November

So now that is is December 18th and I am finally done with all of my projects and classes I have time to finally get the blog caught up.  This entry with be the November edition and December will follow.

We’ll start by going all the way back to the very beginning of the month and getting ready for our North Field trip. This really was a month of travel, we only had 10 days of class in the entire month.  The first trip we took was our class trip to North Italy and we even made a couple stops in Switzerland and Germany.  We left Rome on the 4th at 6:30 pm to catch an over night train to Basel, it was going to be a 12 hour train ride. It was going to be a long train ride no matter what but the cold I had gotten the week before halloween came back and I got really sick.  I had chills, sore through, swollen throat glads, stuffed up sinus’, and the medicine I had brought over for the minor stuff wasn’t working and then I ran out of it.  I tried to just take ibuprofen and drink lots of fluids to get over it but that didn’t work at all.  It got to the point where a couple of the teachers were getting worried and wanted me to go to the doctor.  Instead of going to the doctor I had one of them go to the pharmacy with me and help translate for me to see if I could get some better medicine.  The lady at the pharmacy gave me two things to try, one was a throat spray that was supposed to help kill the infection and help the swelling go down.  The other was a type of antibiotic pill, that was also supposed to help clear up the sinus infection part of it.  With medicine in me I felt a little bit better about going on the trip, hopefully it would be enough to make the trip comfortable and still have fun to.  So getting back to the train ride, we got on and started the long trip up through Italy. Since it was already dark there wasn’t much to look at and I had taken some nyquill so I just went to sleep and slept pretty much the whole way there.  It wasn’t comfortable at all, if I never have to travel on a sleeper train that would be fine with me.  That morning when we got to Basel they woke us up and got us a nice pastry for breakfast and a cup of coffee, that is a really nice way to get the morning going. We got on another train and had a 2 hour ride to Bern and we stayed there for one night.  The hostel we stayed at was nice but wasn’t anything fancy.  In Bern we went to the school of design to look at their poster collection. They have a huge collection of posters that are all original prints from famous well known designers.  He pulled what he thought were a bunch of the better ones and showed us all of those and explained a little but about all of them.  They were all swiss design poster, something we look at quite a bit for different kinds of inspiration.  After that we had a couple hours to go and explore the town and get some lunch, they had some sort of festival going on so there were a bunch of little shops and vendors set up all over town. After that we went back to the hostel for our night there and then packed up the next morning to catch a train to Zurich.  Before we got to Zurich we made a brief stop at the Vitra museum in Germany.  It is a furniture design company and museums showing all the different types of chairs and stuff they are producing.  It was cool but by the end of the day I was about ready to fall asleep and the medicine was wearing off so I wasn’t feeling the best also. Zurich is a very cool town. Everything is in english to so that also made it very easy to get around and know what was going on. They use a different currency in Switzerland so we all had to exchange our euros or just go to an atm to get money out. Again in Zurich we went to a couple more poster collections and graphic design collections. The poster collections were a lot like what we had seen before but just different topics and some different designers.  One of them was a collection of design posters and other stuff as well; corporate manuals, books, magazines, logos, all kinds of stuff.  Since a lot of it was really old we had to use rubber gloves to touch the pages if we wanted to look at it. We headed back to the hostel after that, we were there for 2 nights, and it was rated as one of the best youth hostel in europe.  It was really nice.  On day two we had a couple well known designers come and speak to us. Rosemary Tissi and Odermatt, two swiss designers showed some work they had done and talked about how they go about different types of designing.  By this time in the trip I had been taking that medicine for a few days so I was feeling a little better but still not great, just a little easier to tolerate.  That was our last day in Zurich, we had some time to hang out again and see the city before we left the next day.  We all took a train back to Milan in Italy, this time it was during the day so we got to see the alps and all of the little mountain lakes and villages.  It was really picturesque, I could have gotten off the train and taken pictures for hours.  I really wanted to have a bike there to ride, there would have been some really cool mountain roads to ride on.  The next time I’m in Europe I will have a bike with me to ride.  When we got to Milan it was about 2 in the afternoon and that is where our teaches left us.  It was kind of nice having that part of the trip out of the way, it was a lot of fun but was also exhausting. We could have ridden all the way back to Rome with them but a couple of us decided to take a train to Florence for a couple of days.

