Villa Chillin

Hi. Not much has been happening since I last posted, I just didn't want it to be a week before I threw something else up here. Just been finishing up hw for the week, the minimal amount that there is, and lounging around the villa. This weekend, however, we are going to Venice. We leave super early Friday morning, and come back to have a dinner at the Villa on Saturday night, so it's an overnight adventure. Should be a good time, I'll write a real post about Venice once I actually get back from it. Then I'll have to spend that week up until thursday working ahead on HW and such because STEPH COMES A WEEK FROM TODAY! Very excited.

Beer Heaven

Group of Wisco kids on Saturday Morning at the Hacker Tent

 I honestly don't even know where to begin. This was the most ridiculous weekend of my life, hands down. It was a ton of fun too. If you have the means or opportunity to go to Oktoberfest, in Munich, take it. A group of about 15 of us from the villa left on a coach bus to go to Oktoberfest at 11:30 PM on Thursday, and we arrived at about 9:30 AM. The ride there was pretty cool just because we drove through the Bavarian and Italian Alps. We could see all the little houses and cities lit up at night, which was sweet. However, I didn't sleep for more than probably a half hour tops. So that blew. Then, we arrived at the campsite we were staying it. It was pretty legit. The tents they gave us kept us dry, and they fed us breakfast every morning. Also, there was basically free brew on site as well. It honestly reminded me of camping in Wisconsin or Minnesota. Germany = the midwest is what I learned from this trip. So there's the description of the campsite. So we left for Oktoberfest at about noon on Friday, and the first tent we went to was the Paulner tent. Here is a picture of the Paulner tent

This picture doesn't really do the place justice. It was gigantic, and so many people were geared up in their Bavarian outfits and Lederhosen. It was awesome just being a part of that atmosphere. Everyone was so happy to be there, and just looking to have a good time. The way the place was decorated was awesome. The outside of Oktoberfest wasn't anything special, just a long street with food vendors and the outsides of the tents, which looked just like normal buildings. There were also a ton of beer gardens on the outside of the main tents as well. But the insides were phenominal. Just tables everywhere, bands playing German tunes, people singing and dancing, cheering and what not. It was unbelivable. And the Beer.... good lord was the beer amazing. It might have been brewed by the Gods themselves. Easily the best tasting beer I have ever had in my life. I think I said on numerous occasions while enjoying it that I was the happiest man alive. Here is a photo of the fantastic brew. I honestly can't describe to you how good it was. Here's another photo of some of us at the first tent

Amazing

So that was basically day number one, the only day with nice weather. I was dead tired from the drive up there / spending the day at Oktoberfest, that I went to bed at 7 PM that night. I slept through a whole mess of rain and a hail storm which was nice, thank goodness for those sturdy tents. So the next day we all woke up at 6:30 in order to get into a tent in Munich. Apparently the tents fill up very quickly on Saturday's, and they don't let people in after a certain amount of time. We get into the Hacker tent, shown above, at about 7:30 AM and the place was PACKED already. It was easily the best part of Oktoberfest though. Everyone started chanting for beer and it was served at around 9 AM. Highlights of the Hacker tent to speed this whole post up. It was definitely the best tent we went into.

Me and a buddy with one of the Beer Maidens

1) Being the only Americans in the tent, no joke
2) Cheering and singing songs with the Germans around us
3) Singing Varsity with the Wisco kids
4) The gigantic pretzels
5) The beer maidens. They could carry an unbelievable amount of beer at one time, and always seemed to show up at your table at just the right moment
6) The whole atmosphere. Everyone was dressed up and chanting, cheering, having a blast, etc.
7) My pretzel stash, nibblinz just like back at home
8) PROST!!!

We got kicked out of that tent though at 12:30 because it was reserved. A lot of the tents were like that, so me and a couple buddies wandered around for a while trying to find A) some place to sit and hang out and B) some place to get a rotisserie chicken. That was easily the best chicken I've ever had and we were honestly on a quest searching for hours to find a place that had room for us to sit down and order one. We finally came to this outside beer garden and sat at a table with these Australian girls. There was also some Englishmen and Americans at tables near us too. So we all just kind of talked and played different kinds of drinking games, which was a lot of fun. One of the best parts of Oktoberfest was just meeting different people from different countries and hanging out with them. It was pretty neat. 

