chapelle (looking straight up)

Pompidou window

Sainte Chapelle

Musée de l'Orangerie

Vernon, France (my least favorite place in the entire world)

Next up: The Netherlands...

Recap

Before I go into writing about spring break, here's a quick update on a few trips that I neglected to post about...

ROME

We took an overnight trip to Rome (at the end of January) to see the Vatican Museums, St Peter's Basilica, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, etc... I loved Rome and would definitely love to revisit it and check out things we didn't have time for (the Borghese Galleries). My favorite parts were seeing Michelangelo's Pieta and going to the Trevi Fountain (at night)...but really, the whole trip was a blast. I put a bunch of Rome pictures on facebook: here and here (one album for each day).

FRANKFURT

On the first weekend in February, I went to Frankfurt, Germany. We found cheap flights through RyanAir. If you've never flown with RyanAir, it's sort of like a normal airline except you fly into airports that are really far away from the city so you have to take a (12/13 euros and at least an hour long) bus into the city. Also sometimes when the pilot lands the plane, it's terrifying and you almost die. But the flights can sometimes be ridiculously cheap so it's worth it.

The MMK was awesome. MMK is their modern art museum and there was a Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition. I learned about him last semester in Digital Foundations class. I think his work is incredibly fascinating. They also had a bunch of Larry Clark photos in the museum but I'm not a huge fan of his work. We also went to the zoo. It wasn't the most impressive zoo I've ever seen but there were some really cool monkeys. Some of the monkeys had mustaches. Also they had penguins. Penguins are funny and Shelby loved them.

It was a fun weekend but I doubt I'd ever go back to Frankfurt, especially in the winter. It was cold and people walk right into you and don't apologize (but maybe I'm generalizing).

I posted a bunch of pictures here (including monkeys!).

VOLTERRA & SAN GIMINIATO

On Feb 11th, we took a day trip to two Tuscan hill towns. We didn't spend a lot of time in Volterra but both towns were beautiful. Nero took us to a few museums and churches. At San Giminiato, we had some free time to explore the area. The views from San Giminiato are breathtaking. Here's some pictures from that day.

MNAF

I've been going to all kinds of awesome museums and seeing incredible works of art. I love being able to get up close to an object I learned about back in Tallahassee. Last week for photo class, we visited the Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia, which is located right near Santa Maria Novella.

We started off looking at a special exhibit of works by Israeli photographer Adi Nes. It was made up of huge color photographs, each one meticulously posed. They were very cinematic. I think some of the photos worked better than others. He refers to art history a lot in his work but overall, I wasn't a huge fan of the exhibit. However, I always love seeing exhibits featuring artists I'm not familiar with.

Anyway, the rest of the museum was even cooler. They had a ton of photo history stuff to see. Their collection was the best group of photos I've ever seen. They had work by artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eadweard Muybridge, etc... It was over a week ago so I don't remember the other legendary artists included, but trust me...there were tons of them. They also had a great collection of vintage film cameras. My favorite class I've ever taken was the History of Photography so this museum was really fun for me to visit. I will definitely go back.

After we made our way through the relatively small museum and everyone headed back towards the study center, I stayed behind to check out the gift shop. They had so many books there that I would love to have. I flipped through a compilation book of "Camera Work" containing old ads, cover designs and published photos. That was cool. Then I got a little lost getting back to the study center because my sense of direction is not the best.

Interlaken, Switzerland

This past weekend, Mary and I (impulsively) decided to go to Interlaken, Switzerland. I had never seen snow before so I was pretty excited for the whole thing. We took a long bus ride there and back. We got to Switzerland very late on Thursday night so we had all day Friday and Saturday to play in the snow.

Everything was obscenely expensive, which unfortunately made the weekend less fun as we couldn't really afford to do stuff like go skiing, sledding, etc...

We did take the train (actually, one bus and two trains) way up to Kleine Scheidegg though. It was super high up and filled with people skiing but we just went up for the breathtaking views. We also each had a delicious coffee (with Bailey's!) in a warm teepee and later we had a mediocre & overpriced lunch (vegetable soup).

At one point we also got to go to a free chocolate tasting at Swiss Chocolate Chalet. We both took 8957986778 pictures because it was so beautiful. We tried the traditional Swiss Rösti, which is basically hash browns with stuff like vegetables and/or meat mixed in.

So I'm bored of writing but perhaps I'll revisit this post to fill in a few details.

To see the full album of over 100 pics, check out the facebook album I just posted.

Siena

Throughout the semester, we have a few trips built into the program. Yesterday (Friday), we all went to Siena.

We took a bus out to the Tuscan hill town in the morning. It was very foggy out during the bus ride and it remained that way for a little while before the sun decided to grace us with its presence. It was chilly out (high of 54 degrees) but I love that weather.

Once in Siena, we got cappuccinos and then headed into town. Throughout the day, we checked out the Siena Cathedral, Piazza del Campo, Palazzo Pubblico, and the Cathedral of Siena. While in the Piazza del Campo, Sue (program director) told us about the famous horse race that is held twice a year. It was neat to see Lorenzetti's frescoes of good government and bad government after learning about it in Art History class (back in Tallahassee).

I can't recall the name of the restaurant at which we ate lunch but it was really a delightful meal. It was in a heated covered area outside so it was nice and warm but we still could enjoy a view of Siena. We drank Chianti. The first course was a delicious pici pasta. The waiter served the steaming pasta onto each of our plates. My second course (which was different that everyone else's because of my vegetarianism) was cooked vegetables (carrots, zucchini, potatoes, etc...) and spinach. We had an almond pastry dessert. It was nice and light and followed by a lovely little shot of espresso (with sugar, of course). Oh...and there was a liquor served with the dessert but I only tried it...I didn't really drink it. It was too sweet and strong for my taste.

After lunch and wine and espresso, we were all in a really happy mood. We took a bunch of pictures of each other in the Piazza del Campo.

We left Siena as it was getting dark. We were all exhausted and slept during most of the bus ride. The Siena day trip was definitely my favorite day so far. Siena is SO beautiful.