Ciao Barbara!

We had our last Italian class this morning.  We have all learned a lot of material in this short amount of time.  We basically crammed a semesters worth of Italian into 10 days.  My hat is off to our prof, Barbara, for even attempting it.  

She made the classes very interesting though and we had a lot of teacher/student interaction.  She gave us a very practical understanding of the Italian language.  Now its our job to go out and apply our skills in the city.  We have been very fortunate so far to make some Italian friends that have been helping us practice our new language.  I am finding Italian very easy to pick up.  I have been able to have some great conversations with some of the locals and I am lucky to be able to call them friends now. 

Tonight we went out to Barbara's favorite restaurant which happens to be very close to the villa if you don't count the 162 stairs, ha.  The food was great.  It was a very traditional meal with first course, second course, and dessert.   Oh, and in a health news side note, Italy has actually served as a pretty good diet for me so far.  I have already lost 10 pounds since I got here so I cant complain.  Between the exercise and drinking a lot of water, the Genovese diet has worked out pretty well the last couple of weeks.  But I don't want you people back home to think that Im not eating.  Believe me, I have plenty of food to eat.  Our chef makes sure of it.  Plus the food out at the local restaurants is always wonderful.  This is one of the traditional Genovese desserts.  My kind of diet!

After some vino and a espresso, we headed back up to the Villa to decide on our group partner for the semester.  There are 16 of us students and we are splitting into 2 person groups.  We all set down as a studio and discussed our interest for Italy and what we wanted to learn from this architectural experience.  Drew and I found out that we have common interest and goals for the semester so we will be working together on our research project as well as our design projects.  We also share a common appreciation for Landscape Architecture and how it combines with the structural component to form a complete package.   Drew is actually studying Landscape Architecture at Clemson so I feel like I will be able to learn a lot from him this semester.  Tomorrow we will begin our actual studio work and we should be able to get a good handle on our research project.  

In other news, we are heading to Torino (Turin) this weekend to ski the Alps.  So uh yeah, that's pretty exciting!   I will def. update you with some pictures from that trip after we get back.  I think we are taking a train Friday night so that we can ski all day Saturday.  We will prob. stay sat. night too so that we can visit the museum and some other structures before coming back on Sunday.  This is a link to the place where we are going skiing on saturday.  

Wish us luck on the mountain!  Until next time! 

Ciao!