Classes

I have 5 classes in total. I have only been to 3 of them so far. I’ll explain why, shortly.

1. Communicating in Italian: I love my Communicating in Italian class. At first, I wished that I was in Italian Language Beginning (those are the two options for beginner Italian classes) But I soon was grateful to be placed in Communicating in Italian. I feel like I know so much more Italian then everyone who is in Italian Language Beginning. Their class is more grammar based while my class is more, well… Communicating based. My class is focused more on speaking and I think that I am able to understand more in conversations during daily activities. The grammar class is more focused on spelling and sentence structure. When picking between the two options: it depends on what you want to learn. My professor is super nice and really understanding. She really pushes us. We stopped using English directions in class the second week. At first, I thought that was way too early but it has forced me to remember what a lot more words mean.
2. Fashion Marketing: I’m learning a lot about marketing. At Central, I am both an Apparel Merchandising and Apparel Design concentration major but I tend to lean more towards the Apparel Design side. So this is different than what I am used to. We are currently working on a project for this company called Exclusive Fashion Tours. We are helping them construct a blog and writing blog posts for their clients. It is fun because I get to see places in Florence that I wouldn’t have normally gone to or even known about without this assignment. My first assignment was going to Scuola del Cuoio, which is a leather school that has been around for many years. The students and artisans work side by side to learn how to make a variety of different leather products. My professor is really nice. She owns an accessory company called Nannini Accessories. The class is actually supposed to be taking a tour, there in a couple of weeks.
3.  Fashion Photography: I’ve learned so much about a DSLR camera in such a short amount of time. I now understand what the terms aperture, shutter speed and ISO are and how to adjust them. We have had an impromptu photo shoot for a Chinese designer for department store advertisements. One of our assignments is called Street Style. We walk around Florence taking picture of people street style that we like. The key to the street style photography is to have a connection with the subject. It is challenging because when you walk up to a person to ask them, you’re not exactly sure what language they will be able to speak. Sometimes they do speak English, sometimes they only speak Italian and sometimes they do not speak either of the two.

My last two classes are Florence Food and Culture and Magazine Editing and Publishing. I have not started these two classes but I can’t wait to start them. They are intensive classes, which means they will begin on November 17^th and go for two and a half hours everyday Monday through Friday for three weeks straight.

I was originally supposed to be taking Shoe Construction and Handbag Construction but because there was not enough students to run the class. Both were cancelled, unfortunately. So my two alternative classes are Magazine Editing and Publishing and Fashion Marketing. 

I am a firm believer that everything happening for a reason so there is a reason why my schedule was changed. Even though, I was super sad that those were cancelled. I was going to be having class Monday - Friday every day for the whole semester. So in a way it was a blessing because I have been able to travel on the weekends and see some amazing places. 

Addicted to the Internet

A big part of my study abroad experience has been to get out of my comfort zone. I can successfully say that I have been getting out of my comfort zone very frequently and I’ve been trying a variety of new things that I wouldn’t regularly try.

If you know me well, I always try and play it safe. I calculate the risks of each situation and I try to calculate every single possibility of results that could occur. If I can’t calculate the outcome or the risk is too high, most of the time I don’t end up doing the activity. I also like to be very much in control of each situation. If I can’t control the outcome, once again I won’t participate. For example, you won’t find me on a roller coaster or any rides for that matter, walking outside after dark unless I absolutely have to or talking to people that I don’t know in foreign countries.

By doing things out of my comfort zone on this trip, I’ve learned a lot about myself. I usually psych myself out in situations; I overthink a lot of things. I am stronger that I thought I was and I am grateful that I had the guts to try new things. There hasn’t been one thing that I’ve tried that I’ve hated. I have been thankful that I tried them. All of them. In the past, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what if. What if about certain events, once in a lifetime opportunities, and what if I let go of my fears and just had fun.

I also have been letting go of controlling every situation. I’m learning there is no sense in me trying to control every situation especially when a lot of situations that have presented themselves to me are out of my control.

For the past two weeks, I basically lived without constant Internet access. I haven’t lived without 24/7 Internet access since I was 8 years old and at that time, I was not dependent on using the Internet as my main source of communication. I had no control over the situation nor did I have control of when it was going to be fixed.

The wifi in my apartment broke on Wednesday night right before I was going to sleep. No big deal, I was going to sleep anyways. When I woke up, I tried to do my daily check of social media. I clicked on my Facebook app realized that wasn’t working so I decided to check my twitter app, that didn’t work as well so I moved on to Instagram. It wasn’t until waiting for Instagram to load for a couple of minutes that I remembered that our entire Internet was down so nothing was going to work. I continued this same routine every single day, when I woke up and before I went to sleep, until our wifi was fixed.

Thursday morning, it really hit me after I put in a request to get the Internet fixed. This was the weekend before midterms and while I was concerned with communicating with friends and family. I also had a terrible time trying to study for midterms because everything that I needed to study was online. Talk about the irony and terrible timing. We don’t even buy books over here. We go to the library and scan all the pages and email them to ourselves so even our books are technically online. Since when did everything for classes switch over to being online?

