Velvet Underground

Today was a pretty good day. Woke up and got some breakfast, which reminded me of weird Japanese snacks Annemarie's Aunt Amy used to send us. Like a processed donut that tasted semi-decent.  Also a juice box of tropical fruit juice, which leads to my new development:

Spill of the Day: Tropical Fruit Juice Box

You know when you stick the straw in the box and sometimes the pressure makes it squirt out the straw? Yep. All down the middle of my shirt.  I decided on just wearing a jacket all day. Pretty successful since the building is still freezing.

To get you up to speed, spill of the day yesterday was orange juice in the flight, all down my shirt and onto my laptop case and blanket.  A stain remains on the blanket but I convinced myself the stain on my shirt wasn't noticeable. I'll never really know.

We took a tour from a local Italian woman today, named Lorella.  She teaches the Italian classes at the center. She took us to all the historic sights and gave us lots of info about how super Catholic the community is.  I'm pretty excited for Holy Week because there's parades on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday with a giant statue of Jesus processed through the town.  Each day is a different statue doing each different event for the respective day.  On Easter, however, I am particularly stoked.  They throw open the huge middle doors of the church and six men holding the statue up run into the church with a statue of the resurrected Jesus.  Sounds like a party.

Lorella also explained all the history of Saint Francis and his connection with the community.  He came through the town and now there is a piazza and an arch named after him, possibly a street, too.  The town was part of a pilgrimage route.  It was also the place where parts of the film Life is Beautiful was filmed! 

The piazza del something something from yesterday was actually called Piazza Garibaldi.  General Garibaldi is responsible-ish for unifying the Italian states, so there are piazza's all over Italy named after him.  We actually came during the 150th year of the Italian Unification, so there will be big parties once it gets nice out.

We also went to the historic tower in town.  Castiglion Fiorentino was once an Etruscan fortress, and the top of the town has a large walled-in lawn where Etruscan soldiers once fought off evil people.  Okay so I might have dazed off during the talk on all that history, but there's a nice big lawn and an amazing view where the wall has been knocked down to hand-rail height.  There is also a soccer field, which Lorella told us is the second religion of Italy.  Attached to this wonderful grassy place are two museums.  Once has Etruscan relics, should be interesting. Another is something else...like I said, I dazed off.... On a side note, Lorella was not sure if the trees had been there for 500 years or not, thanks Chip (Landscape Architect Professor) for asking those interesting questions...

One of the neighboring towns is Cortona.  Apparently there is a lot of rivalry between the towns, but Castiglion Fiorentino wins because 1. Americans are here and 2. They had proof of the Etruscan soldiers inhabiting it, which apparently is a huge deal.  Each town is very bitter towards the other, I'm going to compare Cortona to Lawrence while I am here.

After Lorella showed us all the historic spots in town, we went back for our first session of Italian class.  It was more like a refresher course since we took a semester of Italian already, and she was verrrry impressed with us. Little does she know we are Italian geniuses...

After the class we had some free time, so we got on the internet a bit to wait for the shops to open after their siesta (1pm-4pm), and we ventured to the town to find a hair dryer.  We went into the farmacia (farm-uh-chee-uh) and found very over-priced toiletries, but no hair dryer.  It was very nice that the store keepers tried to speak English to us when Marissa was buying some stuff, "Do you...want...for...uh...hair?" and "Tirty-seven, uhh...tree-five."

We found a salon that had straighteners and dryers in their window so we went inside, were greeted, and then stood there realizing we had no idea what to say.  Eventually we found one on a shelf and Marissa said, "quanto costa?" The lady replied in Italian, 35 euro, and then proceeded to pull one out from the display window, double check the price, pull it out of the box, plugged it in, show us how it worked and then made sure we saw the instruction book.  She clearly knew no English, but was very friendly and helpful.  We also went to another farmacia where the clerk was younger and decided to mix some Italian and English together, with the cost being "Nove-fifty." I guess today we realized that they know we are clueless, but appreciate us trying and will be very helpful, at least in our little town.  Side note - mom, saw an extensive tea set in the window at a boutique, looks very cute! I'll check it out sometime.

After dinner, which was once again amazing, we made pals with the new UTSA students here, and tried to teach them some Italian phrases.  They seem pretty nice, and we went and explored the Velvet Underground later in the evening.  The bartender spoke English which made it easier on us, and he kept showing off all his bottle-tossing skills. 

Anyways, the town is on a VERY steep hill, so no need to worry about me gaining weight, I will be Megan Fox after this semester.  I better get to bed, since we actually have a class tomorrow - STUDIO! 

Cara Marie