Studying Abroad In Italy {1

Colombia 2016

Cartagena and Bogota.

Christmas 2013

     Hey, Merry Christmas. I say ‘merry’ at the beginning of every holiday now, because ‘happy’ is a feeling, but ‘merry’ is an attitude, like a higher level of happy. But everyone looks at me funny when I say “Merry Thanksgiving!” Or “Merry New Years!” So it’s nice having a holiday where you can say merry properly.
     We’ve got a very big show for you today, first a video of me telling a winter–type story, perfect for all you displaced northerners, and then we have a bunch of pictures. Not a lot of text, because it’s all packed into the video! Almost a thousand words and the bonus of my face. You’re welcome. Merry Christmas. Merry Holidays too.

Hatcher Pass

     Yesterday Dad, Hanna, several friends of ours who will remain nameless and secret, and myself, visited the magnificent and majestic natural wonder just minutes from where I live; Hatcher Pass.
Now, despite it being named after a person, it is not Hatcher’s Pass, even though that is what everyone everywhere calls it.

     Anyway.

     We parked the car and walked up a mountain to a lake that a friend of mine who will remain secret and nameless knew about, and had been to. As we walked I was struck by how crazy nature is, just the sheer amount of detail in nature blew my mind, the tiny, tiny swirls of plants that grow in hard to access locations.
   
      I have always sort of suspected that nature and the earth is a sort of trick, a simulation provided for the amusement of people, that the only reason anything exists is so that people can go and look at it but you go to a place like hatchers pass and that’s so obviously not the case. You walk up to any rock and you stare it and no matter how long you stare you just keep. Noticing. Details. If I were to recreate this somehow it would take me so much time, and so much energy and would be so. Boring. Our nameless and secret friends are religious and I felt so, sad for them. I mean, I understand. It is so, so easy when presented with something so strange and complex that your mind can’t handle it to just push it aside and say, well of course, God made all this so that I may see it and it is great. But whatever. Isn’t this supernatural being great! God is the amazing thing here.

      That is the wrong thing. You’re still stuck in that mind set of ‘Of course everything exists so that I may see it’ and you are not seeing the thing that is in front of you. Because the world is not a simulation for your benefit it just is there. Lichen will continue to grow on rocks and create the most insane patterns whether you walk past it or not and that is awe inspiring. Rocks can be perfect cubes in nature and that is so weird. There are tiny black flowers and it is all basically pointless and that is amazing. Those flowers and massive forests aren’t growing so that they may be good plants and then go to heaven or something, trees don’t have a concept of anything because they are trees and that is okay.

      The concept that the world is massive and insanely detailed and doesn’t exist just for me is a thought I try to have regularly but it is hard to do that. And when this concept is presented in a way that you cannot ignore and you cannot deny and when this all happens in a very low-oxygen environment it is the craziest thing. Awesome in the true sense of the word.


     So here are some pictures.

As you drive up you notice how intense everything is. How green the ground, how blue the sky. 

Hey, our town’s down there. 

GE Sponsored Tour, Day One

THE whole point of this trip was something oil–related, I think there was a conference?
{Dad’s part in this was that he and his team were buying spare parts from GE.} Because there were so many people there GE sponsored a tour for the “Spouses” {Really the wives/Girlfriends. And Me.} Spouses is in quotes because I was the only guy {On the Tour} I saw.
 There were a bunch of organised things, but I only went on the tours of the last two days.

We were on Tour #1. 

Portrait: This was quite the official outfit, there was a guide and a guard and a photographer.

This is the photographer, I took a couple of pictures of him because of his grumpy face.

Florence: The Graveyard of San Miniato al Monte

THEY call it the Remembrance Park.
  I like a graveyard, mostly because it makes me feel better about my character names, a lot of real people had crazy names. You’ll see.

One day we had some time, and Dad wanted to walk. So we took a taxi to the church on the hill, just up the hill actually from where David used to be, and walked back. 

Around back of this church is a really great graveyard, huge and cool and free.

