Venice

I wasn't going to go to Venice. I don't have any money left. But Hadassa wanted to go, and so I started to want to go. So I went, but only after Hadassa got sick and didn't show up, I forgot my tickets and had to have them changed to a later train, and after taking a hella long boat ride on Venice's public transportation. This is from when I was waiting alone for the right boat at the boat-stop (?) to catch up with my friends who had remembered their tickets and left on the right train.

After the hella long boat ride I got off at the Accademia stop and there they were. Those are my friends on the bridge with their faces whited-out by the sun.

It's true, Venice is pretty cool. People actually live there and this is proof: if you look closely you'll see laundry.

I didn't take this photo because it is a sentiment I share. I've just found that most Italians feel this way. 

I didn't really get to eat any Venetian food. But this was a window display in a restaurant totally worth photographing.

Pots

I started work on my filling again.

Here's a photo after some taking off the wax mold. It's not perfect.. I have a few air bubbles, but I'm told that's normal for a first try. This is after some work with a file and sandpaper. 

Here I've worked it down to the surface level and wet the edges so you can see them better. It's really messy work. Brown dust everywhere.

Finally I have to get the filling at a level just slightly below the level of the rest of the pot using a scalpel. This is a nice detail of my air-bubble failure.

Disneyland Paris

The trip we've all been waiting for. Disneyland Paris.

Teacup ride

Louvre

Walking from the Louvre to the Champs Elysee', we literally stumbled upon this Richard Serra. Kristin looooves Richard Serra and basically freaked out.

While everyone else paid money to freeze their asses off at the top of the Eiffel tower, I took this photo.

And this one minutes after the lights came on. It's supposed to look like the EU flag.

Pompei? I am Sorry Nov. 8-9

Thousands of miles away, but these little ladies followed me. Or I followed them. Either way, I saw them in January 07 at the Toledo Museum of Art, and here they are again in Naples.

Needs no explanation.

Paestum! Greek colony in Italy. The wall paintings that came from here are significant because they're almost-Greek. This one is my favorite. It's from a tomb and that's a diver, diving from this life to the after life, metaphorically speaking. I bought an ashtray with him on it, ironic?

Temple of Neptune at Paestum.

And finally, I saw the Villa of Mysteries at Pompei. This is proof.

Raku Nov. 6th

I'm finally getting around to adding text to these posts:

My ceramics class took a field trip to a ceramics school near Certalda: 

http://www.lameridiana.fi.it/ 

The place was totally amazing.

Out back. Look carefully for vineyards. This is Tuscany.

They fed us an amazing meal out front.

The front of the studio.

I should explain why we were there. You see, they have facilities for Raku firing. Raku is a process of firing ceramics that originally came from Japan (though has been modernized/Westernized considerably). Ceramic pieces are removed from the kiln while red hot (that's what's in the photo), and the rapid temperature change that they undergo causes the glaze to crackle. 

To play up the crackle, potters will put their red-hot pieces in something combustible (sawdust here). The ceramics promptly catch fire, are then covered by the sawdust, which creates smoke, which gets into the cracks in the glaze and turns them black. It can look really good.

Halloween at Borgo A Mozzano

It was Halloween and we had no plans. I picked up a copy of the Florentine, which is the crappy English newspaper here, and found an article about a spooky myth surrounding this bridge. Called the Ponte di Diavolo (Bridge of the Devil), it's strangely assymmetrical and sits in a creepy foggy valley. It's medieval, and as the story goes, the devil was seen there several times before leaping from the bridge into the water, never to be seen again.

Nowadays, the town it's in, Borgo A Mozzano, hosts the biggest Halloween festival in Tuscany.

Marjorie and I decided this was not to be missed.

So after a perfectly halloweeny train ride through the mountains, we made it to the creepy bridge. We take a bunch of photos, but as we get up to the bridge, Marjorie's camera stops working. Every photo is blurry and discolored, most to the point that nothing is visible.  I tell her to check her lens, but nothing appears to be wrong. "Obviously, the devil has possessed your camera," I tell her, "You watch. As soon as we get away from the bridge your camera will be fine." So we walk away. Marjorie takes a picture. It's fine. It was the devil! I can think of no other explanation.

You won't see a sign like this anywhere else.

Then after, we stopped in Lucca for dinner. The entire waitstaff at our restaurant was dressed as vampires, and the menu had been altered for the occasion so that the spaghetti was called guts, the wine was called blood, and (my favorite) the bread was called "pane di morte". Perfect.

Arezzo Oct 28

Arezzo was different than I expected. It was quite a bit larger and more developed than these other towns I've been making day trips to, not that you can tell from this picture. This is right outside of the archeological museum in Arezzo, it's the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre (as in the colosseum).

Separate from the archeological museum, there was an exhibition of a bronze statue of Minerva/Athena that was originally found in Arezzo and has been in the Florence Archeological museum for years. It was a big exhibition focusing on the recent restoration of the statue.  Look at this photo of this huuuge room... with basically just the one statue in it. 

The restoration of the statue was done by none other than Renzo! My archeological conservation teacher. Here's a photo of Renzo at work from  a video on the restoration that was on loop in the exhibition. I was pretty proud.

Volterra Oct. 27

As promised, these are photos of Volterra.

This first picture is of what they call the acropolis of Volterra... basically just what remains of centuries of Etruscan-Roman-Medieval occupation.

Volterra's archeological museum was in a fun old-fashioned style. There were cases and cases of the same objects, many of which were these old red painted cabinets.

And this is looking down onto the Roman theatre and bath complex in Volterra. It was really impressive.

Rome Oct. 18-19

First of all, this is a photo of the amazing yarn shop that my friends and I have been heavily patronizing. They have every kind of yarn you can imagine, and since they spin most of it themselves, it's really affordable. I'm going to miss it.

Here is proof that I made it to the Vatican Museums. That's me and the Apollo Belvedere. 

When we got to the museum, as one may have predicted, there was a line down the street at least a kilometer long. And the Sistine Chapel was closing at 1:00pm. So, along with the other thousand people in that line, we rushed through the Vatican to the end where the Sistine Chapel is. I have never felt so herded, so moronic, so totally dehumanized in my entire life. For safety reasons, nothing like this would happen at home.  There were wayyyy too many people in that museum. Had there been an emergency, we'd all have squashed each other to death.

So after recovering in the poorly lit, Pepsi-sponsored Vatican cafe, we ventured back through the museum. The Sistine Chapel rush was gone, and we were able to take this photo in the peacefully empty Belvedere Courtyard.

Then Sunday, after an extravagent lunch at Babbington's, an English tea room at the foot of the Spanish Steps, I scurried up to the Villa Giulia Museum, Rome's Etruscan museum.

This is a photo of an Etruscan temple replica in the museum's garden.

And this is the impressive view from our balcony (!!) at the hostel Saturday night.

Election Day

Wearing my Obama shirt today. As if I don't already stick out as American.