Siena

Assisi

Assisi, Perugia, Siena, and San Gimignano

Hi all! Sorry it's been a while since my last post. I had a very busy weekend. Through Fairfield I went on a two-day trip to Assisi and Perugia on Saturday, and Siena and San Gimignano on Sunday. All four places were absolutely beautiful. I had so much fun. We also switched up roommates for the night so instead of sharing a room with my actual roommate, Lauren, I got to share with my good friend Jo, and ended up staying awake until 4am watching movies on my laptop. I'll do 4 more posts just of pictures for each place we went to following this post.

School has been a lot of fun lately too. I'm absolutely loving my Philosophy and Science of Early Modern Italy class. I'm one of three students who have taken a philosophy class prior to this so it's really fun to see everyone get all confused and not being used to the type of questions that philosophy makes you ask. One girl even tried asking what the point of what we were talking about was and my teacher was baffled so I told her that there is no point and that's what philosophy is all about, to question the usually unquestionable and that you'll never get a definite answer but just an entire thought process. My teacher looked at me and turned back to the student and said "I agree with Christina" and continued the lesson, it was pretty funny.

Okay, I'm posting all pictures now. Love you all!!

Il Carnevale di Venezia

Venice!!! While it was extremely cold, it was absolutely beautiful. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to go and experience the city, especially during Carnevale. I need to go back though because there is just so much more of the city that I want to see.

We did the trip through Bus2Alps.com since it was cheaper that way than to do it by ourselves. We really had a blast. Driving there by bus took about 3 hours or so, and we ended up driving through a blizzard at one point, it was really crazy.As soon as we got there we went to San Marco square to look for food and masks. We had excellent pizza, it probably tasted better than usual since we were so hungry.

There were people everywhere.

And you could totally tell who was American because they were the ones yelling in english about partying and getting drunk, even though they were already falling over themselves, gosh stupid people.

Anyways, so many people were dressed up in costumes and elegant masks.

We had a lot of fun searching for our own masks to wear. It was difficult though.

The girls literally just kept trying on different masks, butI waited. I needed to find that one mask that just stood out from the rest and that I couldn't take my eyes off of.

Luckily enough I found it. It wasn't too extreme like some of the other ones we found, but it was perfect to me. We all ended up picking out masks that matched what we were wearing at the moment.

Firenze's secret bakery

Friday night I had the pleasure of going to one of Florence's secret bakeries with a few of my newest friends. It was a little sketchy to begin with, especially since my
friend Joel told us we needed to be really quiet and know exactly what we were going to order. We left my place just before 1am, when one of the bakers will open the door and take your order. It was just around the corner in an alley off of an alley, again, it was a little sketchy. Soon after we turned down the first alley we saw the side alley with other students waiting, impatiently, at the door. It wasn't very obvious that there was a bakery there, save for the sweet smells filling the area.
The door was just made of glass, but the kind of glass that's on a shower, where it's not transparent but not opaque.

There were a lot of students from NYU and Gonzaga, so we met a lot of other American students who were doing the same as us and experiencing the secrets of Florence. Finally the door opened a little and an italian man came out and talked to the first group of students at the door and then disappeared back inside, came back with their order in bags and handed them over, for a euro a piece. I pushed my way forward with money

for the 9 of us and gave our orders and when he came back with them we passed the bags out to our friends, paid, and walked out of the side alley. Oh. My. God. I got a chocolate croissant. SO AMAZING. It literally tasted like pure sugar in my mouth.