Venice

Hello from Colorado! Yes, its true - I am home. I'm unbelievably exhausted, and really jet lagged, but so happy to be home! I am sorry, once again, for the delay in updating, but finals took precedence, so here come all of the updates! I'm going to do my best to finish updating about the end of my trip in the next couple of days.

So anyway, Venice. Venice was really cool. Somewhere along the line someone had tole me that Venice was overrated, so I really wasn't expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Something about the canals and the old buildings and the winding passages has this incredible, old-European feel to it that I just found very endearing. I spent a lot of my time in Venice just wandering around the city (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident!)and finding more and more beautiful canals.

Our time in Venice was very artistically focused - we had a lot of classes, and we saw a lot of different churches and examples of Italian Gothic architecture. We got to see Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (a famous altarpiece from the Venetian Reniassance) which was absolutely incredible. We also saw a performance of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Its such a beautiful piece of music, and hearing it in a big old church with incredible acoustics was great. We ended up getting an unexpected free day in Venice because one of our full day excursions got cancelled, but the conditions for our free day was that we had to do something "reimbursible" (meaning something possessing some sort of educational value), so I went to a couple more art museums. One I went to had a whole room of Jackson Pollock paintings, which are so interesting to look at. I also went to an exhibit all about Leonardo da Vinci - someone took his drawings of machines and actually built them and they were all on display. The night of our free day, a small group of us went to see a performance of La Boheme. It ended up being in this tiny little modern theater, and it was possibly the worst thing I have ever seen! I mean, it was actually so bad that it was good, just by sheer entertainment value. I love performances like that (especially since we got reimbursed for it!)

Apart from academic and artistic excursions, we didn't do a whole lot in Venice. We did, however, go to a little island just off of Venice called Murano. Its famous for its glass blowing (the home of Venetian Glass). We toured the factory and then went shopping :).

Overall, Venice was just a great, stereotypical European experience. We had lots of sunny days, blue skies, and pizza :).

more to come soon...