So that was pretty much Saturday. At this point I have no more pictures because I gave my camera to a member of our program for safe keeping. A great choice. Anyways, we got up on Sunday and decided to go to the concentration camp at Dachau. This was a complete 180 from Oktoberfest, but I'm so glad that we did it. It was crazy that such a place existed basically right in the midst of a city / near such a large city as Munich and that hardly anyone knew what was going on. Dachau was one of the first camps, and imprisoned over 500,000 people. More than 40,000 died there. It was an extremely chilling and sobering experience to go there, to see the barracks, the prisoner's quarters, the grounds, the fences, as well as the crematorium and the gas chambers. It really made you think a lot about how the hell something like that could have ever even happened. I think it was a really good thing to get a chance to see though. It really makes the whole holocaust deal that much more real, actually seeing and walking on the place where thousands of people were murdered. If you get the chance, I definitely think you should go visit one at some point in your lifetime. But after Dachau we all went home, got on the bus, drove through the Alps which was beyond beautiful, saw all these little mountain towns on the way, and finally got home.

It was quite the weekend

The Whole Crew

The Calm Before the Storm

 Well, there's not a whole lot going on. Oktoberfest is on the horizon, which I could not be more excited about. A group of about 15 of us total are headed there, leaving via bus on Thursday night at 11:30, and arriving early Friday morning in Munich. We're staying at this gigantic campsite right outside of Munich, and there are shuttles that run throughout the day between Oktoberfest and the campsite. It should be a great time. Honestly going to beer heaven for a weekend, plus it's pretty cool that a lot of kids from the villa are going as well. Strength in numbers and all.

Anyways, with Oktoberfest on the horizon, I've mainly been doing homework and what not this week to get everything out of the way for the weekend. Which I should now probably run down my classes since I haven't done that yet
1) Western Europe in the High Middle Ages: Pretty easy so far, no homework or reading for it yet. Also, pretty interesting. Our professor is this 70 year old man who teaches at Duke and has a strong German accent. But he's awesome, possibly my favorite professor I've had to date

2) European Societies: This class is really interesting too, and also not very tough. It's primarily about the creation of the European Union, how it came to be, and how it works. This is something I know next to nothing about, so it's been really interesting so far.

3) Italian 3rd Semester: Yikes. Definitely should not be in this class, as I haven't taken Italian in over a year. There's only 3 kids in it too which makes it even worse. BUT, I'm taking it pass/fail so it's not really an issue. Plus, I'm already getting a lot of my Italian back.

4) Finally, Florentine Renaissance Art: This is basically an art history class about all the Renaissance artists in Florence. Like Michaelangelo, Donatello, Da Vinci, Boticelli, Ghiberti, etc. The best part about this class is that once a week we get to go into/around Florence to tour museams and churches and what not. Our first visit was to this basicalla and then to Santa Maria Novella, which I think I already talked about. But this past week we went to the Museo Dell'Opera Del Duomo, which is right behind the Duomo. The cool thing about this place is that it houses many of the original works of art and sculptures that were placed on the Duomo facade. There were a lot of Donatello's in this Museum as well. The biggest let down though is that Ghiberti's famous "gates of paradise"/ his bronze doors that were placed on the Baptistry, were under rennovation so we did not get to see them. There was also a lot of old models of designs for the dome and for the facade. Also, they had original pulleys and levers and what not that were used to create the Duomo on display as well. The coolest thing there was probably Donatello's last work "Magdalene Penitent", depicting Mary Magdalene. The craziest thing is that he carved this thing out of a tree trunk. To get that kind of figure and detail from a tree trunk boggles my mind. Here's a picture of the Mary Magdalene. The other is of Michaelangelo's La Pieta. The face of the hooded figure is supposed to be his own. He was a senior citizen when he carved this bad boy out of marble. Absurd.

We also went inside the Duomo, my first time inside there. It was free to go in so that was pretty cool. The inside of the church is pretty basic. It's gigantic, and the floors are really decorative like the other churches we've been to so far. The most amazing part was easily the painted ceiling of the dome itself. It was unbelieveable. I guess it was painted in just about a week, since it had to be done quickly before the plaster or whatever dried. I'll put up a picture of the dome but it doesn't come close to doing this thing justice. You're just going to have to go see it for yourself.

Not a very good image, but a portion of the painted dome

The last thing that I wanted to talk about quick was going to the Uffizi last night, the largest art gallery in Florence. This places houses Da Vinci's, Boticelli's, etc. including Da Vinci's "annunciation" as well as Boticelli's "Primavera" and "The Birth of Venus". It was great because a group of us went after dinner, since the Uffizi is open until 10 on Tuesdays in September. Apparently no one else in Italy knows about this because we were basically the only ones there. For a place that usually has one to two hour lines for entry, it was great. To get a chance to be that close up and intimate to priceless works of art was definitely undescribable. I got a chance to just sit uninterrupted infront of the birth of venus and primavera, it was really cool. I'm not really a huge art guy, but I was blown away by some of these frescos and paintings. These people had some chops back in the day. You should look up those paintings if you don't know what I'm talking about. I'll definitely be going back on some solo missions to the Uffizi once tourist season dies down.

