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!

Forgiveness

Lately I've been dealing with the dilemma of forgiving people for events that happened in the past. It's the most empowering thing to be able to forgive someone. But how can we forget what happened? I really wish that it was so simple to move on in a way, I'm just not sure how to yet. If anyone has some good advice, send it my way!

Midterms/ Life

I'm sorry I haven't been posting a lot recently (that's assuming people enjoy reading my blog). For those of you who don't know, this week is midterm week. Holy cow, how time flies! I had a Spanish midterm today, my International Relations midterm tomorrow (wish me insane amounts of luck), my Italian midterm tomorrow, my Art History midterm on Thursday along with another Spanish one and a Communications midterm, and another Italian midterm on Friday. YIKES! The midterm I am fearing the most is my International Relations midterm. It is by far my favorite class and I find the material extremely interesting. However, the midterm sounds terrifying! I have read 320 pages out of one text book, and have to read another 200 pages in the other book (I am already on page). I have gone from never having to study in my life, to studying for one week straight for one test that is only an hour and fifteen minutes long. How is this possible? If someone has an answer, please let me know! But seriously, wish me luck everyone! Also, my motivation to get me through this week is the fact that I will be on academic travel next week! Woohoo! That is quite possibly the best reward for living through midterm week in college, and I get to go on academic travel after every midterm week, how lucky am I?
It's been getting a little difficult being so far away from home, I've begun to miss many things from Oregon. Some things that I particularly miss are my family, my dog, and people who speak English. People speaking English sounds silly, but it is slightly annoying when you go to the doctor and you cannot explain to them properly in Italian what is wrong. I still love it here! But I'm also looking forward to being able to hug my family, I'm halfway to winter break! Yay! Have a good week everyone!

TED Talks

Sorry that I haven't been posting in a while! Here are some videos that cheered me up today, enjoy them!
This is a TED talk remix that my physics class watched last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDHET3aCI2U
My friend Abbi showed me this one today! For those of you who get the spinny wheel of death while waiting for a page to load, et cetera, you can definitely relate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_6SfMZxoLc&feature=share