November Update Part 1

So now that the month of November is over I thought I had better finally take a little bit of time to get my photos and blog updated.  Tonight I created albums for the the trips that I have taken, and places we have gone over the past month.  To check out the pictures go to:

http://gallery.me.com/cgroten1

The next step is to get a blog updates typed out.  That will take me a couple days so check out the new pictures in the mean time.

Trying to catch up…

The month of November has been crazy!  I have spent a lot of time traveling around, and a lot of time trying to catch up on projects because of that.  I did not have a chance to post pictures from our North trip and Ireland yet, that hasn’t been to high on the to-do list right now.  

Ireland was really fun though. We got there kind of late that friday night since flight left about 40 min late. The weather was good and it was a nice change of pace and scenery.  One of the girls we were with had a connection through a friend so when we got there go took us out to a popular Irish pub and the next day drove us all over so we wouldn’t have to take a taxi.  He showed us his college campus and then just walked us around town all day showing us what he thought we should see.  One of the neighborhoods we drove though reminded me of Des Moines a lot.  It was also really nice to see and hear english all over the place.  Some people had a really heavy accent so it was really hard to understand them, but english is english.  After that weekend I had 2 weeks in Rome to hang out here and try to get as much work done as possible.  It was nice to be in town for a weekend finally and be able to take it easy.  During that time I found out one of my friends from back home was going to be able to come over and visit.  Jon got here on the 21st and will be here until Dec. 2 so that whole week and a half will fly by also.  He is almost over the jet lag then he will be able to keep up much better.  A bunch of us went to the open market this morning, that was a crazy experience our first time and we had been here a month, I can’t imagine what it seemed like 3 days into a trip. We plan to go to the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel this week among other sight seeing, I have been here for 84 days and have seen the Colosseum at least twice everyday and still haven’t been inside. I think it’s about time.  We have a couple extra days off for Thanksgiving this week so I think we are going to head to Siena for a couple days and check that out and I want to go up to Pisa for a couple hours to check out the leaning tower.  When we get back from that and Jon leaves I think I will be living in the studio almost 24/7.  All of our projects are due Dec. 10 and I have quite the to do list to tackle before that point.  I will have to do a complete November update when all of that is taken care us to get you all updated.  Yesterday marked the 30 day countdown so we are on the final stretch, only a few weeks left.

North Trip Update

I made it back from our North trip late Monday night, we didn’t know if we would make if home at first since they railway went on strike and stopped trains.  Luckily there were trains back to Rome all day.  A quick update on the trip is that we took an overnight train to Basel (12 hours) and then took another train to Bern and stayed there for one night after a quick afternoon in Germany at a museum.  After that we took a train to Zurich and were there for 2 nights and went to some poster collection museums and heard a couple designers speak.  After Zurich we all took a train back to Milan and we had the option to either break off and do our own thing or go back to Rome.  A couple girls and I went to Florence for 2 nights and checked out the sights there, then obviously came back to Rome on Monday night.  The whole trip was a ton of fun but it was also exhausting.  It will take me a few days to type up a full update from that trip so hopefully I can get that up before this weekend.  I will be in Cork, Ireland for the weekend so I’ll probably wait and post all of those pictures at the same time.  I am really busy with classes and projects this week so it may take a couple days to update but don’t worry it will come.  I did update my Google map with the spots we went to on the map so you can look at those if you want to.  The new map is posted below.

North Trip Map Update

View Larger Map

Halloween In Roma

I haven’t updated in quite awhile, mainly since there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary to share.  The halfway point has come and gone by a week already.  Only a month and a half left here in Rome and I feel like there is still so much we need to see before we go.  I have spent the last 3 weeks busy with studio classes trying to get as much done as possible before November got here.  The last 3 weeks went way to fast.  I’m pretty sure November is going to fly by twice since I will be traveling about half the time.  We only have 10 days of class this month which means we have to find time to get a lot done inbetween trips.  We will be leaving this Wednesday night for our north field trip.  I’ll give the detail of that trip later on but a quick summary is we go to Milan, Bern, Basel, Zurich, Switzerland then back to Milan as a group.  Then are going to Florence for 2 days after our trip is over when they leave us in Milan.  Look forward to that update. And of course we all had to celebrate halloween here even though the Romans don’t.  We were trying to figure out what to dress up as.  It’s was harder this year since we can’t just go to the costume store and pick up something, we had to make our costumes.  We are all obviously graphic design students and use our Apple computers everyday, so we decided to work off of that.  We decided to all go as a OS X dock, the dock you put your icons on on the bottom of the screen (kind of like the Start bar for you pc users).  We all picked an icon that in some way described our personality and then got out the paints and painted it on a box.  I decided to be the Stickies icon, since I have sticky notes all over the place on my computer.  In all we had 9 icons and a mouse/spinning wheel of death.  While we were painting we were all joking that we had to have the nerdiest costume of the year and wondered if we could get onto Gizmodo.  Gizmodo is a tech blog that shows new products and shows of anything Apple.  Our roommate Joe emailed them one of the pictures and later that day we were on the homepage!  We were all pretty excited about making it up there, you can look at the page on this link, you just have to scroll down a little bit:

http://gizmodo.com/5073529/instant-nostalgia-apple+themed-halloween-costumes

As a side note the picture is taken in Derek and I’s bedroom, like the pink paint and chandelier?

So we have Derek the Finder, Anna the System Preferences, Greg the iTunes, Lydia the cursor/spinning wheel of death, Rob the iCal, Jake the iChat, Collin the Stickies, and Joe the trash. I can’t image what was going through the heads of the locals when they seen 10 boxes walking down the street, and when we all jumped on a bus we got some crazy looks and laughs.  Totally worth it though.

That’s it for now, time to get back to work.  I’ll be gone on our trip till the 10th so check back for photos and updates that week sometime!