FINALLY, for real this time... STEPH IS FOR SURE COMING TO ITALY!!! I'm very happy about this. She gets here on Thursday October 7th and doesn't leave until late afternoon Tuesday October 12th. We are chilling in Florence on Thursday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. BUT, on Friday and Saturday and during the day Sunday we will be at Cinque Terre. Quite excited

No Thank You, Pisa

On Friday a group of us went to Pisa. It was terrible. Easily the worst experience I've had in Italy thus far. We get to Pisa just fine, about a 1.5 hour train ride from where we were at, and from then on everything went south. We were all jonesing for some pizza, so we head towards this random restaurant on the street that is clearly marked as a "pizzeria". Right before we walked into the place, these people told us not to go in there, and that the food was bad. We should have listened, but at that point it was 2 or so and we hadn't eaten all day so we just went for it. The food was so bad. And expensive. AND, despite being called a pizzeria, they did not have any pizza available at the time. So we each ended up paying about 15, 20 euro for an awful dish of pasta. Honestly worse than what I make for myself back in Madison. So we're all grouchy because of that experience, then it starts to rain. Pow.

The Classic Tower Pic

That just made matters worse, so now we're wandering around Pisa in the rain trying to find this tower and what not. First off, for how famous it is they make it difficult to find. It was really far from the train station, and there wasn't too many directions posted on how to get there. Second off, Pisa is kind of ghetto. It was pretty run down and somewhat sketchy. Thirdly, the tower isn't even that great. It's not really tall or anything, and it leans a lot less than you'd expect it to. So that was a let down as well. Pretty much just everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. To top off the visit, one of my buddies forgot his ipod on the train, and when he went back to the platform to look for it, he saw it in the window of the train as the train was pulling out of the station. Pretty tragic. But that was our day at Pisa. I would not recommend wasting your time there. Literally all there is to do is to take your picture at the tower.

Some of the crew at the tower

Saturday, however, made up for Pisa. There are all these hills / mountains everywhere in Tuscany. And there's some right by where we're staying in Sesto. So four of us decided to go hike around in these mountains during the day. It was a ton of fun. It was a pretty steep hike, but we found some really cool places, and got some unreal views of Florence and Sesto from up in the mountains. We hiked up to this really nice Villa in the mountain, as well as to this church that was supposedly build around the year 1,000. So that was neat just to see something that old in such a random place. The trees are really different here from back home, so that was kind of cool to see, and there was a ton of olive trees all over the place during this hike. Definitely is something that I'll be doing frequently now that I know how to get there / get up there and all. After that a group of us guys went into Florence for dinner at this place called Dante's. It's a good spot, and they also give students free wine. The wine isn't that good, but it's free, so there ya go. Then we wandered around looking for a place to just chill for a little bit, and we came across this Irish pub. So we were there for a while, then called it a night. AND, for lunch on saturday, we went to this small cafe in Sesto right by our Villa, and had possibly the best meal I've had since being here. The food is really good there, and everything is only 4.50, which makes it even better. So to sum up this post. Friday = Awful, Saturday = a lot of fun. Other than Dante's, I haven't gone anywhere twice yet, which is really nice. Trying a ton of different restaurants and bars. Now it's nothing but homework and relaxing this week in preparation for OKTOBERFEST IN MUNICH all weekend next weekned. Needless to say I'm very excited. I'll do another post tomorrow or Tuesday before I head out for the weekend talking about classes so far and what not.

This picture is one of the many views we had on our hike. Pictures really don't do this place justice. You can actually see our Villa. It's in kind of the middle of the picture, off to the left just a tad. It's the building kind of surrounded by trees, right in front of all the other buildings of Sesto.

Viareggio!

Mediterranean, the town, the mountains

This past Saturday a group of about eight of us decided to take the train up to the town of Viareggio, a small beach town right on the coast of the Mediterranean. Since it's been basically 80 and sunny every day, we figured we shoudl get to the beach while it lasted. We tried to catch a train that left at 10:41, but since Sesto has the most confusing train station in Italy, we missed it. It was actually on the platform we were on, but we got confused and didn't get on. Anyways, we took the next one a little after 12:00, and it took about 1.5 hours to get there. The ride up there was really cool, just seeing all the mountains and hills and small Italian towns. One of the best parts of the ride was that we passed in a tunnel underneath a mountain. It was pretty ridiculous, the pressure changed instantly so your ears were on fire, but it was interesting none the less. We finally got there around 2 and spent a good 5 hours at the beach. The town of Viareggio itself was a really cool town. It was just this smaller, beach town, that kind of looked like something you'd see on the coast of Florida. One of my buddies on the trip said it reminded him of a scalled down, less rowdy Miami. But it had palm trees all over the place, and we had to walk about 15 minutes to get from the station to the beach. Which was just fine, because they had this boardwalk going on all along the beach, with a ton of little shops and restaurants along side of it which is pretty cool. Here's a picture of the town itself and the start of the boardwalk.

