Culmination (6-1-09)

To start off I would like to thank all of those that have been part of this trip. This includes those that have been following my blog (Family and Grandparents), those that have been in communication from home (Clarkson Publications Department), the students that have been on the trip with me, and special thanks to Professor Frascatore and Wears for doing a great job at orchestrating the entire trip. Now that I have had a few hours to think about this trip (this plane ride back is really long) I’m going to weigh the pros and the cons of the trip and with these I will note some possible amendments to the trip.

PROS:

• · Wonderful sites and attractions and we couldn’t have asked for better professors to guide us along the way.
• · The hike up Mount Vesuvius was definitely worthwhile.
• · The small businesses seem to work great. What I mean by this is that at the small businesses I always saw more hospitality towards us and I feel like because of this we were able to communicate more with them and thus learn more from them.
• · This year’s group was a great group to travel with. I find that everyone got along to some degree and that we are all leaving better friends than we would have ever thought of. I also found that our group was quite responsible and that we all greatly enjoyed the trip.
• · The individual projects worked quite well. I think we all got something out of the reports and it was also fun attempting to go to all the places that the class had researched.
• · The kitchenettes in our rooms I think were quite useful and I think it did save me quite a bit of cash over the entire trip.

CONS:

• · Some of the businesses I find we didn’t really need to visit and it almost seemed like we were not worth their time. Some of these businesses / places include Nestle Factory and the Navy Base. I thought that we were going to go to these companies for more than just a tour; I was expecting to learn something through them and be able to ask intelligent questions too.
• · The group of thirty was a little too big. I could see how last year’s class of nine was too small but this year the group was too big. It was difficult to hear everyone at all of the factories and it was also difficult to transport us all up and down Italy. I mean when you go out to dinner with a group of fifteen people, which happened occasionally, it is difficult to not only find a place to eat but it is also difficult to figure out the bill and such.
• · Professor Gwynne is a great and extremely intelligent man but for those that are not as interested in history as others he can come across as a boring man. I would have loved it if he was more specific about one time period and / or if we had shorter classes with him because most of the time I had a very difficult time following his train of thought for the two and a half hour classes.
• · The Rosetta Stone course was useful at getting our feet wet in the language but I feel that the Rosetta Stone was a lost cause because it covers such a broad topic range. For that reason I would have much more preferred a professor to teach us Italian in the states so that way we could be more specific such as learning how to order food and how to meet and great people effectively. With this proposition I must touch upon Professor Maurizio Valtieri. Maurizio is a very intelligent man too but I feel that the language courses that we took in Italy were a waste. I never really learned anything from these classes because I picked up most of it from the Rosetta Stone course. I also didn’t really see the point of using him when we cut the class short due to different reasons pretty much every class. This will be interesting to see how this works out but I feel that how it is right now just didn’t work effectively.

Now I know that it looks like there are a lot of negatives but there really isn’t. The reason why the negatives look long is because I wanted to elaborate on the things that I think needed fixing so that way next year’s trip can be even greater than this year’s trip! Overall this trip was an amazing trip and I’m really glad I was able to go. I strongly advise this trip to anyone that is thinking about it. I had a fun time and I made some great friends. So as I post my final blog entry for this trip I will say two last words. First off I would like to day that I would strongly go on this trip and that if you do go travel as much as possible. My second and final word is that if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me. I can be reached at fogartjj@clarkson.edu.

Day 21 (5-31-09) Giro D'Italia

Today was a day of culmination. It was the last full day of our trip to Rome. I started off the day by finishing up packing and then I ate whatever was left in the fridge for lunch. After this it was time for the Giro D’Italia. This was the best culminating activity that could have happened to end this trip. We are all tired and exhausted after how much effort we have put into this trip and it felt amazing to have a payoff this big. A group of us (Laura, Caitlin and I) stayed the entire five hours of the race. It was amazing and empowering to see so many people and to see the dedication of the cyclists. And of course we got to see Lance Armstrong, photographed above with Caitlin in amazement. It was so much fun and I haven’t felt that much adrenaline run through my body in a while. It was encouraging to see how much work and how tough all of the riders were whether it be recovering from a bad crash or the sheer power of cycling up some of these hills. I hope in the future I can see a race like this again. I took over two hundred photos of the race so I will be sure to post them sometime in the near future. After the Giro a group of us headed out to dinner by the Pantheon and we concluded the night with some gelato. Now time for some sleep before our long plane ride tomorrow. I will be back home (in Potsdam) tomorrow!