Florence is a really cool city as well, it’s like Rome but it wasn’t near as busy, loud, or dirty.  We found our hostel and then crashed for a little while and relaxed since we were all wiped out.  We found some dinner and were going to walk around and see the town at night but we all fell asleep by 10 pm.  The next day we got up on-time and went and looked at all of the sights in Florence. We went to see the David, the Duomo, and the famous bridge that has shops built on top of it.  The David was really cool, the museum it was it was really boring but then you walk around the corner and there is the giant David statue.  I didn’t really realize how big of carving it was until you get right up next to it, we went early in the morning so there wasn’t that much of a crowd around it.  We probably could have stayed there and just looked at it all day but had to move on to the next place on the list.  The Duomo is really best viewed from the outside, the marble on the outside is amazing.  We went into the inside and it is really kind of boring compared to the outside and all of the other churches we have visited.  The only frescos were on the dome, the rest of the walls and ceilings were just painted white.  You can walk to the top of the dome but the day we were there it was closed off for some reason, we could go to the top of the campanile next to it though.  To walk all the way to the top it is about 416 steps, we were all breathing pretty heavy by the time we go to the top.  Since it was a clear day you could see a long ways, and the whole city.  I think it was actually a better view that from the dome since you could actually see the whole church.  After that we went to that bridge that you see in all of the pictures.  By that time we were all kind of tired and headed back to the hostel to get cleaned up and take a break before dinner. The hostel we were at was really nice, they had a brochure with some good restaurants on it so we decided to eat at of the more ‘traditional’ place.  It was a good deal to; we got a first course, second course, bread, dessert, and wine for only 10 euro. We had lasagna for the first, chicken and potatoes for the second, and a type of cake for dessert. We were so full after dinner that we went back to the hostel and crashed again.  Florence is also known for the leather markets and other open markets so we hit those the next day.  We walked around and you could pretty much find any kind of scarf in any color if you want to. I had fun spending money that day. I bought a couple scarves, a pair of leather loafers, and I got a good chunk of my christmas shopping done to.  It had been a long trip and we were all ready to get back to Rome and get back to our daily schedule and get some work done to.  We all had a lot to do in order to catch up for it wasn’t going to happen right away.

The week after we got back we had a group project to work on and had a guest designer come in to help critique us or work.  Primo Angeli is a well known packaging designer and it was our job to redesign the package for a product.  We chose to do the label for a jam and jelly company.  There were 6 of in the group so we all did some sketches and worked on or own ideas and then brought them together, picked the better ones and them touched them up from there.  The whole project only took a week to do since it was a short one and we split the work up. It was a good thing we had it done in a week since I was going to be gone to Ireland that weekend and then we had the final presentation on Tuesday morning.

On the 14th I left for Cork, Ireland with a couple people for the weekend. Of of her friends had studied in Cork last year and gave us the number of a couple of the friends she made while she was there and told us go give them a call. Our plane got in a little later than we had expected so we didn’t there till about midnight.  We thought it might have been to late to call but we got to our hostel and then gave him a call.  He was still out and about so we took a cab over there and hung out with him, his name was Alan.  At first I thought it was going to be one of those weird situations when you go meet somebody and say hi and then its all awkward but it wasn’t at all.  He was a really cool guy and he made it his personal goal for the weekend to make sure we had a good time.  Just like Switzerland english is one of the national languages so it was really nice to be able to read everything and be able to talk to everyone.  I took full advantage of that and went to the pharmacy there and explained to the lady how i was feeling, it was impossible to get anything cold and sinus in Rome but that’s what she gave me, and it helped a ton.  There was even a night pill to help knock me out and get some sleep for once. That round of medicine was a good help to feel a little bit better again.  Still not 100% but better. Alan took us around Cork the next day and showed us all of the little things you might never see if you didn’t know somebody that lived there. He took us to his college campus and it was really cool, much smaller than the ISU campus. Then he took us around town. The towns we were driving and walking around in really reminded me of part of Des Moines, they are way different than Rome to, much more my style.  Alan drove us out to the Jameson Whisky factory and we took a tour there, it was a lot like the Sam Adams tour I did in Boston this summer.  They showed us some of the barrels that it’s stored in and then told us about the production process; at the end we got to sample some as well. He even took us to a store that was exactly like a Wal-Mart, it was the coolest thing any of us had seen in a long time, it would have been perfect had there been a Mt. Dew but no go on that one. That night be took us to an interesting place for dinner, they just wrap your burger and fries in a sheet of brown butcher paper.  It was good and it was a ton of food.  He took us back to his apartment to eat and his roommate was there to, we watched their version of american idol while we were there to. that was the first tv I had watched and understood in over 2 months.  He took us out to a irish pub were he goes with his friends that night. It was already Sunday by then so we had to get to the airport and head back to Rome. That week after I got back I had to work like crazy to catch up again and that didn’t really happen either.  I had 5 days to work that week before the next adventure started when Jon got here.

