And the classes begin...

Well, I've only been to two days of classes and there's already so much to talk about. Let's see, yesterday I started my morning out with Italian class. Nothing special or new - since we technically started that class last week. My Italian is getting better though. I went to a store the other day and only spoke Italian to the lady working, I was proud of myself :) . Next class was Sketching and Drawing. I'm very excited about this class because every Thursday we get to go on site and just sketch what is around us. I hope to improve my drawing skills while I'm here so this is the perfect way to do so.

Then last but of course not least, we had studio. I was a little nervous that the work load was going to be ridiculous like always, and I was going to find myself in studio all the time instead of traveling around. Instead, my professor seems very nice and accepting of the fact that traveling and seeing everything is really what we are here for. Of course we are going to learn A LOT, but seeing everything is half the learning. My professor is Italian, went to school at the University of Venice for undergrad, but then came to the U.S. for grad school to Syracuse. Pretty cool because he kind of knows what we are going through, studying in a different country. Just from the introduction, he seems like a very good prof and I think I will learn a ton from him.

Today was my favorite class, Italian Art. I was soo excited for this class before I came here and now I'm even more excited to go to every class. We went to two different piazza's today, where he gave us a lecture on the history of Florence. Very cool by the way, too much to type but pretty awesome to hear how the city became what it is today. Every class we will meet in the classroom and he will give us a brief lecture on what we are going to see, then we get to go to the place that we are talking about and literally see it. Some scheduled places are inside Santa Croce, San Lorenzo, Santa Maria Novella, the Duomo - literally inside the dome, we get to climb it as he lectures about how it was built, and museums including Accademia, Uffizi, and Opera del Duomo - all museums containing very famous work.

Also, today after class, me and a few friends decided to try out our museum passes and went to the Uffizi museum. We were there for probably about 3 hours and barely saw half the museum. It is huge and has so many amazing things in it! Unfortunately, you can't take pictures there, so I didn't take any today. I'm going to try to work on my sneakiness to take a few at some point. Since we get in for free, and get to jump any line that there may be, we can go back as many times as we want :)

Tomorrow, I have the exact same schedule as yesterday, and we are all off on Fridays for any type of traveling we may want to do. As I said before, we are planning on going to Pisa and Sienna this weekend!