After the field trip for the final review, we went to Italy for a week. However, since our coursework was over, some people went to other places. Slowly, over the space of three or four days, we trickled down to three students, our teacher, and his family. By the time I got back I had lost touch with the group completely.
The first day we took a series of trains to Sienna, stopping in Firenze (aka Florence) on the way to check in to our various hostels. In Sienna we went to the piazza and saw the famous horse races, which are really a very long ceremony that ends with a horse race. Flag bearers and important religious figures paraded around the piazza for several hours before the race started. The piazza (pee-ah-tsah) is in the middle of the track, so once the ceremonies start you can't leave until they're over. The piazza is a large sloped expanse of stone pavers with no shade and no restrooms.
About two-thirds of the way through the marching flags, the girl sitting a few feet behind me tapped my shoulder and asked if I speak English. When I said I do, she pointed to my peer's towel and asked if it was mine. I said I knew the person it belonged to, and asked what she needed it for. She said she was going to be sick if she couldn't pee, and asked if I would hold it around her while she peed into a bottle. I did so, both of us laughing at the situation, and she had a small accident, so she bought the towel from my peer rather than washing it for him. Turns out she just finished her degree in the States, had been living in Sienna for two months, and began filling me in on the historical references that I was missing in the ceremony. We traded watercolor drawings, each of us signing our work and including an e-mail address. What a way to network!
The next two days were spent on Florence, where our instructor has lived twice in his life, where he met his wife, and where he proposed to her. The sentimental value he has for the place made his guidance even better there than in previous cities. Between that and being down to less than ten students, my stress levels were very much gone and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I learned a lot at the same time.
Aside from the magnificent architecture, there was also magnificent shopping. Italy's prices are much cheaper than what we can get in Switzerland, and Florence had a really good street market going on. I got myself a leather-bound sketchbook from which the paper is removable so you can re-use the thing your whole life. The leather is green, and I got a calligraphy pen and green ink to match the leather. All of that together was less than what I paid for lunch at a mediocre restaurant in Switzerland today, and it was real leather.
After Florence was Cinque Terre, a wondrous collection of five cities along some very amazing coastline. We were supposed to go on the 9:50 train, so I got on the one before it in order to check in to my hostel and meet my group on time in Cinque Terre. However, the train before that left at 7:21, so I had a two-hour layover in Pisa instead of getting to Cinque Terre early. Two hours in Pisa when you were supposed to have 20 minutes... What would you do? I saw the leaning tower and the duomo it's associated with. It took 45 minutes to walk across town from the train station, so I didn't risk climbing it for fear of not making the train, but I still got to see it! No pictures though - I had taken the wrong power adapter with me to Italy and my camera battery died in Florence. I thought I was on the same train as the others to Cinque Terre, but I never ran into them. I saw the place by myself, but it was so beautiful it didn't matter. The water was clear enough to see to the bottom and looked blue and turquoise and green depending on the place.
After Cinque Terre I went back to Scudellate, where a handful of us were still left to leave for good. I packed up everything, and the next morning I got on the earliest bus out of Scudellate. I came straight to Lugano, put my baggage in a locker, and explored the town while I waited for check-in time to roll around. It's nice having a hotel instead of a hostel. Tomorrow I go to Germany!
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