My buddy Jon from back home was able to get a cheap ticket out here for Thanksgiving break and come visit for 10 days which I was excited about. But that also meant that was 10 days that I couldn’t really work on stuff again. The other best part about Jon coming was he was going to be bringing some medicine from home for me to get better, real prescription medicine. I had my art history final the next monday so I had to study for that the first couple days here was here which was kind of a bummer. It was ok though, it gave him a couple days to get over the jet lag and used to the style of Rome.  After my test I could go into vacation mode like him and forget about projects for a few more days.  I had been here for 85 days at the time and still hadn’t been to the Colosseum and the Vatican so that was for sure on our list of things to do.  We went to the Colosseum one morning and spent about an hour there.  It was really cool to think about how old it was and what kind of events took place there.  That afternoon we took the metro out to the Vatican and went through the museum there and seen the Sistine Chapel, which is amazing.  The rest of the museum is packed with artworks I had just studied for my final so it was cool to see them all right in front of me.  We went into St. Peters and got to see the inside of that to, very impressive, it’s really big inside.  We had another day in Rome after that so we just walked around and I took Jon to the different pizza places we liked and showed him all of the stuff we have been living in for the past 4 months. We then headed to Florence the next day and spent 3 days there. It was kind of north trip redo for me since we stayed at the same hostel since it was really nice and accidently at at the same restaurant for dinner.  I did the same thing Florence, showed him around and we seen the sights again, I could have spent another day at the market. They were really cool. It rained or sprinkled the whole time we were there but it was still a lot of fun. The rain kind of put a damper on our plans to go to Siena for a day but we did make it to Pisa, that ended up being it’s own adventure and a half. We bought train tickets to get there and either got on the wrong train or got off at the wrong stop and ended up in Pistoia, Italy not Pisa.  We wandered around there for an hour checking it out.  The only cool thing was the professional cyclist we seen on his bike. He was dressed head to toe in Team Lampre clothes and had a top of the line bike to go with it.  We were 99% sure he had to have been out on a training ride.  After that I was just frustrated that we messed up the train and I was going to prove to myself that we could make it there.  I asked the guy selling tickets how to get here and he printed a timesheet for me. Now we had to take a train to Lucca and then transfer to Pisa.  That took about an hour, we finally made it there, it was dark but it was the tower. We were there for about 20 min. and we had seen enough.  Luckily there was a train straight back to Florence so it only took about an hour and a half to get back there to.  We headed back to Rome the next day, we were both traveled out and I was getting anxious to get back to work and get caught up.  Jon still had one more day in Rome so we went to one of the bike shops we had found and I bought a jersey there.  He took off the next day so he got to bed on time and had to be out the door early in the morning.  Jon leaving was the end of November, so that got me to the final stretch and the medicine had got me feeling much better.  That is probably the only thing that got me through up to now. If I would have been sick it would have not been a fun lsat month at all.

Well that is November in a blog.  You can check out the pictures from all of these thing on the web gallery also.  I will work on the December download tomorrow and me all caught up just in time to go home!