A quick post before I head up to Venice.
Yesterday I went to Assisi and visited the Basilica di San Francesco, who is the guy who could talk to animals. Even though I am not religious, I couldn’t help but be touched by what had been done for this holy man. He is tombed in the lowest level of the Basilica, in the second level his life story is told through historic paintings on the walls, and the top level is a place of worship.
Assisi, by the way, is a beautiful place. Ancient buildings, rolling green hills and the classic old Italians peering out of the windows to see what this giant bus was all about. We also had the biggest meal I think I’ve ever had in my whole life. There was 4 or 5 courses, with bread, salami, proschutto, bruschetta, two types of pasta, dessert, and don’t forget the wine. We split a bottle of wine between two of us, but we ate so much that we couldn’t even feel it at all.
We then went to see artisans make pottery by hand. I’m not really sure how to describe this but to say it looked like magic. A couple of the other students tried it but they had an extremely difficult time, while the artisan made it look like he could do it in his sleep.
Then last night I went to my very first futbol game. Sam, Heather and I went down the “stadio” frantically searching for tickets. When we found the ticket line, it was huge. As we waited in line we A. Found a bunch of others from our group, so there ended up being I think about 10 of us, B. Were told that we should really have our passports with us, which we didn’t have, and C. They stop selling tickets about 10 minutes into the game. We were at the door to the ticket office when they closed it down. There will still lots of people in line so we were all pretty upset. Dom, one of the members of our group, went to try to find more tickets and asked a girl who worked at the stadium that was just sort of relaxing by the fence where we could find tickets… and she gave him 6! We were able to get 2 more from a police officer, then we managed to reuse a ticket by slipping it back into the line from the inside without the guard noticing, and then begged to let the last person in. Then, when we had to present our tickets, we played stupid and said they just let us in, so they finally allowed us in. They put us in a cheap section with a lot of teenage kids, with no covering. AND the section was boxed in so we couldn’t sneak to the good parts of the stadium. But we didn’t care! We are at an Italian national game! Italy vs. Belgium! We were all decked out in our finest royal blue and doing our best to cheer along in Italian with the others, even though we had no idea what we were saying.
About 2/3rds into the game it started to drizzle, and then a light shower, and then it poured. Remember, there’s no covering, so we all got soaked. Most of the Italians ran for cover, but handful of the other Italians stayed and so did we. We’re AZ kids, we love the rain, especially at a crazy futbol game.
Italy ended up winning 3-0. Yesterday was quite the adventure. Hopefully there will be many more to come.