A man came Thursday afternoon to look at it and said that he would give me a call the following day, Friday. He did not call me on Friday and I was devastated. Getting the Internet fixed was my number one priority. It was my lifeline: communication, schoolwork, general knowledge, and entertainment. The Internet is not as important here in Italy. That is definitely low on their priority list. If something happens to the Internet, you are extremely lucky to have it fixed in a week. When I walk around or go to a restaurant, I do not see Italian’s glued to their phones. They are actually having conversations with each other.

 In the states, I am constantly connected to wifi and if not wifi then I have a data plan that allows me to use Internet on the go. There is never a moment when I am not connected.  The school is closed on Saturday’s and Sunday’s but I hoped that he would call on Saturday even though I knew that it was going to be a long shot.

I had a birthday dinner right before I left for Italy. At one point of the dinner, I remember I put my phone down and looked around the table, there was not one person who was not on their phone. Everyone was glued to his or her phone scrolling away. It stayed this was for a good 10-15 minutes and all the while, I just silently watched everyone. It actually shocked me that we could sit at a dinner in a restaurant and not have any conversations for a good 15 minutes. At the time, I didn’t think that it was that bad. I just started a conversation and most people put their phones down and we started to talk again.

Chat Pals

Starting today, we will be taking midterms. The sad part about that previous sentence is it feels like I just got here. So that means that time is going by way too quickly. I only have a month and a half left.

I signed up for this program called Chat Pals. The Chat Pal program at FUA is where you get paired with an Italian person trying to learn English or your native language (There are some students who speak Portuguese and other things here.) You are supposed to meet with them at least once a week and speak 30 mins in Italian and then 30 mins in English.

My Chat Pal’s name is Martina. She is super nice and around the same age as me. I am very lucky to have her because she knows English pretty well. She has been the United States a couple of times, to larger places like New York, Las Vegas and some cities in California. We talked about a great deal of things like her family, what types of food she likes and what her and her friends do when they hang out. She says that the amount of Italian that I do know is very good because I told her that I came here without ever taking an Italian class. I feel that there is still so much Italian that I have to learn and she understands English like perfectly. I only need to help her with her English when she forgets a word or provide her with an alternative word or phrase for saying something.

Dante's Rock

Michaelangelo's Self Portrait

For our first meeting, I met Martina, in Piazza della Repubblica and we went for a walk around the city square. She showed me things that most tourist don’t know about like the rock that Dante would sit on and watch the Duomo being built and a self-portrait of Michelangelo scratched into the side of Palazzo Vecchio, which is actually the town hall in Florence. We also went to see Dante’s church and house. She was surprised that I didn’t know much about Dante and hadn’t read any of the books such as Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. That only made me wish that I had read Dante’s Inferno in high school.

Dante's Church

I learned a great deal by just walking around with her, aside from more Italian. She told me about history in Florence and also about other things about Italy in general. I didn’t know that different cities in Italy had different dialects depending on what country they were under until they became a part of Italy. Other countries such as Switzerland and Austria controlled different cities in Italy and that affects the ability of a person from Florence from being able to talk to a person from Naples (they can barely understand them. Only a couple of words are similar,) I also learned that they only started teaching English in schools approximately 20 years ago. Before that, children were taught French in school, so that is primarily why older generations don’t really know English. 

My main goal is to be able to understand what people are saying during daily activities but I know that it is going to take lots and lots of practice. Hopefully, this Chat Pal partnership will help me speed the process up. I also hope to gain a lifelong friend as well.

San Gimignano, Chianti, Siena and Monteriggioni

I woke up and was on the go again. The previous day, I had gone to Milan for fashion week. This time, I went on another day trip to several different cities in Italy: San Gimignano, Chianti, Siena and Monteriggioni.

 

We ended up on a tour bus where the tour was primarily given in Spanish. Spanish and Italian are very similar so I spent the first couple of minutes thinking that the tour was in Italian until I recognized some words to be Spanish. Eventually, the tour guide would translate everything into English but by that time if we were driving by a monument on the bus, we would already pass it.

I thought that it was hilarious. I’m already trying to learn Italian and I end up going on a primarily Spanish speaking tour in Italy. I don’t know much Spanish either (only what I remember from my high school Spanish class) so I was equally as confused during the Spanish parts.  Everything looked really cool though so I didn’t necessarily have to understand everything. There was a total of about 8 English speaking folks on the whole tour bus.

First stop was to San Gimignano. They are known for some of the best ice cream in the world. So naturally, I had to get some even though it was only 9 or 10 in the morning. I got pineapple and Nutella flavored ice cream. The pineapple was just way too much for me to handle but the Nutella was perfect and very delicious. There were many mini photo shoots taken in this town.

