This was our week of “lasts”.  The last day of school. The last mint and chocolate gelato. The last family dinner. The last kebab….and so on and so forth. We had out last studio dinner and had one last hoorah as a class. We had a blast eating, drinking, sharing stories and toasts, and as usual eventually ending up at the bars later on. I forgot to mention that we (me and the guys) had a few drinks before we left that were all purchased from the grocery store with our change bucket. We had twenty something euros of change that we used to buy drinks for the last night. The night was a great success.

I managed to succesfully pack all of my own things into two bags, a simple set up to travel home, however I was given a bag and a half of things to take home from “the girls”. There was seven of us traveling home together and a total of nearly thirty something bags. Needless to say I was not the only workhorse who had to take some extra stuff home. Worried about overweight bags, and lugging everything to the airport the day was although a lot of travel, a success. We all made it home with all of our luggage and the four months of Italian adventures had come to an end….a bittersweet ending. 

This week was spent at Val d’Orcia. Essentially it was a short trip to a few small towns. The highlight of the trip for me was the Tuscan Landscape. The vineyards, olive rows, mountains, and fields were quite the spectacle especially when paired with a beautiful sky. The lunch we had was true Italian cuisine and a good reminder of what we would be missing when we got back into the states. The red wine that we had for lunch was amazing too; a specialty of the region. The day ended with harsh rain and we all went home that night prepared to begin the planning and scheming for our travels back to the United States.

This week was a no travel week for many of us. Tyler, Logan, Zach, and myself stayed in Orvieto and did these following things (in no particular order): worked on our studio things (not too much though), played scrabble (A LOT), made mega pasta bowls that would last for many meals, and of course we went to mass at the duomo for “domenica di pasqua” or Easter Sunday.  It was interesting to see how Easter was celebrated here in Italy. To put it simply I guess you could say it was less “flashy and less pastely”. There was a lot less of the chocolates and what not, except for the giant chocolate eggs that were sold in the supermercatos. Mass was even something different than I expected. It was short, with no kneeling, and no wine. It was something to experience for sure though. Sitting in the large duomo was quite the setting for Easter Sunday. That pretty much sums up our weekend and now we are off for the final push of the semester to complete our projects. Next week is our last trip before we prepare ourselves to come back to the states. I cannot believe the time has come to go home already. 

This past week we traveled to Sienna. It was not necessarily my favorite trip. We started at a museum. I never really have been a museum kind of guy. Nevertheless I made it through the museum and we continued the “class” portion of the day. We saw the duomo there that looks very similar to the duomo here in Orvieto. A group of us walked around and explored in the afternoon and did not really find anything that was all that impressive. It was still a neat little town but nothing unique. A good amount of people were traveling this weekend but us five guys did not so we had a dude weekend back here in Orvieto.  It has come down to where the end is near  for this amazing semester abroad….which means we must produce and finish our projects so we have something to show for our time spent here haha…. so we also spent half of a day in studio working on our chapel designs. 

On Saturday there was a chocolate festival that we visited and I had my first cannoli ever. Wow was it good! I really have been missing out. There were lots of other delicious looking things at the chocolate festival but my favorite had to be the tools carved from chocolate. The tools were completely made from a solid block of chocolate and shaved down to look like hammers, wrenches, spurs, and other objects. Some of the tools looked so real I do not think I could have told you that it was made of chocolate had I not known it before.