Day 9 (3/30/11)

Today we were free to do whatever we wanted until 3 when we had desk critiques, so of course since we are studying abroad in a fantastically beautiful place, we sat inside and worked on our studio project :(. It was a pretty awesome experience, we ended up using Google translation back and forth to communicate with Jessica, and that worked pretty well. We had many similar ideas based solely on our research, so it was pretty easy to develop it a little bit during that time. After a few hours of that, everyone in the studio got together to head to lunch, and we all started walking back into town.
However, when Jessica and her friend Nelly (her group is the 3 seniors on the trip) heard where we were headed, we went a different way because they said it was bad. So we went to a small area just off of the Piazza de Roma that had a kebob place and a pizza place, and we ate there. My kebob was absolutely amazing! It had all the good stuff plus I got both the yoghurt and the chili sauces on it, a great decision. After we finished eating we stopped at Yoghi’s, a pretty big dessert place. I decided on gelato, (of course) the two flavors were pistachio (it had little pieces in it!) and biscotti with chocolate (also with big chunks!). It was some of the best I have ever had, and only 1.60 euro for a cup big enough for dessert, which was unbelievable.
After we walked back to Piazza Arringo where we were meeting up, we talked to everyone else and realized that Jessica and Nelly were very right (my friend ate hot dogs and cold spinach for lunch…ewwwww) about lunch. We all walked back to studio where we met as a group before dispersing throughout the school to prepare for our desk crits. We had a pretty awesome session of sketching where we unrolled one piece of vellum and just drew away at the same time to prepare. The review was kinda weird, we learned that our ruin was one of the most influential pieces of architecture in Italian history (which we obviously should have known since it was not even finished as designed and 75% of it was demolished almost immediately. Silly us?) and that we had to learn more about it. However they kinda liked a little of what we were doing, but once they left we were a little discouraged. However, Jessica’s teacher came over a little while later and talked to her and then to us, and she loved what we were doing and totally agreed with our approach (guess I should just study here…), so we were much happier then.
After we said goodbye we walked home and stopped at an art supply store and bought some sketchbooks and met another Italian architecture student who knew some people who came from Ohio State last year! After some talking we went to the grocery store where I got the green apple version of the 1.5 liter drink (THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER HAD TO DRINK. EVER!) and walked home.
The rest of the night was spent with, what else, sitting in the room and reading some of the most boring articles ever for our theory seminar tomorrow. Eventually Joe and I got annoyed and went to bed, so I will just finish at the last minute tomorrow morning (the best way to work).