A blooming world

A blooming world

I think I'm allergic to Italy. The top of my head feels like it's going to explode. Yesterday I walked around feeling like I was in a haze, and I had a lot of sensitivity to sound. My right eye was looking a little irritated. I went home from school around 8, ate dinner, and went to bed with the start of a migraine around 10 (I took a Zomig and then fell asleep). I woke up with a very sticky and pink right eye. I read that pink eye can occur as a response to allergies but that it usually impacts both eyes. This is the same eye that was pink a month ago! I've been taking care of myself in terms of my contacts, and now I've got my glasses on. But this pink eye is different from other times that I've had it. My eyeball hurts behind my skull - like the muscle or something. My eyelids are tender and my eyeball is itchy.

I spent the weekend in the south of Italy visiting Pompei, Herculaneum, and Naples, and didn't have any problems with the pollen there. It's just Florence! Dirty, blooming Florence.

In one sense, everything is starting to fall apart. All my clothes are dirty, and my shirts especially are filthy beyond salvation. Last week, my jacket pocket ripped towards the zipper about 3 inches when it caught on some rough Italian wall, and the zipper of my boots broke on the left shoe (now the zip mechanism is only on one side). I have worn those boots nearly every day since I got here! They are so comfortable and so perfect for my lifestyle. Alas, I found a pair of simple black sneakers in Pompei Saturday night, and they will have to tide me over.

I'm happy though, really - or should I say, I'm really happy. This is one of the happiest periods of my life. I love my roommate Marisa, and I don't jive at all with my roommate Kerry, but none of it matters. The second part of this experience is so much more enjoyable than the first.

As far as photos go, I've got so many and such a terrible internet connection that it's really slow going getting them uploaded. I filled up my entire memory card the first day of the Pompei trip - that's 400 photos! So it's going to be a slow process. I'll get there.

I've been busy making travel plans with Justin and catching up on homework. He arrives one month from tomorrow - 18 aprile - and so far we've got a great itinerary going, with lots of room to adjust if we want. I'm excited. There's a part of me that is ready to move on from Firenze, and a part of me that realizes I'm only just getting started here. No part of me wants to go back to the US at this point, though I could be saying something different after three weeks of travel. My only regret is that I won't be able to plant things in my garden until May, and that could set me back on my vegetable crop for this summer ...

So it goes!

I've been on two field trips in the past week. On Wednesday, our sculpture class took a bus to Pietrasanta and Carrara, near Cinque Terre. Then on Friday, I went to Pompei with 24 students from SACI.

For the sculpture field trip, we visited a sculpture lab in Pietrasanta and hiked to see the marble quarries in Carrara. The quarries have been in use since Roman times. We saw where the marble is supposed to have come from for Michelangelo's David. It's incredible to think of how much marble is moved out of those mountains on a daily basis. We are literally eating away at the mountain range.

Pompei was incredible in a different way - a city paralyzed and preserved in an instant ...