Day 20 (5-30-09) Relaxation

Today was a day of preparation and relaxation. I started off the day with twelve hours of sleep. After this I woke up and made myself some lunch from what was left in the fridge. After this I finished up some journals and photos that I have been waiting to post for a few days. It has been amazing how much we have done in the last few days so it felt good to do very little today. After I posted the last four blogs that I have been holding out on I went for a walk / photograph session for two hours in Villa Borghese. It was a great day to get out and walk around. It was also great to go and do some people watching. I felt so relaxed while I was doing it and it felt almost like I was back in the states. I took many great photos but one of the ones that stood out to me the most is posted above. I think I may call it “walking off to the future”. With this series of photos I was trying to grasp the feel of being in Rome and / or Italy. After I finished up my walk through the park I came back to the hotel where I did some reading of the websites that I normally read when I have time back home. After this I went out to dinner with room 314 (minus Liz and plus Julia) at the local corner restaurant. Here I ate a whole pizza and boy did it fill me up. Now I’m writing this journal and after this I will do some packing and some more research on the Giro D’Italia that I get to go watch tomorrow! One more day left: SCARY!

Day 19 (5-29-09) Florence

Today was the first day of our last three day weekend in Italy and a few of us wanted to change some things up. Now don’t get me wrong, we all love Rome but I feel that I have seen all that I want to see of Rome so instead of staying in Rome again this weekend a group of us decided to make a day trip to Florence! We started out first thing in the morning by catching the 9:05 slow train to Florence. After about a three and a half hour trip we arrived in Florence. Once we arrived we first got settled in by going and getting some pizza and calzones at a corner store because we were all starving. This is where we figured out that today was going to be a good day; the first meal that we had in Florence was AMAZING! It filled me right up and it was cheap. After we finished our meal we went and visited Santa Maria del Fiore. This is when I started to realize that the architecture in Florence was more from a renaissance period compared to the mixed architecture of Rome. Santa Maria was beautiful from the outside and was decorated in ornate and extremely detailed decorations. When you stepped inside the architecture changed to a very simplistic and plain design with only a few details here and there. It was a pleasure to the eye to see this change in architecture because I have been getting a little tired with the Roman architecture. After we finished touring the inside of Santa Maria we decided to climb to the top of the cupola just like we did at Saint Peters. The only difference with this hike was that it was a lot easier than Saint Peters but you got a much better view. From the top of Santa Maria you could see the outskirts of town and if you circled around the entire dome you could view all of Florence. It was another spectacular that was really worth seeing. After we finished touring the church we decided to start to just walk around Florence because one of the downsides to visiting Florence is that you have to pay to enter most exhibits and churches. So we just started walking around and sooner or later we ended up finding a place to shop which the girls in our group loved. This is also when I was able to get some photographs, like the one above, of the city and the beautiful architecture that it has to offer. After we finished up most of the shopping it was time to go to dinner. So our group went out and got dinner at a little restaurant on a side street next to Santa Maria. The food was excellent once again and it was cheap! It was also here that I realized how much more English was spoken in Florence compared to Rome. Pretty much everyone that was at dinner and the waiter were able to speak English and so did most of the other people that we met along the way throughout the night. Heck I even met a woman from Connecticut at dinner who was there with her husband for a few weeks. It was really a nice change of pace to be able to actually communicate with people rather than having to use jargoned Italian in order to get around. After this we headed out wandering towards a market on the other side of the town. On the way we stopped and got Gelato. This was the best Gelato that I have had yet! I got a strawberry gelato on top of a fresh made waffled covered in hot Nutella. It was so delicious. After we got our gelato we continued to walk along the side streets of Florence and the women continued to shop. As the day drew to an end we headed back to the train station to catch a high speed train back to Rome. After a twenty minute delay we boarded the train and now we are heading back to Rome. When we get back I’m going to freshen up and then go to bed to get a good night’s rest before the rest of the long weekend comes along. I do want to say that the side trips are definitely something that everyone should do and that I loved traveling out of Rome to do what I wanted to do.

