this is home!

I finally feel like I'm at home here and the people around me are my community and family. I have some friends, I know my way around town and Italian has somewhat come back to me so I can communicate, I'm familiar with a lot of the store people, I'm getting an idea of what stores are closed when (like 1:30pm on Sundays, closed on Tuesdays, etc). Unfortunately now that I'm getting comfortable, I realized that the program ends in a little over a month and I hate to think about it. The professors are trying to fit as much in as possible before the semester ends so they keep talking about how we only have 6 more class sessions, etc... I can't think about leaving, it makes me sad and I don't want to think about trying to adjust back to American life as if nothing has changed. It will be a very weird transition, like Italy was a dream even though it has affected me and made me grow in ways I can't really explain.

I need to get some photos from my friend Maggie (the red headed one in the last blog post photo) and then I'll do a photo update too, but probably more on facebook and just a few here.

This past week was a normal week of painting, drawing, bookmaking, and my art history midterm. We went to Volterra (I guess the real setting of part of Twilight, even though they filmed it in Montepulciano because Volterra charged too much...this is all from some Twilight fans on the trip and I have no idea if it's true or not) and San Gimignano on Saturday.

I went to San Gimignano almost 5 years ago last time I came to Italy and I have two photos: one of me eating an heirloom tomato I bought at the market, and another with a girl named Sarah in some kind of fresco/arch/stone cove up some stairs. I had no idea where it was and wasn't planning on finding it but I told one of my friends about it who had been to San Gimignano a while ago and also had a mystery spot in her memory, and she told me to go up an alleyway by the church where there's a well and some arches because she had a feeling that might be my spot. I walked through a dark stone walled alley thinking "I doubt this is it, I have such a vague memory I didn't even explain it to her except that there were stairs and stone which is like 90% of hilltop towns in Tuscany" but at the end of the walkway I got a flashback that made me smile so big. It was the mystery spot that I had been to where I had taken the picture with that girl that I don't talk to anymore. It was one of the most exciting things since I've been to Italy so I literally ran out from there to the piazza outside of the church to look for Karen who told me to go in there. I had her come back in there to take a picture with me in the same spot I think I had the picture taken before.

I also had gelato at the gelateria in San Gimignano that has won the world gelato contest for the past 4 years. I wondered why I hadn't remembered it from last time and realized it was because they won the contest starting in 2006 but I came in 2005 before it was famous...

On a side note, the angel in the Annunciation by Luca Signorelli (the one in Volterra, I don't know if he painted more than one Annunciation) is beautiful and I want a huge poster of it!! I admired it with Maggie for a long long time. However, disregard the creepy babies in the top left corner of the painting.