oh crap

I'm getting excited about both my Berlin trip (for which I leave early early EARLY tomorrow morning) and for the North field trip, but I'm also starting to get nervous about the amount of work that has been accumulating/I've been putting off...

Although I am essentially going to be gone for the next eleven days (really with only an afternoon back in Rome before leaving again), there is still plenty due right when we get back, with almost no time to do it. I have to completely start over with my packaging project, since I was working hard on trying to find a good solution, but it just stopped making sense... Although I'll have fun traveling, and can work on some sketching and thinking while away, a good chunk of my work will need to be done on my computer, so I can't do it until I get back.

On the other hand, I'm really excited for Berlin, although I've been really hands off in the planning for this one and am not too sure what's going on. After Berlin starts the North field trip, up to Basel and Zurich in Switzerland and Vitra, Germany! We get to do all kinds of nerdy design things like see private poster collections and modern furniture design and go to a paper mill and meet awesome designers. After this trip, Meghann and I have our Stockholm and Oslo trip, which I am excited/stressed about... I'll have plenty of preparing to do in my short time back in Rome...

Off on more adventures!

roma, roma, roma

I think I've been getting much more accustomed to how busy Rome can be... It doesn't seem to bother me nearly as much any more. I've been noticing sirens a lot less than I used to.. the incessant honking when ambulances are trying to get through and when people are parked in still drive me up a wall sometimes, but in general I've been noticing it a lot less. Coming back to Rome after a weekend away isn't quite as much of a shock. Maybe I brace myself for it more, or maybe there are fewer tourists around clogging things up, I don't know. I've also found a couple ways to get up Via del Corso with minimal time actually on Corso... so, I think I've managed to find a way to avoid some of it more as well....

Now, if only there were some places close to my apartment that were really quiet... I really need to try the park closest to my apartment and see what I can find before the weather gets too rainy.

Parents in Rome and some Sad News

This week back in Rome (I wrote Ames at first, definitely not the same thing) was mostly just spent trying to meet some deadlines, as I've been putting off a lot of my work lately...

Friday night, Meghann and I went to Maharajah for some Indian food.. it was so delicious and definitely cheaper than we thought it was going to be! A definite plus, and it was so fantastic to have food that wasn't Italian...

When we got back from dinner, we met up with some of the other girls and went over to the boys' place. From there, we all headed out. We started in Piazza Navona and some bar/club place over there. It was crowded, loud, and mostly pretty boring, though, so Ryan, Colleen, Meghann and I headed out to explore Rome at night. We found Ryan's favorite fountain, as well as tried to go to Aventine Hill. Although it was closed since it was dark, there was still a great view of St. Peters. We took a long route home, walking through Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, as well as the triangular-shaped one just south of that (San Cosimato, I think?). I've decided I like that piazza, and it's about halfway to studio, so actually wouldn't be that bad to try to hang out at. We had fun playing around on the urban kids' playground for a while before heading the rest of the way home.

The next day, I got up to meet my parents at Galleria Borghese... the museum was really cool, they had a lot of beautiful paintings and sculptures, as well as their special exhibit on Caravaggio and Francis Bacon. They basically said they weren't necessarily trying to draw a parallel between the two artists. It was really neat to see Caravaggio's Self Portrait as Baccus in person. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne was an incredibly impressive sculpture, and I cannot imagine the amount of planning and delicacy.

After the museum and a picnic lunch in Villa Borghese, I took my parents on a kind of super tour, on a really roundabout path from there to my apartment. It was a ton of walking, but still good. We walked around Villa Borghese a little bit, then down to Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Vittor Emmanuel monument for a great view of the city, took a break getting gelato at San Crispino (so good! I got pear, and loved having bits of the skin in there, so tasty). Then we walked through the Pantheon, then off to Piazza Navona, down to Campo dei' Fiori, with a rest/tour of studio. After that, we walked a bit through Trastevere, then hopped on the tram the rest of the way to my apartment.

We tried to go out to Renato e Luisa for dinner this night, but they woudn't let us since we didn't have a reservation.

Sunday, we did Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum, with a little help from good ol' Rick Steves. We then took a little rest at my parents' hotel and made a reservation for Renato e Luisa before heading out to the Capitoline museums to see the bits of the colossal statue of Constantine... it was definitely quite large, with the head being taller than I am.

Dinner was really tasty, and the place was cute, I was definitely glad we made it in that night, somewhere I should consider going back to.

Monday was spent almost entirely at the Vatican. I got to sleep in a little, which was really nice, but then we went into St. Peter's Basilica (HUGE.), then the Vatican Museums. I was impressed with the size of both, and liked to see the Egyptian stuff at the museums... I also recognized so many statues of Hercules. I was pretty disappointed that my dad pretty much shooed us through the room with Raphael's The School of Athens.. I barely got to see much of it. Apparently there were too many people in that room for him. Then, again, when we walked into the Sistine Chapel, the first thing out of his mouth was "What is going on in here?" Apparently, he can only really concentrate on how many people are in a room.. oh my.

That night for dinner we ate Indian food.. about as good as Meghann and I ate on Friday night, but the atmosphere of the first place was much better...

Then, I said goodbye to my parents and headed home, quite exhausted from the weekend.

This weekend, we also received some incredibly sad news. My art history professor has passed. I am incredibly sorry that he is now gone. I thoroughly enjoyed class with him; he was so enthusiastic and passionate about everything he talked about, I loved it. I can't say I've ever known anybody else who had made poured concrete sound so interesting. Needless to say, he will be missed. I am not sure what will happen for art history now, but I guess we will find out...

Venice/Florence

After the Oded Workshop, I rushed off to catch my plane to meet my parents in Venice.

It was a little bit intimidating but exciting at the same time to be traveling by myself. Catching the train to the airport was super easy, and getting into the airport wasn't too much trouble. I had to go through the metal detector three times, though, which was very annoying. Then the guy looking through bags was asking about what crops and animals went with each state.. he thought that a big thing in Iowa was chickens.. I made sure to add corn to his list.

The flight was super short, it felt like we barely had any time in the air before we were preparing to land again. Once I got off the plane, the automatic machines to buy tickets for the Alilinguna, the boat bus, were not working, so I had to talk to somebody to get a ticket...

The boat bus was kind of cool, it was definitely an interesting way to get into the main part of town, seeing everything from the water and the outside first. When I got off the boat, however, I was supposed to meet my parents at the Campanile in St Marks' Square. I figured, though, that there would be signs all over the place. This was not the case. I had directions to my parents' hotel (but not the name of it), so I headed off in that direction, since I could see a few towers and I wasn't sure which one I was looking for. Like all great Italian directions, however, they were a little bit off. After wandering around for about a half hour as it was getting dark, though, I ran into my dad returning to the hotel to grab a sweater for my mom. So, in the end it worked out.

We then went to dinner and ended up getting a fixed menu dinner, of some traditional venetian dishes. As we were looking at the menu, though, they brought us some sparkling wine. I'm not sure if they thought I was younger than I actually was, though, because initially they had given me some sort of extra sweet strawberry drink. (I traded with Dad, though, I'd rather have the wine and he'd rather have the sugary drink). The meal was... interesting. Plenty of things like anchovies, octopus, unidentifiable fish, squid ink sauce on pasta that turned all of our mouths black, and liver. Needless to say, although it wasn't a delicious dinner, it was quite the adventure.

The next day, it rained most of the day, but we spent most of it in museums, so it was okay. We went to the Museo Correr, where we saw a lot of 18th century.. things (I loved the library), and the Modern Art Museum (disappointingly small, but we saw some Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Joan Miro, and a couple others...), the Doge's Palace, where we went in the Bridge of Sighs (completely surrounded by giant ads on the outside, ugh). We also went into the cathedral there that day. After dinner that evening, we got some gelato and spent time floating between the dueling orchestras in San Marco Square.

