From Italy to California

I would like to apologize for being a very bad blogger by not writing squat since I returned to the States over a month ago. I've been traveling in this time, but that's a lame excuse and I know it. In my defense, my computer went AWOL on me by running out of hard drive space for pictures and, for a while, did not let me sign in to my own email account. Thanks to how much material there is, I've decided to do this in two parts, so please be patient with me.

Ravenna and Bologna are, at this point, very old news, so briefly, I'd like to say that Ravenna had absolutely amazing golden tile mosaics. There's so many awesome gold mosaics in this city that they have a specialized school there just for mosaic restoration. Bologna is famous for its incredibly awesome food, which I enjoyed very much after seeing their cathedral. Their cathedral is quite large, having been halted at some point in its construction for the crime of threatening to get larger than St. Peter's Basilica. I lit a candle there, even though I'm not Catholic, because it was the last cathedral I saw on that trip with real wax candles, not those nasty little electric things.

I did attend a lovely concert in Dante's church in Florence later that week, an oboe-soprano-organ combination. It was a nice prelude to seeing a then-popular film in an old theatre palace, the Odeon, which I recommend to anyone who enjoys old theaters and seeing films in original sound. It was a lovely break from the pressure of getting my project, death masks of Valjean and Javert from Les Miserables. Although the Valjean mask didn't turn out as cool as I wanted it to be, I feel like I properly blew the class out of the water with my presentation.

My return to the US was a whirlwind of visits with family and friends I hadn't seen all year. I enjoyed these very much, from seeing my aunt and uncle's new house in Fish Camp, to visiting the rest of my Spencer relatives in Desert Hot Springs, to a lovely family gathering in Napa with my Mom's side of the family where I swear, the bruchetta was even better than the Italian stuff I'd had shortly before.

In many ways, returning was a relief--many convenient things were at my fingertips once more, like cell phones and waiters who understood the word "vegetarian" and air conditioning in buildings. A number of things, though, were like visiting a foreign country all over again. I got frustrated at the ugly aesthetics of American paper, missing my A4 sheets wistfully. The lack of buses and trains was a bit disconcerting as well, and going back on to the American diet was a reverse culture shock as well.

One journey that was almost like visiting a foreign country was attending a wedding in Texas for a distant cousin of mine, Travis Purdin. That, however, is worth a separate episode, which is the one you'll be getting next. Thank you for your patience in reading even this far.