Helloooooooo all you beautiful people!
I hope you have enjoyed my blog so far because I have a lot more stories to fill you in on now!
Starting with last Wednesday (the days seem to fly by here and I don't even believe it's already my last week in Italy!), after I wrote my other blog. First we went to a modern art-ish museum for a little bit and walked around. It was pretty cool because the whole concept was that the artifacts and things that were in the museum were people's perceptions of what things in the future would be like (but now that it is the future, these things are just funny or interesting to look at). Here is a picture of the museum from the outside (Chelsea a girl on the program took some of the pictures I'm using in this post, so I'll make sure to credit which ones are hers).
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| Outside of the Modern Art Museum (Chelsea's pic.) |
Following the museum at about 6 in the evening, we arrived at the church that housed the one and only LAST SUPPER painting by Leonardo Da Vinci. Not just anyone can see this painting, rather, you must book about a month or so in advanced to even get a ticket for it because the security is so tight and they only allow 25 people in every 15 minutes during the scheduled opening. No pictures, no videos, no food, and breath lightly. All these are important to keeping the painting preserved. The room remains pressurized because the type of paint that Da Vinci used for the wall, started cracking IMMEDIATELY finishing the painting. With this in mind, we have to realize that this painting is hundreds of years old and the paint is quickly flaking off into nothingness.
Some things you should know about this painting that I definitely didn't know until that day. Number 1 the painting is actually the ENTIRE size of a wall. It's not a small canvas painting like I had originally thought but rather spans the entire wall of a room. Number 2 the painting was made for the dining room of monks so that when they ate dinner, they were accompanied by the Last Supper of Jesus. Number 3 Da Vinci's portrayal of Judas was considered to be extremely controversial because he made his skin much darker than the others, gave him a pointy nose, and kept him on the same side of the table as the rest of the disciples. This is what made the painting so popular. In many other paintings of the Last Supper, Judas is already revealed as the betrayer of Jesus and is on the opposite side of the table as everyone else, but in Da Vinci's painting, he chose the moment before revealing which person would betray him.
Let me tell you, this painting is in no means overrated. I thought it was absolutely phenomenal. It sucks that we only had 15 minutes and no pictures. (Literally 15 minutes and then they kick you out of the room). But anyways, I absolutely adored it.
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| Church that houses Da Vinci's Last Supper (Chelsea's Pic.) |
After the Last Supper Painting, we had a group outing with our whole program (13 of us plus the professor) to a Karaoke Bar. The story behind the Karaoke Bar is that we have been looking for one in Milan since day one, but everyone we asked had a hard time recommending somewhere to us. However, FINALLY, we found one. We all dressed up, took taxi's to the Karaoke place and had a blast! I mean, not just like, a little bit of fun, but a WHOLE BUNCH OF FUN. We drank a few drinks (gotta love that liquid courage), and then bravely, got up onstage to sing a variety of songs from (I Will Survive to Backstreet Boy's Everybody). It was seriously, AMAZING. I don't remember the end of the night, I just know that we all got home safely, and had a wonderful time at the club. Below are some embarrassing photos taken by Chelsea of our experience at the Karaoke place.
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Drink in hand--Clearly happy about something
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| From Right to Left: Stephanie, Francesca and I |
Because of the oodles of fun that we had at the Karaoke bar, many of us were NOT feeling so well the next day. Thank goodness our only assignment for the day was to work on papers and watch an Italian horror movie. The movie was actually pretty good, as we got to watch it in our dorms and order pizza. Also, the movie was filmed in Rome (where I had been the previous weekend) so many of the sites in the movie were sights I had literally seen a week earlier. The story kept my interest but definitely wasn't that scary. That night, we decided to have a second group outing to mini-golf. We thought this was a great idea until we got there and got eaten alive by mosquitos. We pretty much rushed through the holes just to get back on the bus and head back to the dorms. My legs look diseased from the numerous bites that these killer mosquitos have left for me.
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| Attempting to Mini-Golf but getting eaten alive (Chelsea's Pic.) |
Friday was a pretty relaxing day. In the morning we went to another important church (they are all starting to blend together at this point in the trip). We had a tour given by a monk and we got to see monk living quarters and a really really beautiful and expensive looking church. I took a lot of pictures so I'll post a few and that will pretty much explain that place.
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| We couldn't take pictures of the inside but this is what it looked like at the entrance. |
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Kinda cool right?
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So then after this place, we went back to Milan where Stephanie and I decided to go out shooting pictures for our class credit and projects. It was really fun and relaxing and she taught me some really interesting techniques (including how to change my lenses without getting any dirt or dust in the body) and how to get pictures of people without them knowing (we called it "creeping"). Following our shooting session, we packed and got ready for the weekend. We had plans to go to Florence, Siena, Modena, San Gimignano, Tuscany and Pisa. Talk about a lot for a weekend. But I will tell you alllll about that in the next post!
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