Since Spring Break

The last week has been a good week. The majority of the week was spent getting back to the grind of school and things like that. To start, I had to do a 15-minute presentation in Italian on The Lion King (wonderful way to come back from spring break) and at the end, we went to the GAM, Torino’s Gallery of Modern Art for the first time with my art class.

Coming back from a break always is tough. Anybody can tell you that the hardest part of a vacation is getting back into the grind of day-to-day life after the excitement and awesomeness that is (or hopefully was) your vacation. This only seemed even tougher this semester. Traditionally, I spend spring break playing a sport or working so coming back to school isn’t too bad. However, this spring break was spent in Italy so coming back to school, even though it was in Italy, was even more difficult. There were a few things to look forward to with the start of school. Most excitingly, I am done with my Composition class.

After taking a year off of Italian, coming back to a third year composition class was far tougher than I would have imagined. Taking the year was not so much by choice as it was because there were no more classes offered by UNR for me to take so I had kind of fallen out of practice. The 6 week intensive course of composition I was a very tough class and I was glad for it to be over. It felt like most of that class, by everybody involved, was spent hoping to not be called on, reading stories we didn’t not understand or being confused in general. That being said, I do feel like I learned a lot in that class but I would have tried to keep up more with my Italian in the lead up to heading over to Italy.

The next thing I was looking forward to was my presentation I had to do in my Conversation class. The professor in the class, Simona Lai, is a great professor and she made doing a 15-minute presentation in Italian seem very doable. We had to do a presentation on a movie so I chose the Lion King because it is an awesome movie and since it is a kids movie, the vocabulary I would need to memorize for it would be easier than if I picked something else. I decided to use Prezi for the presentation instead of powerpoint or keynote because it was far more visually appealing and more awesome than the rest. I included some of my favorite songs and scenes from the movie and made the presentation fly by. In the end, it turned out to be a good presentation and was a good confidence booster for my Italian.

By the time Friday had rolled around, it had been a fairly uneventful week in Italy. School was school and it still was too cold to be out at night. However, Friday was a visit to the Galleria Arte Moderna (GAM) in downtown Torino. So far this semester, I have enjoyed my art class. We have talked about things like Impressionism, Baroque, Post Impressionism, Romanticism and realism which are all pretty interesting and fun to look at. However, I quickly found out at the GAM that I am not a Modern Art kind of guy. My professor was already a tough professor to like. Her class wasn’t particularly hard or anything but she seemed to be the blind leading the blind. Her descriptions of paintings were straight from the textbook, her slides were poorly put together and she didn’t seem to have much reasoning behind what she liked and disliked (but what she likes, she loves and what she dislikes, she hates, no real middle ground). We walked into the first room and she asked us to pick the picture with the most melancholy. The 5 people in the class split off and picked one of the 8 to 10 pictures that we though said something about melancholy. However, despite 40% of the class having had a significant background in Art (one art Major and one with an Art Minor), nobody got it right. We then discussed the painting she though had the most melancholy for an entire hour before moving on. That was the highlight of the GAM as from there, it went downhill. It got so bad that one person decided to drop the class because of the visit (not that I can say I blame her…)

This was one of the better peices in the museum, saddly

Despite the return to the grind, a long presentation and a terrible museum visit, the week in Italy was a good one. After seeing Molly, the world seemed to be in a slightly better place. The trees are starting to get greener here and the Kebabs seem to be tasting better (not that that is something that is at all possible). Molly is again coming (later today actually) and my outlook is doing pretty good! Italy has certainly been great and I look forward to meeting Molly’s Friends. I'm finishing up this post (writing the bloody thing anyway until I can get more pictures up here…) and going to work on planning their trip here. Going to be a fun week next week! Hope all is well back home! Thanks for reading!