The city is your textbook

My social circle is expanding. Today was the first day of classes. When I made it to school in the morning there were actually people I have met to chat with so school is all beginning to feel a little more familiar. I also made some new friends in my first art history class who like talking about...art history. It makes me so happy, art was my reason for coming here and I was beginning to think I was only going to meet business and communication majors surprisingly. I actually had a conversation today where we gushed over both Monet's Garden and the Pieta. The art history class was Roman Imperial Art and Architecture. The professor is intimidating in the kind of way that makes you want to be at the top of the class. He assured us the class would be challenging and my first thought was Sweet! This is mostly because he seems to really know his stuff and we will be spending the majority of the semester out in Rome understanding the layout of the ancient city. He explained that we have no textbook because "the city is our textbook" and we are going to have to "learn to take notes while walking". He explained that we can see the art anytime we want because it is available to us 24 hours day. For those of you unfamiliar he is refering to structures like the Roman Forum and Trajan's Column. Sweet.
The second class I had was Masterpieces of Italian Opera. It was one of those experiences akin to watching the olympics. You see the athletes exceling and the excitment of the event and think: I wanna do that! I'm not past my prime to be an olympic swimmer. Wether this is realistic or not, I left that class saying I wanna be an opera singer! Do you think i've missed that boat yet? Anyway lots of opera-going in store and just listening to all different types of music the way one eats a box of Godiva Truffles, slowly while trying to guess exactly which flavor each is.
My final class was Beginning Italian. For those of you who don't know my mother has taught English as a Second Language to adults for all of my life and I have been to her class many times over the years. Today was the strangest feeling of being the foreigner, the one who is just beginigng to understand. I understood why we did all the repetitive exercises and only attemped the same 10 phrases over and over again for an hour. I still haven't mastered where are you from in Italian (Che natzionalita sei?...It came out of my mouth in all that mispelledness). I can't wait to take my classroom italian out to the streets.
Today was also the day to sign up for school trips. Thanks to Amanda I made it into the trip to Pompei in October. I'm going to spend the rest of the evening doing some reading about other side trips like Assisi, Spoleto and Florence. I'm starting small but aiming to get to Paris!