Munich Recap

So we're safe and sound and in Florence, and since we have FREE WiFi here (amazing!), I thought that I'd put together a quick recap of our day in Munich, as uninteresting as it might have been.

First of all, Munich is an absolutely beautiful city, and the people there are so nice (which I may or may not have already said).  Our main events of the day were going to two museums for art class, one specializing on art of the 16th and 17th centuries--mostly Rococo and Northern Renaissance--and then to the modern art museum.  I've finally figured out where I stand with modern art...I can really get into paintings especially if I have a big group of friends to talk about them with, but installations and weird 3D stuff always just confuse me/freak me out.  I'm definitely getting more well-versed in art, however, which makes me feel very cultured :-)

After the museums we went downtown to wander around and see the Glockenspiel, which was rather unexciting.  It kind of just looked like a Glockenspiel, not gonna lie.  We had our traditional Bavarian dinner after that then headed over to Hofbrauhaus, this very famous beer hall.  I drank an entire liter of dark beer by myself (liters are the only size they came in), then we decided to call it quits for the night and went back to our hotel.

This morning we headed out of Munich bound for Florence VERY EARLY, and despite a minor incident of almost leaving my passport in the hotel safe, the trip was very smooth.  We drove straight through the Austrian and Italian portions of the Alps, which was incredibly beautiful. After we stopped for lunch in Northern Italy we watched "The Sound of Music" on the bus to commemorate our exciting day in Salzburg.

We arrived in Italy fairly late, so we all ran around changing and trying to find food in an effort to get to our concert on time.  (We went to a Schubert concert tonight at one of the concert halls in Florence for music class.)  There were three pieces: an overture, a full mass, and a symphony, although the symphony was by far my favorite.  If you're interested, here's a link to the first movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoutYQ0sAYc

After the concert we went out to a very good (if not a tad bit uber expensive) Italian dinner...my friend Amy and I split a spinach risotto, which was excellent, and pretty much everyone else had the ravioli.  It turns out that despite the fact that I don't speak more than twenty words in Italian, my colored history of ordering only Italian food at restaurants has made me quite proficient in the language of menus.  Hm.

Anyway, tomorrow we've got three hours of class and then we're going to the dome, so I ought to get to bed.  Please comment if you like my posts--I miss you all terribly and I'd love to know that I'm not just writing to myself! :-)

Dara

PS: I'm fairly certain that photos are never easily uploading themselves to Blogger again, so just check out the Facebook albums...