St. Peter’s Basilica {2/2}

WHEN you walk into St. Peter’s basilica your senses sort of overload.
 It’s a HUGE space, the walls, covered in carved marble, sometimes that is covered is gold, there are paintings of bible scenes I know nothing about and statues of Popes and Saints with names I’d never even heard, it’s overpowering.
 Frankly, I didn’t like it. It was too much all at once.

Detail: Two of these cardinals/popes were obviously the best ones, Iacobo 3 and Iacobo 2. 

{Iacobo is Latin for Jacob.} 

Detail: A Corner. 

St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome. {1/2}

ONE of the things most people go and see in Rome is St. Peter’s basilica, spiritual and political centre of the catholic version of christianity. 

  Dad kept calling it the Vatican, and while The Basilica was in Vatican City but I think the vatican is actually a bunch of offices and such in the back that tourists can’t get to. 

The Vatican City and St. Peter’s Basilica are way too big to see in a day, especially if you have a cold. 

Rome: The Ruins Behind the Colosseum

Out behind the Colosseum are some ruins, there weren’t a lot of signs so Dad and I didn’t really have any idea what we were looking at most of the time, we decided eventually that it was where they kept the animals and where the support staff lived, because there were houses and shops.

Turns out we were looking at the roman forum.
 It’s all a little confusing, because it’s all old, all broken and mostly built on top of older ruins.

There was a big line to get in, but we decided we were italians and just bought and walked past the line. 

I’m not sure what this is, but it’s right next to the Colosseum, looks like it used to have steps going up to it, and drops down pretty seriously just inside the door. 

So, obviously they kept something in there that they didn’t want to get out.

Rome: Colosseum

 The Colosseum: Death Dome of the Ancients. 

  The Colosseum is weird, most of the monuments in italy, the really famous ones, are way bigger than you’d think but the Colosseum seems to fluctuate.

 When I first walked up  I thought “Wow, this is way smaller than I thought it was.” But it isn’t. Not at all. In the subsequent pictures, look for the people who are standing on the ground directly next to it. That’s the real scale.

Panorama: When we walked over to the Colosseum we ended up on a hill with some parked cars, look in the botom right hand corner of the picture.

Those teeny–tiny dots are people who are actually CLOSE to the Colosseum.

Detail: Included, people for scale.

The Original Grotesque

Before the middle ages, {or “Dark Ages”} the Greeks and subsequently the Romans had a pretty thriving culture, with art and temples and carved marble and things covered in gold, {Like the Catholics! More on that later} but then Christianity went mainstream {Thanks a lot, Constantine} and all this cool old stuff was “Lost” and destroyed because it was “Pagan”.

Fast forward to the Renaissance and Europe is rediscovering all this old stuff, like “Math” and the old stories, which were a lot more popular with artists because Nymphs and Goddesses of Beauty presented a lot more opportunities to carve naked women than the Madonna ever did.

One of the things they eventually rediscovered was Nero’s tomb.

The Ponte Vecchio {and the Vasari Corridor}

This is a bridge in Italy most people know, I had always assumed it was flanked by several similar but inferior bridges and that this is how all the old bridges used to be.
Wrong!
 In fact the only reason this bridge is like this is because the family that used to run this town {The Medicis} wanted to get from their palace to the office without going down on the mucky street with the dirty common people.  So they had a famous architect build the Vasari Corridor on top of the shops that were already there.

Panorama: The Ponte Vecchio

Panorama: The Old Bridge. 

Here you can really see where they built on top of the old shops. 

Pisa

Pisa is a lovely little college town in Italy, with a river and a hat shop and about as many little art supply stores as you would like, none of which sold my malfunctioning mechanical pencil. 

{It’s very difficult to get a Parker Jotter mechanical pencil overseas. Everywhere had the pen version, but whatever.} Pisa is not a small town, {You couldn’t amble the perimeter in a day, for example} but it wasn’t as big as Florence. We did everything in an easy day trip, and walked across almost the full diameter of the town just to get from the train station to the tower.

There’s a lot more in town than the tower, {or Torre Pendente as the signs will tell you} there’s even a lot more RIGHT NEXT to the tower than you’re expecting, including dad’s favourite church. 