I also had my very first espresso. It was not my favorite. I don’t like bitter and that is exactly what espresso is. Very. Very. Bitter. (I didn’t know that before I ordered it) In order to actually drink it, I added a great deal of white and brown sugar. After seeing me add a bunch of sugar, the bartender asked me if I would like some milk to add in it and I gladly accepted it. In the end, I ended up making my espresso into what they call here in Italy a caffe latte but a mini version since they serve shots of espresso in a tiny cup.

Sarah (my roommate) said that the bartender looked at me in horror as he watched me poor the mountain of sugar into the espresso. I didn’t really realize that coffee and espresso is a really big thing in Italy. They drink the coffee for the taste, where as we (in America) drink it more to wake us up, which is exactly why I actually bought the espresso because I was exhausted from being in Milan the previous day. By the end of my experience though, the bartenders saw it as more of a funny experience then an insult. I explained to them that I was new to coffee and espresso and they were really understanding about it. It’s interesting that a common drink such as coffee can have two different meanings depending on what culture you are from.

Next, we went to Chianti. Where we were able to do a food and wine tasting. When we arrived the woman spoke to us in pure Italian and all I could do was mimic what the other people in the room were doing. After tasting two wines, some olive oil and cheese. She over heard my roommate and I speaking in English and she switched over to English so we could understand her as well.

What she was saying was to swivel the glass around (with the wine in it) and then to smell the wine for a couple of seconds then to hold it in your mouth for five seconds (when we first received new wine) She was also explaining that the wine tastes different when you drink the wine and eat it with different foods (which is COMPLETELY true!!)

In the first couple of weeks of being here, I discovered that I don’t really like wine so I've started to avoid it. The wine is always too dry or bitter. But I just tried the wine in Chianti to say that I have and I’m really glad that I didn’t chalk all wine up to tasting the same. I ended up really liking the dessert wine (No surprise there! It was super sweet to Sarah and my friend, Christina) I absolutely loved it!! I also really liked the balsamic vinegar that we had as well, those were my favorite from the entire tasting. We tasted some classic Chianti wine that wasn’t bad either. In total, we had four wines, two different types of olive oil with bread, a bit of cheese, salad and salami. (but I don't really eat pork so I didn't really eat it. I did try a bit though!)

 

We also had some really good pasta with olive oil on it and the olive oil completely changed the taste of the pasta. It made plain pasta with sauce have really good flavor.

Siena was next.

This place is like a medieval town. There are 17 districts each with their own separate flag. (It reminded me of the Hunger Games) The streets are marked with a crest of which district they belong to. The only place where there is neutral ground is called Piazza del Campo. It is also the place where the hold the famous horse race, which is apparently one of the most dangerous in the world. I guess that would make sense since our tour guide said there were no rules. Anything and everything is fair game during the race.

Monteriggioni was our last stop. It is a medieval walled town and a total of 50 people live there. 50 people. There were more people in my high school graduating class (65) and I knew them all by name and could pretty much tell you a history on each of them. I couldn’t imagine living in a walled town with only 50 people but I am more of a big city type of girl. (I plan on New York being in my future.) It had a nice small town type of feel.

Milan Fashion Week

Milan Fashion Week was held this year from September 17^th  – 22^nd.  I went on the 3^rd day the 19^th.  When we first got there, we headed straight for the Milan Duomo, which was a beautiful site. It is apparently the fourth largest cathedral in the world.

Milan Duomo

Next we went to Loggia dei Mercanti (the fashion center) where they have the fashion shows. Unfortunately, the shows aren’t open to the public but they have a carpeted area right outside that has projection screens that feature the live fashion show inside that the public can watch. (See Video above) There are also people passing out newspapers, information about the shows and a model casting call.

We went to the Galleria before heading off to lunch. The Galleria is thought to be the world’s oldest shopping mall and it is a popular meeting spot for Milanese. Inside, there is a famous bull tile that is said to bring good luck if you rub your foot or spin around on it (Different people say different things).

Galleria Vittorio Emanuel II

Lunch was at the Mozzarella Bar on the top floor of La Rinascente, (a famous department store; think like Macy’s or Nordstrom’s) where I had some very delicious pizza.

After lunch, we went to the fashion district and the design district. The fashion district was filled with stores such as Prada, Gucci, Cavalli, Ferragamo and Pucci. We saw the fashion houses and head offices of various different companies like: Valentino, Gucci, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. The design district was where design students would go to school.

Milan Fashion Week was not like what I expected. It is very spread out around the city. (I thought that it would be more in one concentrated area.) It makes it hard to see all of the things going on in just one day. My experience would have been even more awesome if we were able to get into some of the shows but as I learned in my Fashion Marketing class, Milan is all about connections and knowing someone to be able to be invited to go. Paris is the most difficult fashion week to get into but there is hope you can pay and go to New York Fashion Week.

Unfortunately, it rained on the day we went. Newer designers and design students sometimes hold catwalks outside in different parts of the city. Despite the rain, we were able to grab a couple of look books for a brand and see some beautiful sites. All in all I had a good time in Milan!

Fun Fact about Milan: The bean bag is a Milanese invention!

 Here are some pictures of street style in Milan: