updates

I ended up going to the second part of the contemporary art gallery, MACRO FUTURE, one evening last week with Colleen and Meghann. It's hours are from 4pm to midnight, which I thought was a little bit odd, but oh well. Turns out, it was pretty much right across the river, so it was actually something that was close to our apartment! That was super nice.

The gallery was really interesting because it was located in the old slaughterhouse, so they basically had two buildings, each with a different exhibit, and both buildings had the large tracks and hooks still there... they were interesting but creepy at the same time. The first exhibit was defined as "surrealist pop," and was full of so many bright colors. There were a lot of American artists on display, which I wasn't expecting. This included Shepherd Fairey, the designer of the Obama "hope" posters. The other exhibit was about the Berlin wall.. it was really neat exhibition (or at least it looked neat), but I would have understood a lot of the stuff there if I could read more Italian, so that was kind of a bummer. There was another installation outside, which was really creepy, actually. There was a couple chairs set up between a couple buildings of the slaughterhouse, with a really bright light shining directly on a hanging cube-like object and into one of the buildings. There were a lot of variations of the cube set up in a very organized way on the floor, but the light cast really dark, long shadows, and the light emphasized the crazy hooks.. Overall, I liked the gallery. It was way different than a lot of things I've seen lately, and it was nice that it was so close to our place. I decided it's a shame that I haven't really gone for walks much in that neighborhood because it seems like there's a bunch of interesting stuff over there, but it also feels really sketchy sometimes, so it's not really a place I would choose to go by myself often. There is a fair trade market over there that I do need to go to before I leave.

Last Friday, I went with some girls up to the 'Bone Church,' or the Capuchin Crypt. It's a little crypt off the side of this church that's decorated entirely with the bones of these monks. It's really crazy how they took different bones to imitate different patterns usually found in churches, and even made bone lamps, a bone clock, and a bone vatican crest. Some of the whole skeletons still had a lot of skin stretched over them... eek. It was so creepy, yet so fascinating at the same time. We ended up stopping at Santa Maria sopra Minerva by the Pantheon on the way back to see their relics.. I was way more creeped out by this open door that had really dark long shadows than all the bones, though. We had also stopped at the Fabriano store and looked at beautiful stationery and to Muji (which I've been to way too many times in the last couple weeks...), which both have plenty of things I wish I could have. So simple and organized. mm.

Saturday, Erin and I continued the dead people theme and headed south outside of the city walls to the catacombs. Although there weren't actually bodies here, there was hallway after hallway underground where all the graves and tombs would have been, as well as many old frescoes.

It was pretty much homework city for the rest of the weekend, as our art history final was a take-home test and was due Monday. It was super frustrating, though, because our new art history teacher had given us the take-home test as a way to take it easier on our class a little bit in light of the events and because she couldn't really give us a regular test on only three class periods. This, however, turned out to be so much more trouble. The questions were good questions, but the word count was ridiculous. There was two 1500 word questions and two 2000 word questions.. That was four times the amount of writing that the other classes had to do for their ONE essay that they had the WHOLE semester to write, and we were expected to do that in a week (well, a weekend, since we all had other deadlines and had to push it back). There wasn't really enough information to write for each essay, either, without doing crazy intensive research. I was already using way too many fancy descriptors and repeating myself. In total, my paper ended up being 15 pages, and it was still somewhere between 2- and 3000 words short as a whole. Nobody in our class was happy about it, since we all had so much else that we had to be doing to meet our deadlines/final critiques this week..

It's crazy that I'm not here for that much longer! Yikes. I'm conflicted about going home. On one hand, I'm ready to be done with school, and I'm missing being around people that aren't in design and my friends from Ames. On the other, there's so much I still want to see and experience here, and there's plenty of things I'll miss.

I think in general, we've been extremely lucky with the weather this semester. It didn't stay unbearably hot for too long, only a couple weeks.. and it's been hardly rainy at all. I remember hearing from the students last year that I would be miserable without rain boots and Troy said most of November last year there were puddles everywhere, but it's really only rained a few times. Half the times, too, were at night so it really wasn't a big deal. I hope it stays like that for the rest of the time!