Chiao,

This past weekend I visited Trento and Lake Garda on an overnight trip led by Syracuse. It was a two-night trip with breakfast provided at the hotel. This was my first time in a hotel in Italy and it was more of a learning experience than I expected, the best advice I can give is to insert your key card into the wall of your room to turn on the lights. Although the hotel was a bit dim at first, the trip itself was radiating with beauty! Syracuse was not lying when they chose to call the Mountains and Lakes, though I did imagine a little more nature exploring than we did. The activities they crafted included tickets to a small museum, a boat tour, a guided castle tour, and of course pretzels (this region shares roots with Germany)! The cool thing about them taking us to Trento is it isn’t a touristic town, and it is a place where locals go for vacation. That is something all the tours I’ve gone on have in common; they are places students don’t normally visit mostly because they aren’t easily accessible without a car. Additionally, Syracuse tends to give students time to explore on their own. On this trip lunch and the evenings were left open for us to find food or activities without the entire group. It was an overall wonderful trip and I highly recommend it if you aren’t a fan of touristic locations.

Switching gears, my art courses have all been going very well and I enjoy all of them for many different reasons. I finally feel I have a good understanding of Drawing 1 Observation Florentine Sketchbook and want to share my experience if you are also interested in the course. To be totally honest the course started out on a not promising note. On the first day, a girl dropped out after the class was asked to line up our sketches and say which we think was the most and least successful. It was an intense and jarring task to outwardly say in a sense whose we thought was the best and worst. Each class is organized by meeting at the studio, then being given a location, a medium, and a time to be back by. After returning to the studio, we line up our work and are given a prompt to critique our own experience with the medium and our favorite drawing/ the most successful drawing for the assignment. I don’t want to discourage anyone from taking this course, but I also don’t want people to go into the course without this information. After the shock of the first day, the group became a lot closer and I grew to enjoy the professor’s sarcastic sense of humor. My fellow students are from all different levels of drawing knowledge, and all have experienced improvement. That being said, I wouldn’t consider this a class to learn how to draw. There are no lectures or lessons on perspective or proportions. Part of what I now understand, being three weeks away from the end of the semester, is that the first day’s jest is to show how some of the less successful students are now being chosen as people’s most successful. I guess to summarize if you hold through the first week and be vulnerable this course holds so many possibilities for you. It is one of my favorite classes.

Distinti saluti,
Rebecca