Our first week of classes is over. The studio is an apartment on the top floor of this.. apartment near the train station. it's really nice. There are two floors and we divvied up the rooms as studio spaces. I have the 'garret' room. Up the stairs next to a broken washroom and two other smaller studios. I am going to be sharing my room with another student, Heather I think (as she wants to use the bathroom as a Dark Room). I choose last for studio space, as I like to plain air paint, so I don't really need a studio to sit in most of the time. There is some issue with the power in the studio (as in the wall plugs don't really work all that good..IE at all), thus the promised internets there has not come to fruition.
Last night, I decided to wander the streets for the first time at night, in the Piazza del Ciompi. There is a lot of live music being played and it's quite the happening place. I listened to this one Italian band called "Big Black Mama", who were playing good old american blues. I chilled out there for about a half hour or so. They were fantastic and it was a greta way to spend the evening.
Today I visited the local Games Workshop store for the second time. I arrived after 12, as they close between 1 and 2pm (only one guy, Pietro, runs the store, he needs time for lunch). So I basically hung out a bit awkwardly for a while, skimming the new Ogre Kingdoms book. Pietro loved the fact that there was an english speaking person to talk to (He is an Italian who dislikes speaking Italian, he claims that English is the most expressive language he knows). Him and one of the (I assume) regulars invited me to join them for lunch. We went for some panini's (which were amazing) and Pietro insisted we get Gelato's afterwards, as I had not had one yet. That too was also pretty damned good and I finally found out which flavor was vanilla. I was using my sketchbook as a means of transcribing my army list and Pietro wanted to take a look at it. He was so impressed that he wants me to draw and paint the Firenze Games Workshop store's banner for Games Day next month. He especially liked my drawings from Bancroft and Camp.
I played my first game in Italy against this fellow named Lorenzo. It was a good game, ended in a Tie. I've joined the local store league which plays on Fridays.
Side information.
Street Traffic here is insane. There are a lot of bicyclists and scooters everywhere. They also will often not follow any sort of conventional rules of the road. They will zip around cars, up one way streets, it's pretty crazy. Even normal vehicles are driven with reckless abandon and I've seen a lot of near misses. The sidewalks are also often extreamly narrow. Some areas (south of the (Arno especially) it's difficult to walk down them due to the storage boxes on the backs of scooters parked along the side of the road. Scooter drivers park their scooters almost everywhere they can fit. It've seen cars parked often on pedestrian zebra crossings as well. Pretty crazy.
Also, someone(s) have added these stickers to street signs around the city. Very funny, I only have pictures of two of them, but there is more.
Here are just some random pictures from around the city.
This is the view from a garden owed by this palace Prince Dianna stayed at when she visited Florence. I don't know the name of the tower. The palace is now owed by the family that produces a certain wine. See the following picture for pictures of the bottles.
This photo is snapped from one of the windows in our studio. Very nice view.
An Equestrian statue in the Piazza Della Signoria. Image of Cosimo I de Medici by Gianbologna
This last set of pictures are just images of the Arno I took. I quite like the river. I wonder how I get a Kayak to paddle in it with.
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