The next day was actually quite sunny and warm, and we explored a few more parts of Venice we hadn't wandered to yet before catching the train to Florence. Before we left, we found some good gelato, and I was excited about my chili pepper chocolate flavor, yum!

I met up with Andrew when we got into Florence, and he took me on a mini art history/walking tour, looking at plenty of fabulous sculptures and such on the way to his apartment. His apartment has an AWESOME rooftop with a beautiful view, I'm so jealous! It was very nice. We tried to go to one of Andrew's favorite places, the Art Bar, for awesomly fruity drinks, but it was apparently closed on Sundays. So, instead he took me to the Mexican restaurant and we got some Dos Equis with lime instead (!!!!! finally satisfied that craving...). After that, we headed off to his class mates' apartment for a dinner party, it was quite tasty.

The next day, Andrew took me to the Spanish Chapel off to the side of Santa Maria Novella and explained all the frescoes to me. I then met up with my parents. Again, it rained a bunch this day. This was unfortunate, because I was not dressed for cold or rainy weather, but I did not have access to my clothing, since it was all at Andrew's apartment and he was in class for the day. I borrowed some from my mom, but I was still cold and had wet feet all day, which did NOT help the fact that I was a little bit sick.. definitely got a little worse after that day. We saw a couple nice churches, and a museum where we saw Michelangelo's Pieta he had started for his own tomb, and a nice view of the city at the top of the hill. I got the wonderful opportunity to stand off to the side and listen to the Italians make fun of my parents for posing for pictures with the silly three-wheeled work trucks... oh my.

In the evening, I met up with Andrew again for the night. We had grand plans: go to the Art Bar for fruity drinks (maybe make it to the free harpsichord concert at his school?), dinner for one of his classmates, then the Jazz club. We did make it to the Art Bar... I got a strawberry daquiri (which I would usually never order), which was really just a ton of delicious fresh fruit piled on top of some drink.. even passion fruit!

Then we headed off to dinner. Turns out we were going to some super secret restaurant club thing.. it was an unmarked restaurant and we had to pay to join and get a club card before we could go in. I knew dinner was going to be really good, though, when they handed us handwritten menus. They brought us plenty of wine and bruschetta, then apparently what I had ordered for dinner (I didn't really know) was lamb with marsala.. it was really really good. Andrew had ordered something called gnudi, which was large balls of spinach coated in ricotta cheese. These were also so soft and delicious. We also got some tasty desserts, and they brought this giant jug and told us to finish it. We didn't really know what it was at first.. apparently it was grappa, and had a bunch of fruits that had been sitting in it for about a month. There was so much sediment in the liquid, and it had a really nasty taste to it. I was not a fan... but other people got a little rowdy. It was a pretty fun dinner, though, and kind of exciting that it was some sort of secret club.

For spending one full day in Florence, though, I picked absolutely the worst day, as the Uffizi and Accademia are both closed on Mondays... (not to mention that a few days later Patrick Wolf played a free show and Hot Chip did a DJ set the day after that.. hope you had fun, Andrew!). Guess that just means I need to go back sometime.

Oded Workshop

I really enjoyed our few days with Oded Ezer, he was an interesting guy and it was a great workshop.

We had to do a project for him before he came-- we were supposed to build a letter or symbol at least two feet tall and photograph it in a banal and an extraordinary place around the city. Becky and I were assigned to work together and we started our project with the stipulation that we didn't want to spend any money on supplies. We decided to be adventurous and attempt the euro symbol... and the available materials we had? Garbage. Hence, we titled our project Eurotrash. We took it up Via del Corso, and we about to walk away and observe after we set it next to some piles of trash, while we had to run and rescue it since the garbage truck just pulled up. We also had some guy try to talk to us about it, and he wanted his picture with it.


