Stress

Today was a little stressful. This morning I signed up for the day I'm going to give a presentation for my Art History Course. I instantly knew I wanted to go early in the semester (to get it over with) but didn't want to be the first one, so I signed up to give a presentation in 3 weeks on September 20th... Well turned out most people rather wait a little bit longer because even though I am not presenting for three weeks I am the FIRST person presenting. So hopefully I will get some sympathy since I will be the guinea pig. I am presenting the painting Gentile Da Fabriano-Adoration of the Magi. But I got lucky because today we went on a site visit for studio to the Uffizi Museum since we are redesigning the exit of the museum for our project. The Uffizi Museum happens to be the home of my painting I am presenting. So I got to see it get some pictures and get the information the museum provides for some help!

Anyway the museum is HUGE and beautiful! It is covered in paintings and sculptures from all different time periods. Since we are visiting for studio we were more focused on seeing the poorly designed exit over seeing all the works of art, but I will be going there two more times with another class and I'm eager to see the rest. Our teacher hates the exit to this museum, you walk through 5 rooms of souvenir shops on your way out of the building, as we entered each room our professor would say more JUNK! They were each filled with tacky souvenirs that no-one really needs. So she encourages us to tear those rooms apart during our renovations.

The exit of the museum is truly poorly designed so years back there was an international competition for the same project we are working on. They invited famous architects to come to Italy and design a exit for this museum, and whoever won would have their design constructed. Well the competition declared a winner, but Italy is known for never following through on projects, so the project was started but never finished so currently there is just a big ramp surrounded by construction walls and machinery... and to be completely honest the winning design isn't very impressive (picture is attached)

When we went back to the classroom after our visit we had to scale everything with the metric system to begin our drawings. Even though we have mostly comprehended how that scale will work, its not easy to figure out how to change all of our programs into the metric system. It caused a lot of unneeded stress. We got our first two assignments that are due two days apart and the Wednesday in-between is when I present for my art history course. So after my 4 hour class and some dinner I already started all my research.

For dinner Anna and I tried this restaurant that is only like 3 minutes from our apartment but has great reviews called Za Za. We decided to go there because I was in the need of some meat. Don't get me wrong i LOVE pasta but every once in while I have to get a meal full of protein. So we each went telling ourselves we were having some sort of meat for dinner. Anna got the italian version of chicken nuggets and fries, and I got what the menu called "Charcoal grilled meats" It was a plate full of meats and potatoes. It had a chicken breast, a lamb chop, piece of steak, AND a sausage patty. It was exactly what I needed and even though it was a lot it was a good portion!

We were planning on going to Pisa tomorrow but its suppose to rain so we pushed that back to Saturday. So we plan on working on studio more tomorrow to continue to get ahead so I'm not overwhelmed when it comes to my week of presentations!