Current location:	la mia camera
Current mood:	contemplative

In reflection...
Well, I have spent more than a few days seeking a way to begin talking about Italy and Siena and everything it meant to me, but that is quite a difficult thing. It would be easy, perhaps to start from the beginning and create a linear timeline, but while I think my journeys can certainly be approached that way, the overall experience of Siena cannot. First, I'd like to take a minute to quantify Italy since I can't quite qualify it. I think by the beginning of next week, I might be ready to approach it more fully, but this week was for sleep and acclimation and Christmas.



98 days

2,526 pictures

88 postcards

19 cities (Rome, Siena, Grosseto, Castiglione della Pescaia, San Gimignano, Messina, Palermo, Padua, Venice, Milan, Paris, Geneva, Montreux, Lucca, Pisa, Naples, Pompeii, Florence, and Perugia)

27 days traveling

35 churches/cathedrals (entered, we won't talk about seen and studied...)

28 museums

1 dormant volcano

2 swims in the Mediterranean

12 towers, church domes, and abnormally high walls climbed, totaling around 5,000 stairs

9 classmates

6 utterly fantastic Italian professors

15 credit hours (Conversation and Composition, Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Art and Architecture, The Three Crowns of Italian Literature, and History of the Italian People)

10 hours of class/week

37 compositions

3 essays (in Italian)

33 CDs (9 purchased: Francesco Renga, Irene Grandi, Gianna Nannini, Punkreas, Negramaro, Modena City Ramblers, La Forza del Destino, Deportivo, Oleg Yulag)

10 books read (Anansi Boys, The Da Vinci Code, Rose Madder, The Decameron Volumes 1&2, L'Inferno, Purgatorio, La Vita Nuova, The Moon and the Bonfire, The Leopard, The Shawl, and Dracula)

7 plays, ballets, and operas (Falstaff, OZ, I Due Gemelli Veneziani, Addio Goro, Acqua/Mozart, La Forza del Destino, The Merry Widow)

5 films (Little Heroes [in Hebrew w/English subs], In Questo Mondo Libero, Resident Evil: Extinction [in Italian!], I Vicere, Lezioni di Cioccolato)

2 film festivals (Terra Film Festival and Siena's short film festival) - 14 showings, 78 films, 21 hours

4 soccer games - 1 loss, 1 win, 2 ties

5 concerts

17 contrada fountains**

700 Euro worth of gifts

7 crepes

5 baci di Siena**

39 slices of pizza

dozens of gelati...I lost count

4 trips to the Tea Room**

17 trips to Bella Vista**

60 dinners with my amazing host mother, Maria Grazia

125 emails from Jess

24 phone calls to my mother

6 African husbands**



**to be explained later, if you're a bit confused, have no fear