Growing pains

I am really struggling to keep up with my blog while I'm in Florence. I think some of it might just be the repetition; I'm still in Italy, so there are still a lot of similarities, and I'm not going to keep describing the churches and art galleries because I need to leave you with some mystery or no one will want to look at my pictures when I go home. So I'll try and stay interesting, but brief.

We started our day at the monastery of San Marco, which I thought was really cool. The bottom floor showed how the monks used dyes to write the manuscripts. The top floor showed all the monk rooms. Each one had a painting on it, usually pretty graphic, that sometimes monks would faint from meditating on the violence. Most of them are some type of crucifixtion scene, but I saw one that looked like cartoon Jesus throwing open a door and stomping on devils who were flattened by it. Silly monks.

We wanted to go to the academia to see David, but the man working there was super salty and didn't speak much English. We have the fancy card that's lets us through all the gates, but he didn't understand that, or something was lost in translation, and we ended up just leaving and being angry. Now we are supposed to just go by ourselves, which I hope to do on Sunday. Marc and Ted did take us to a gelato place and bought us all gelato, which was so nice. They're the best.

We went to Santa Croce and saw the Pazzi chapel. We were also there in time to hear the bells chime, which I managed to catch some video of. The bells here are so pretty- I can't wait to get to Notre Dame and hear them. We ended up sitting out in the sun for almost an hour and just enjoying the really nice scenery; almost all of the buildings open up in the middle to a small outdoor area with a fountain.

Since we spent all our free lunch time in the sun, we skipped right on to Santa Maria del Carmine to see Masaccio frescoes (specifically, tribute money and expulsion from the garden). Everything here seems peach and orange and beige; the buildings, the paintings, the ground. Everything. It will be interesting to see the color schemes of other cities. It's not something I'd ever thought of before.

For dinner we went to a place down the street that did pizza to go, and so Meghan and I split the four cheese. Then we all just bonded outside on the patio and had quiet time, which is so valuable here. A few hours later we had some sloppy sallys, so I went to help take care of that and tried to find Doug before ASIg initiation.

It just reminds me of little things I'm missing; if I were at school, I would have gone overboard with cupcakes and cookies all showering my favorite men on campus with baked goods. But then again, if I weren't in Europe I would be in Franklin, cheering on my brother and Alec and Tyler and everyone else at broadcast. This is the first one ive missed since elementary school, and it seems even worse that it's harry's senior year and he's half the show, from what I've heard. I know everyone will do so great, and I'm so proud of all of them, but I am a little homesick and sad that I can't be there.

Karimah says every time things get hard while we're here, it's just a growing pain. She couldn't be more right.