So we finally get down to the beach. All along the beach they have these private areas that you have to rent out if you want to get a beach chair / umbrella going on. We decided to check out the free beach, but it was real small and most of us didn't have towels, so we rented a spot on one of the private beaches, which was only like 5 euros each. Not too shabby. I'd have to say I was dead on in expecting a ridiculous amount of Euro Spedo action going on at the beach. Also, some of the people there (not from our group, just to clarify) took part in the euronudity at beaches as well. So the stereotypes were definitely confirmed. Shortly after we got all settled and such, we decided to swim in the sea. It was still really warm for September, but the swimming got cut short on account of jellyfish. One of the kids in our group was kind of far out in the water, and said he saw a fairly large jellyfish chilling right by his side, so he waited for it to float away, then we all took off out of the water.

So most of the day we just spent lounging on the beach, walking on the boardwalk, getting somethign to eat, and enjoying the view. The view was unbelievable. It combined a number of my favorite geographical features in one location. 1) Palm Trees. 2) Beaches of large bodies of water. 3) Mountains. Not just like the hills we're used to seeing here in Sesto. But legit, snowcapped mountains. It was great just chilling in the water and looking over your should at some snowcapped mountains. Pow. Anyways, there's a picture of my pasty self in the waters of the Mediterranean.

Siena and San Gimignano

I probably just had myself one of the best weekends I've had in quite some time. It all started on Friday with an organized day trip to Siena. I was skeptical at first because it didn't look that interesting on Wikipedia and what not, but I was definitely wrong. Siena was about a 1.5 hour busride away, but the city was amazing. It is a really old medieval city, with a ton of tiny alleyways and sidestreets, two gigantic cathedrals/churches, one large civic building with a really tall tower, and this huge civic square right in the heart of Siena.

Facade of the Cathedral

The day started with a tour of St. Dominic's Basilica. We couldn't take pictures inside the place, but it was pretty cool. The Basilica was gigantic, and was famous for housing the head and finger of St. Catherine. It was really weird, both face and finger were really deteriorated and shrivled. Anyways, we then went on to tour the Cathedral in Siena, which was possible the most unbelievable building I've ever been in. There was so much detail put into building this thing. Even the floors displayed various scenes in Marble. It was huge, and the amount of art and statues that was in this place was just ridiculous.

Floor of the Cathedral

I got a whole mess of pictures of this place up on facebook too. But it was really cool to get a chance to go into this Cathedral. I still can't get over how old all of these places are, and how they possibly could have been made this beautiful at the time. Next, we had some time on our hands, so we wandered around Siena, bought some vino, and hung out for a good chunk of time in this huge city square. It was more like an octagon, but this place was gigantic, just a big wide open space for people to hang out in. I guess at one point in time they had horse races around the square, not too sure if they still do or not though. That's pretty much how Sienna went.

Shot of Siena

After Siena, we all then went to San Gimignano. The bus ride into this town was really cool because we were driving straight through the Tuscan countryside. Just a whole mess of hills and vineyards, which was a lot more interesting to look at than driving on 94. San Gimignano was probably my favorite part of studying abroad so far. It was just this really old town in wine country that had a ton of really nice shops, restaurants, wine cellars, etc. And the views from it were pretty amazing. Just overlooking all the vineyards and the countryside, it finally kind of made me realize that I was in Italy for good now, and not just like a week long vacation. We didn't really do a whole lot in San Gimignano, but I think just the views and the fact that it was just an authentic, Italian city made it the best stop for me thus far.

One of the views from San Gimignano. Pictures really can't do it justice.

The only thing we really did there other than admire the views and walk around the town was stopping at the "world's best gelato shop." They weren't joking. The line was extremely long and went pretty far out the door, but it was definitely worth the wait. By far the best gelato I've ever had. I'm going to be quite unhappy when I come back home to the states and all we have is shitty eddy's and kemps. This place was amazing, can't even describe it. I had a combo of lemon, wildberries, and some kind of blackberry. When I inevitably win the lottery, I'm definitely going to be importing a disgusting amount of that gelato to wherever it is that I'll be living at. So that was our Friday more or less. Saturday a group of about 8 of us went to the Mediterranean to this town called Viareggio. That was a blast too, but I'll put up a post about that excursion when I get the chance.

Sorry!

Sorry for the lack of posting. This one is going to be super short. I'm going to try to get a post up today about our trip this past Friday to Siena and then to the town of San Gimignano. This was easily my favorite day I've had since I've been here, and definitely saw some unbelievable things. I'll hopefully be able to get a post up about it sometime today, but if not I have a ton of new pictures up on facebook from the trip so check those out for the time being.