Day 18 (5-28-09) Peroni Beer Company and Farewell Dinner

Today was our last day of classes for our Rome trip. We started out the day a bit later than normal, ten o’clock, with an Italian language and culture lesson. This last language lesson was interesting because it was a bit different than the other classes. Today’s class was structured around the idioms that are used in the Italian language. Some of them could be directly translated into our language but some of the idioms were completely different from the idioms that we use in America such as “to be mozzarella” or to be a person that is a bit frumpy. After we ended this lesson a bit early we headed out to the last business we were going to visit: the Peroni beer factory. This was once again an interesting tour. We started the tour out with the man that runs the production of the beer and he is in fact the number two beer taster on the global beer taster list. It was interesting to see how they produce beer and to see how much beer that they actually produce. It was hard to believe that they were processing around 75,000 bottles of beer per hour. After we finished up the tour with this gentleman we went on a tour of the museum with a different person. This tour was a bit boring and took a little bit of time but overall I think that everyone, including myself appreciated the hospitality of the corporation. After the museum we headed over to taste some of their beer. This is where the tour didn’t meet my expectations. I was expecting to go and learn how to actually taste a beer. Instead we sat around a table, such as photographed above, and just drank beer and munched on some snacks. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this but I would have much more preferred to learn how to taste test beer seeing as this trip was a trip all about learning. After this we headed back to the hotel where we quickly changed into more formal clothes so that way we could go to a farewell dinner with all of the professors and students. This dinner started out by visiting Aldo’s apartment where we were all amazed by how extravagant his apartment was. After some snacks and wine at his apartment we went over to San Lorenzo’s restaurant for dinner. This was a great restaurant to have the dinner at because the food was amazing but the street vendors got quite annoying during the dinner especially when we were trying to roast the professors. The best part of the night, according to me, was when we roasted the professors. It was fun to roast them and it was even more fun to see them try to roast us back. All of us had a great time but as the fun started to wind down we headed back to the hotel. After finishing this journal entry I think I will head to bed because I think I’m going to go to Florence tomorrow!

Day 17 (5-27-09) Pasta, Navy and Mount Vesuvius

If I ever had to say what day was the longest day in my life, today would have been the day. We left this morning around seven o’clock and we returned back to the hotel around eight thirty at night. It was a great day though. To start off we took a three hour bus ride to the Campanian region. This bus ride wasn’t as bad as the ones the other day because today the air conditioning actually worked! It actually worked so well that most of us froze on the way there. Once we got there we visited the Grangnano pasta factory. This was an amazing little factory to visit. It was interesting to see how this little family owned and operated company could compete in the global economy and end up being a main supplier of gourmet pasta to Williams and Sonoma. It was also a great visit because they exhibited so much hospitality towards us. I can safely say that when we all left we were very satisfied with the company and the people that made up the company. They even let us attempt to make pasta and a photograph of this is posted above. After this we went on an hour drive to go visit the US Naval Base in Naples. This was a very amusing bus trip because the bus had to take back roads in order to get there. We took many roads that I thought a bus would never fit down or turn down but in the end we made it through without a scratch. We gave great props to the bus driver for doing such a great job. When we got to the Naval base we got a tour of it. It was very entertaining to see and talk to people that speak English again. The tour was very entertaining but most of us wondered why we actually visited the base. After the base tour we took the bus most of the way up Mount Vesuvius. Once the bus parked we started to hike up the remaining portion, in our dress clothes. It was very amusing to watch people hike up to the top of Mount Vesuvius in dress shoes and heels. Once we got to the top though the view was spectacular minus a few clouds. From the top of the trail we were able to see quite a few towns, including Pompei, and we were also able to see the crater that was left in the volcano after the last time that the volcano erupted. I was also very excited here because my camera held through for the day and I was able to get the type of photograph that I have been trying to hunt down for the last two weeks. I now feel safe to retire my current camera in the state that it is in seeing as it has made it from Guatemala to New England to the top of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. After visiting the volcano we headed back to Rome. Once we got back and settled in a little a small group of us went and ate at the basement restaurant again. Now we are all going to hang out for a little while and then I will go to bed.

Day 16 (5-26-09) San Clemente and the Ministers Offices

Today started as another normal day. We started off with an art history class that took us to four churches. A figure in one of the churches, San Bernardino, is photographed above. After we did this we had a lunch break and then we had another art history class at the church of San Clemente. This church was very interesting because if you start at the bottom of the church and work your way up, you are actually working your way up through the history of Rome. This was a great culminating activity for our art history lessons. I do have some feelings about the art history lessons. To start off Professor Paul Gwynne is a great and extremely intelligent man. He was able to describe to us in extreme detail about a lot of history in Rome. Here in lies the problem though; there was too much detail. The two and a half hour classes were a bit long and for those of us that are not really interested in history it tends to put us to sleep. Overall I feel like the art history classes are needed but maybe with less frequently or about a more specific time period so that way we don’t have to cover a few thousand years worth of history in five art history meetings. After we finished our last art history class we headed over to the council of ministers office in Rome. This was a very interesting visit because we were allowed to see many things that most people don’t get to see and in fact if we probably wouldn’t be able to see the equivalent of these offices in the United States. I found it to be a great pleasure to visit these offices that the ministers hold their meetings in and where they vote on government regulations but it has been a long day. The tour was a little longer than expected and because we have had so many long days it caused a lot of our group to become very cranky. It was kind of disappointing that we kind or ran out of the offices when the tour was done because I would of liked to see more. Nonetheless we left and I headed back to the hotel in order to get ready for tomorrow because we have an early start tomorrow. When I got back I had some pasta that a group of us made and after I finish this journal I’m going to head straight to bed.