It's been a while

Dear faithful readers, I am sorry it has been so long since I have last posted a blog. I know there is not a valid excuse for such an action, but, to my defense, I have been pretty busy during the past couple weeks. As I mentioned last week, I am in the process of making travel plans for April, and I am glad that I have so much free time here, because it is taking more time to plan all this than I expected. Now I see why people still hire travel agents. But I am slowly getting everything figured out, and I'm sure it will all come together. I guess my main goal right now is to secure transportation from point-to-point for the eleven days that I'll be travelling before my mom and brother arrive in Florence.

Aside from all that, I have also spent a portion of the week planning the last minute details of my birthday weekend in Cinque Terre. We leave tomorrow and will not be back until Sunday, so, once again, you won't hear from me for a few days. The weather is supposed to be just beautiful in Cinque: 57 degrees and sunny all three days!

The weather is another reason for my not writing the past few days. Suddenly spring has hit northern Italy full force! The days have been sunny and warm, flowers are in full bloom, and everything is even more green than it was when we arrived! I have been going on some long runs and just trying to soak it all in. Sorry to make all of you back in Minnesota jealous, but I'm loving all this sun in March! I don't even have to worry about snow on my birthday, and that's the first time in my life that's happened.

Other than just enjoying the weather, I've done a couple other interesting things this week. One was for history class we went to the Medici chapels and to a museum that featured the inlaid marble art that is common for this area. I really like looking at the inlaid marble because it emmulates reality so well. You wouldn't think that you could make a realistic picture by piecing together marble, but often times the marble version of a scene looks even more realistic than a painting of the same scene. It is such an intricate art, and it is so strange to think that they did it all before the days of laser cutters and computer technology. It was all just painstaking work, and the results are beautiful.

Today for art class I finally got to see Michelangelo's real David. This is something that I have been looking forward to since I got here, and it was really a neat experience. I learned a bit about Michelangelo's, Donatello's, and Verocchio's Davids in honors class last semester, and now I have seen them all in person. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Florentine Davids, they are sculpures of the Biblical character from the David and Goliath story. The reason why there are so many Davids in Florence is that they are a symbol of the Republic. I really can't describe Michelangelo's David, and looking at pictures of it doesn't do it justice. I keep having experiences like this, and I just want to be able to communicate them. But really you cannot know until you've been to the Accademia and stood in the presence of David what I am really talking about. To begin with, David is a huge statue, bigger than I ever expected it to be from the pictures I saw. He is probably at least ten times as big as a normal human being, so he just towers over everything. Michelangelo carved him out of a single block of marble that had been discarded by other artists. He is the first David to be depicted before the act of killing Goliath, so you can see that he is in deep thought and poised for action. Michelangelo chose to represent David in this moment in order to emphasize his intellectual capacity and it's influence on his physical actions. It is just amazing to be in the presence of such a meaningful and famous work of art.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have lots of stories and pictures to post after this weekend. And I'll try to be a good blogger and keep my writing habit up!