Oh, before we start a word of advice to other pin buyers such as myself in the past:  There are a lot of cool pins in Pisa, but don’t buy them from the little tourist shop next to the tower.

Buy them from the street vendor guy on the way back to the train station, they’re about $1.30 cheaper per for the exact same thing. 

Learned THAT the hard way.

I don’t know who this is, but he’s got an awesome hat and a sword, so obviously he was d*mn lucky.

The Inside of the Duomo, and the Baptistery

The inside of the duomo is very nice, but it’s also very big and very dark and I left the tripod in America. {SO HEAVY}
So bear with me here.

WARNING TO RELIGIOUS/UPTIGHT PEOPLE: There are some pictures of an old painting where the devil or somebody is stuffing sinners in his mouth.
It’s bloody and kind of gross, but still, it’s religion.
Oh, there’s also an actual human skull.
I think it’s a saint, or something.

 Detail: Doors with sheep on them. 

They’re really big on sheep here.

The main interior of the duomo, walk up view.

The Outside of the Duomo, and the Bell–Tower.

 In Florence Italy there is a giant cathedral {Or Duomo} called the Santa Maria Del Fiore, or Saint Mary of the Flower, the flower of course being Jesus.

It’s really, really big, and impressive, and beautiful and has kept me from being lost on several occasions because it points almost exactly west, so it’s like having a giant compass you can see from almost everywhere.

It also helps that all the streets with cool stuff radiate from it, so most times I would Goto:Duomo Turn: Left/right and amble for awhile until I got there.

In our hotel “On the Roof” {really more like a penthouse} there was a breakfast type restaurant, with a buffet and giant windows. This picture was taken from inside, there.

Fiesole

Fiesole; tiny historic town on the top of the hill next to florence. 

  The first day we went up there it was foggy, and the windows on the bus were so fogged we couldn’t see out. 

I guessed just from how long it took that Fiesole must have been…five miles at least from the city, but when I climbed the duomo and I could see the whole city laid out there’s only about a block of green between the city edge and the hill Fiesole’s on.  

Whomping willows  in the morning fog.

The town square.

Florence, [Walk Around 1]

  So I had a wonderful trip to Italy recently,  I went to Florence, mainly, but also Rome, Lucca, Fiezole…Others? God, So many places I forgot about some. The point is I took a ton of pictures.
  Blogger doesn’t handle albums very well, I kind of thought Facebook did but they keep losing my captions and randomly deciding I’m a spammer.
  They also decided that Michelangelo’s David {You know, the world famous statue?} constitutes “Nudity”.  HE’S A STATUE NOT A REAL PERSON AND HAS BEEN NAKED SINCE THE FRIKKIN’  RENAISSANCE. .

  Sorry, american totalitarian censorship really gets my goat, especially when it randomly deletes my work.

  Anyway, this blog is going to be my hard copy.  There’s 64 pictures in this folder, I’m going to post 32 today and 32 tomorrow,  because that’s kind of a lot for anybody to look at.
  Subject Matter: General things in florence, {wall details, a hat shop, other cool stuff.} NOT the big tourist stuff like the Ponte Vecchio or the Duomo, because I’m working on specific posts for those.

[//Run.Program//Mindnumb]

Pink Umbrella.

Merry Christmas

Mini–sode: The True Meaning Of Christmas

“What’cha thinkin’ about, Zachary?” Asked James Brown, Future mayor of Legopolis City, as they watched the frozen river flow by.
 Dr. Smith sighed.  “I think there must be something wrong with me, James. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess.”
James nodded,  he knew that feeling. “I know It‘s easy to get bogged down in all the commercialism and the crazy things people do this time of year, but you have to remember the true Meaning of christmas.”

“The True Meaning of Christmas?” Dr. Smith asked, he had never heard of christmas having a meaning before. “What is it?”
“Appeasing The Old Gods with a sacrifice so’s time keeps working and spring comes. Now, come on, lets go and get some hot cocoas and watch them light up the tree in the town square.”

James took his regular–sized friend by the shoulder and led him toward the lights.

Christmas [y]