11 Days Left

I figured I should update since I haven't in a long time, although nothing much has been going on lately. Massimo's classes ended a week and a half ago, which was probably the best part of that class. Ummm...yeah that's really all that's been going on. I went on a lagoon trip on Friday, which was a covered boat that took us to Torcello, Burano, and San Francesco del Deserto (not exactly sure of the spelling of that...). I'll put the pictures up from that whenever I get un-lazy. I mean....whenever I finish all this work I'm doing....yeah. On Saturday Caitlin and I went to the beach, and I got "tan", AKA red. By now it's a nice tan though. Sunday was the annual "wedding with the sea" ceremony, where the Doge used to throw a gold ring into the lagoon to "marry the sea." I think we should drain the lagoon. I'll be rich! Anyway, I didn't see the actual ceremony because it was far away, but I did go over to Venice to watch the regatta afterwards. It was so cool! It was a 4-man Venetian-style rowing regatta....in brightly colored gondolas! Then I got myself a gelato and went with Chen to the bookstore where she works (because it has free wireless internet, so she can connect to her office at home from there). I picked out two books in Italian to help me over the summer. One is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the other is by Jules Verne. I think I may have been a bit too ambitious with these choices. At least I'll have plenty to keep myself busy with this summer!

In case you're out of the loop, Lelo's foot is better so we got the go-ahead with the trip. I'm REALLY excited for it. I'm trying to force myself to give up eating croissants in the mornings in the hopes of maybe losing a bit of belly flab. It worked earlier in the semester, but lately I've been on a chocolate crave, which hasn't been doing anything for me except make my love handles easier to hang on to. Not exactly my goal in life. I have been trying to spend as little time in the room as possible though, so I've been pretty good about going over to Venice and walking around. Today I was going to go early this morning and find the Ca'Foscari library (the only "real" university in Venice...because VIU doesn't count). I need to check out books for my research paper for my Representing Renaissance Venice class. I'm writing on Jewish women, as a continuation of my earlier presentation on women in general. My group had talked about married women, nuns, and prostitutes, and the only group left out completely was Jewish women, so I figured it would make a great research paper topic. If the library cooperates with me, I'd like to find books and articles that would allow me to compare how Jewish Venetian women see themselves and Venice with how Christian women see their own roles and the city they live in, and also against how Jewish men see them. Professor Bassi thinks I'm being too ambitious with that though, so I'd be content just writing a high school-level paper about Jewish women in Venice during the Renaissance if I have to. I'd rather actually use my brain though. It's been dormant for a while, and needs a challenge. I'm finding myself actually excited to get back to Williams and the crazy amount of work. Maybe graduate school work will suit me better than I had thought (given my level of laziness and expertise in procrastinating in even the most boring circumstances, you'd think I'd want to be done with school asap). Well, that's the main assignment I want to get done this week. The other one is for Italian (yeah I know, Massimo has to ruin the end of the semester by making a re-appearance). We're supposed to work in groups of two and go out and ask Venetians what their thoughts on tourism are. I'm working with Caitlin, who surprised me the other day by saying she already did the whole thing by making up the interviews. Yeah that's not going to work with me. This is my final grade, and I want no part in cheating, so I did some research and came up with questions to ask people. Hopefully I'll be able to bother five Venetians today so I can write the paper tonight and tomorrow, because I'd rather focus on my Renaissance Venice paper.

Okay, well that's about all that's been going on in my life lately. Fascinating, I know. You're probably all snoring by now. This is random, but I'm considering auditing German next year. For some reason, this semester I've started wanting to learn languages well. My goals for this summer are to read both Italian books and understand them, and also to improve my Spanish. I realized that it doesn't really help much for the job market to be able to speak Spanglish. I want to learn German because I really liked Salzburg a lot and I'd like to go back to Austria and Germany someday. I don't need to be fluent, I just want to know enough to get myself around. Plus it's cool to speak lots of languages. Or is that a dorky thing to say? Well I think it's cool. Anyway, I'm done babbling now. I'll update again whenever something exciting happens. Like edible meat in the mensa (which, by the way, I'm back to being vegetarian again, much to my dismay).