When we came to studio for Oded's lecture that Tuesday, I knew it was going to be good since we were only allowed to enter the room from in one way, and because Troy needed to borrow someone's camera. When we walked in, Oded had some giant paper ascender hat on...


He talked to us about how, in our lifes, about half of what we do should be work and half should be play and that the eventual goal is to turn your work into your play. He talked about his work, and how he gets inspiration from science, among other things. Overall, I think we all felt really pumped after his lecture. While the Primo Angeli workshop was all about pleasing the client and getting the most consumer response business and seriousness, Oded was telling us that we needed to do a lot for ourselves, and to get away from the client and the deadlines... it was great to hear that Oded's work eventually became his play, so it can happen!

The next morning, we presented our large letters. At first, we all had a tough time figuring out what Oded was trying to get at when he asked us to talk about each other's pieces, but then we started to figure it out. He wanted to show us how to ask questions from the work we've done, and also not to force materials.

After this, our assignment was to pick a letter of the alphabet (with no two people picking the same letter), then creating a three-dimensional letterform that acted like a famous person whose name started with the letter we chose.

I started with the letter S, and the first thing that came to my mind was Santa. Although a little silly, there's a lot of personality and associations with Santa that could be used. We then went off to work on these. The next day when I talked to Oded about my semi-final form, he had told me that he had kept thinking about one of the things I had been doing the day before and that he thought it was brilliant. (Oded thinks my work is brilliant? Wow.) So, although I had followed the wrong path, there was still time to correct myself.

Here's how my project had turned out by the end of the workshop... it's still something I think I want to keep working on, especially after talking to him at the end of the workshop, so we'll see where this eventually goes...

South Field Trip

South Field Trip was off to an early early start, we left the apartment at 6am to catch a bus to the train station... unsurprisingly, almost everyone fell asleep at least for a little while on the train.

A few hours later, we landed in Naples and took a maze-like path out of the metro to find ourselves in front of the Naples National Archaeological museum. We spent a while at this museum (a little bit too long, maybe, we all ran out of things to see before it was time to move on...), but saw some interesting things, including things from Pompeii. There were tiny mosaics, bright frescoes, and marble statues galore. Some of the ancient artifacts were these little metal objects that looked remarkably like saftey pins, but as I could not read the italian name plates, I do not know what they actually were. One part of the museum that stood out was the Secret Cabinet, which was entirely erotic art.. plenty of phallic symbols there.

After the museum, we grabbed a quick lunch before leaving on the train to Sorrento. I was not too sad about not spending a lot of time in Naples, it really didn't seem like that exciting of a place, but that was just my initial impression.

Getting into Sorrento, we had a few hours to explore before meeting up for dinner. I wandered around with Meghann, Ty, Ryan, Aaron, Huy, JJ, Jamie, and Erin. We looked around in some of the touristy shops, found a nice view of the bay, ate a fresh orange off the tree, and climbed up the hill to get a nice view of the town and the bay.

Dinner was at a place everyone referred to as the "Lemon Tree" Restaurant (actually called Restaurant La Favorita O' Parrucchiano. We all filed in (in our group of around 65 or so...), and sat at our tables... we were then brought an amazing dinner, starting with bread and wine. Antipasti included bruschetta, fresh mozzerella, stuffed zucchini flowers, among a couple other delicious bites. Primi was pasta with a red sauce. For Secondi, I got a veal dish, but probably should have gotten the fish, as the fish was so light and tasted delicious with the hint of lemon. Dessert was cakes with a lemon filling that was quite delicious... some of the highlights of dinner included the waiter asking Mike if he wanted "more pasta, baby?" then plopping a single mushroom onto his plate and also feeding various other people their desserts. After dinner, Pia got a discoteque opened up for us. It was kind of fun for a while, but since it was only Iowa State people, it was a little strange to have the whole place for ourselves. The DJ kept trying to make us sing and would not stop talking over the music. Once he played YMCA and Grease, it was DEFINITELY time to leave.

