Day 3 - First Full Day at the Ostello

(a bee collecting pollen early this morning)

Today was extremely tiring, but definitely worth it. I woke up of my body's accord around 6:00, took a shower and a walk, and had some free time before breakfast, which started at 8:00. It was refreshing to have the shower room to myself (gym style; six shower heads with no divider) and to see the town with no one else awake.

(one example of the hairpin turns typical of this place; the yellow building on the right behind the stone building is the top of the ostello)

Breakfast was an interesting concoction made of mixing yogurt, granola, and chopped fruit. It looked highly unappealing, but I was highly hungry, so I tried it anyways and found it to be better than tolerable, though not by much. As I ate, the flavors grew on me. Most of my classmates loved it.

Our teacher still has not arrived, so the three architects working with our teacher have taken charge of the students for the time being. The time between breakfast and lunch was spent arranging the tables in the workspace into a working layout and researching cultural centers, seeing as that is this term's project.

After lunch we went back to Chiasso (kee-ah-tsoh) in order to buy regional transit passes. These passes allow us to take any train or bus in the region for free, meaning that although they are quite expensive we will be saving a lot of money with them. Chiasso is the closest city, and it costs several francs to get there, so we'll be doing a lot of traveling for every day business, let alone our Friday field trips.

(a photo booth for passport pictures; we used this for our regional pass photos)

In Chiasso we stopped at a bank, bought our passes, and took a short tour lead by the architects with our group. A free tour by locals. You can't beat that! We took a bus to a neighboring town, where we visited a school of architecture and saw some final models of graduating students. Then we went to a town square where one of the World Cup matches was showing. There was a grocery store there, where we gratefully went to get snacks and things we'd forgotten to pack. I got shampoo, cookies, and some things I can't spell correctly (snacks). I'm not accustomed to this three meals a day thing - I like to snack all day and end up eating four or five small meals. Mostly it's the scheduled meals I'm unaccustomed to. My system might adjust eventually, but for now I need snacks to kill the hunger ache!

(a topographic model made from layered pieces of thin, hand-cut cardboard)

When we got back to Muggio (moo-joh), the little town we take a bus to in order to take a shuttle back to Scudellate (skoo-deh-lah-teh), I picked some large clover flowers and made two circle chains. When we got back to the ostello I gave them to the very nice woman who makes our food and helps out in some other ways.

Dinner was delicious. Now some of us are watching the next World Cup match and I am taking advantage of the lack of internet users to try to upload a video in hopes that there is more bandwidth available. If you can play a video of the scenery here, then it worked. If you can't, then I don't think I can upload videos here.