Week Update

This last week has been by far the roughest week I have experienced at Franklin. Last week I received the news that my great grandmother passed away. The news of course made me extremely sad, but luckily I have a good support system here and back home. The roughest part has been being away from home and my family and friends during this time.

It turned out to be quite a busy week on top of staying strong. The game of Assassins is currently being played on campus here, which I have found to be quite distracting and entertaining. For those of you who don't know what Assassins is, each person who wants to play pays 10 francs to the school (as a fundraiser for my residence hall's Swiss living community). Each player receives a card with the name of another player, who is their target. Their job is to find their target (outside of the safe zones) and touch them with a spoon. It sounds simple, but keep in mind that someone is chasing you with a spoon as well. The game gets very intense because everyone wants to win the prize of a 100 franc gift certificate to one of the local grocery stores. I did not play, but I agreed to help my friends win. I aided them by getting them food and walking them to class to help them avoid the people trying to catch them. Unfortunately, both of my friends were caught within the week!

Another element to this week was a trip to Milan for my freshman seminar class. We went to Milan all day on Saturday to take pictures and videos of people in Milan using their cell phones or other mobile devices (I am in the mobile communications freshman seminar class). It turned out to be quite an enjoyable trip despite the freezing weather! I enjoyed Milan more than I thought I would, I pictured it to be the typical touristy Italian city, but it was very beautiful and had a completely different vibe from Florence and Venice.

Next week will be rough as well, so I'm hoping it will be okay. Through it all I'll be strong with the knowledge that I will be visiting Oregon in less than a month!

Picture discussed in the academic travel post.

Extremely exhausted by this point in the trip, but here I am in Firenze!

Torre del Lago! I can see how Puccini was so inspired.

My favorite city: Lucca!

Rainy day on top of the wall in Monteriggioni

Taken from Castello di Verrazzano after the wine tour!

Academic Travel

        
For my first academic travel at Franklin I chose to go to Tuscany, with the main city focuses being Florence, Lucca, and Siena. Honestly since this was my first academic travel I had no idea what to expect, maybe some tours and sight-seeing. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least!

     The first town we went to was Siena, which was about a 4 hour drive from Lugano. On the way we stopped in a town located on the top of a hill named Monteriggioni. Monteriggioni is surrounded by a large wall to prevent attacks from other cities. It was pouring rain but I couldn't help but be in awe of the city's natural beauty. That night we arrived in Siena. While still pouring rain we walked to dinner, which took us an hour and 45 minutes because our professor was lost. At this point I was ready to go home. Then we arrived at dinner, and it was the best meal I have had in my life. The restaurant continued to put more food in front of us until we were full, and then a few more courses. The next day we went to San Gimignano, another town surrounded by a large wall. There we went to a torture museum and a death penalty museum, like all medieval towns have.

     The next day we left Siena and headed towards Lucca. On our way we stopped at Castello di Verrazzano, which was my favorite stop on the entire trip. We took a tour of the wine cellars and the castle faculty fed us lunch and we tasted the most delicious wine I have ever had. I even bought a bottle to take back to the states for Christmas break for my family to try!

     A few days later we went to Torre del Lago, the town where Puccini lived, and Pisa! Of course in Pisa I had to take the classic photo holding up the tower, and then a more creative one where my friend pretended to be a dinosaur and pushed the tower over onto me, the poor villager.

     Our last stop was Florence. My favorite part about Florence was going to La Accademia, where Michelangelo's "The David" resides. How did Michelangelo create such a fantastic sculpture? I may never know, but I appreciated how much time and effort was put into it.

     I know that is not a very detailed description of my academic travel, but what I found most important were the bonds I made with the people on the trip. I cannot believe how lucky I am to go to a college where it is required to travel for two weeks per semester to graduate. I feel very grateful to be given this opportunity! :)

Oops!

       Well I admit, I haven't been posting lately and that is entirely my fault. I have been busy with Academic Travel, and the week following which was crazy with school work. I promise, I will update everyone on what my first Academic Travel was like (and soon)!

       For now, I will tell everyone that I have moved into a new dorm which focuses on the Swiss Community, which I find funny since the title of this blog is Swiss Life. I absolutely love it in this dorm. It's called Leonardo da Vinci or LDV for short. It is the freshman dorm which contains a lot of my closest friends at Franklin. I'm now in a split double room. For those of you who don't know what that means, it means that I have a roommate but we have separate rooms. We share a common entryway, large closet for storing cleaning supplies and other objects we don't want to store in our own closets, and a bathroom. Then we each have a room to ourselves for sleeping. We are also special in the way that my roommate and I each have our own balcony! I feel like this living situation will suit me better than my last room. So it's easy to say that life is pretty great!