The next day, we were supposed to go to Pompeii as a class, but would be free from there. Since it was rainy, our professors kept pushing back our meeting time. We, unfortunately, still got up too early, but enjoyed a delicious breakfast at our hotel, then sat on our balcony for a bit. We were instead released that day with the promise to be reimbursed if we did decide to go to Pompeii. This turned out to be a great day, though, despite the rain. On the way to leave our stuff at our hostel, Meghann and I found a stand that was giving out huge bunches of grapes and freshly squeezed grape juice. We then spent a good chunk of the day exploring the town and shops with some of the other graphic girls, then went back for some more free grapes (this time cake and wine, too!), and hanging out in the park for a while.

We left the other girls to eat dinner at our hostel. It was the most brilliant thing to stay in a hostel attached to a cooking school. We bought dinner there that night, and ended up finding some of the interior girls there at dinner. Dinner started out with eggplant and mozzerella, then some pasta in a gravy-like sauce with chick peas. Then we had what might have been the most delicious shrimp I've ever had and extremely fresh calamari (yum!). Dessert was a cookie sandwich with fresh cream sauce and chocolate chips, cinnamon, ginger, and spearment inside. So good.

The next day, Meghann and I bought breakfast at the hostel (great idea: filling enough not to really need lunch, leftovers from dinner the night before, super fresh croissants and delicious cappuccinos!). We thought about going to Capri, but decided that the ferry was pretty expensive and we'd have an equally good time going up the coast. So, we loaded up onto the bus.. it was a crazy bus ride, so zig zaggy and way longer than I expected...the whole time hanging on to the edge of cliffs and with the bus driver honking around every corner to make sure cars would stop so he could fit around the hairpin turns.

We rode the bus to the end and got off in Amalfi, where we sat on the rocky beach for about an hour so to relax, then wandered around the town. It was pretty touristy, but we found a cool shop that had some really nice handmade paper. Then we loaded back onto the bus and stopped halfway back in Positano. Here, the bus dropped us off at the top of the cliff, and we had to make it to the bottom to see the town. We stopped for a snack and to enjoy the view at the top before making the trek down so many stairs my legs felt like jelly by the time we got to the bottom. Here, again, we basically just relaxed sitting on the beach. We didn't even bother going into the center of town since we figured it would just be touristy shops again, but just sat and talked and admired the setting sun. The climb back up the cliff, we counted steps.. 640. Yikes.

The bus ride home was quite an adventure, with some drunk rich girl from LA telling some guy she barely knew about how she had racked up a bill of $5000 on daddy's credit card in ONE MONTH. Ugh. That got so annoying so quickly...

That night, we actually talked to the other people staying in our room at the hostel, which made things much less awkward since we kept walking in on people sleeping...

The next morning, we had another delicious breakfast at the hostel, then headed out to Pompeii, where we wandered around for a few hours, looking at ruins, mosaics, and frescoes... as well as a couple casts of bodies. Pompeii was a lot bigger than I was expecting it to be, actually, and it was pretty hot that day (plus we were carrying our bags all day), so although we stayed for a while, we did not see everything, we decided to head back to Rome.

All in all, I think the highlight of the south trip was the food in Sorrento, the dinner at our hostel being the best. Staying at a cooking school may possibly be one of the best ideas we've ever had...

Oded Preview

Although I'd like to write more about the Oded Ezer workshop later, I just wanted to share that he has posted some pictures from his lecture on his flickr account...

Here's a picture of Oded speaking (and the back of my head, oh boy!). There are a few more, too. Check 'em out!

I bet you'd like to see some pictures.

You would?

Oh, well then you're in luck, because I FINALLY decided to do something about putting some up.

I'm going to be uploading pictures using picasa, and you can see them here, and this is where I'll be uploading them. I'll also probably add a link on the bar on the right. http://picasaweb.google.com/0.alco.0