Sabato.

It's Saturday!
 

I'm tired, a bit hungover, and not feeling all that reflective on the week... QED. But that's okay. In Amy Poehler's book YES PLEASE she spends a lot of it talking about how she thought writing the book was the hardest thing she had ever done and didn't really like writing it all that often. Unlike Amy Poehler, I don't have a multi-million dollar contract or hosting award shows to work around to induce anxiety for this blog (I have enough of that anyway)... But I do like what she says about writing: "You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing it is the thing. The talking and worrying is not the thing."

Found this gem at the market. An enormous (maybe 10'x8' painting)

The first week of classes is over and done with. Our final class on Friday was the Tarantella - a traditional Italian dance. The man who led it could have begun hovering over the class and I don't think anyone would have been surprised. A visual: He came in wearing tight fitting black pants, a white turtleneck, and had one of the most severe, intense faces I've ever seen. He was bald but had a beard as well. What a combination.  We began dancing together on the ground. He spent a lot of time helping us warm up by relating us to babies on the ground. We writhed back and forth on our backs, reached up and tried to grab hold of our mothers, and discovered our butts. We eventually made our way through different levels until finally reaching standing. Spending a lot of time squatting was incredibly difficult on my thighs which are sore in a way I can't understand. Most of the Tarantella is done in a circle formation. We would put our hands on each other's shoulders and do steps that felt a bit like loosey goosey Irish step dance. It was really interesting to watch the students interact with the teacher... The energy and vocalizations made by the students was so strong and loud compared to this very zen, gentle man. He was so kind to us. It was very clear that he normally works with dancers who are very advanced, and he imposed no judgement on our funny little group.

Other classes: 

Philosophy - Lots of big concepts, problems, and not lots of solutions... But I guess that that's probably the way with philosophy. How does one become a philosopher? And once you are one, what do you do? The concept we focused on this week was essentially the "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for life" idea. Except this time we were learning about how by giving a man a fish (charity) you are essentially feeding his hunger (poverty). Interesting.

Italian - Very basic so far. Very fun. I need to learn fast. Every time I walk into town I am so struck by how incapable I am of speaking to anyone. It's very isolating and difficult.

Voice - We're spending a lot of time with the EBAS technique. This means a lot of pelvic and spine work on the floor with a partner while focusing on breath. She started adding sound yesterday, but not sound of our own. We would walk/run around the room and when she played a note on the piano we would have to find a partner. At some point (not always) she would ask us to sing that note or a series of notes and see how listening to the music affects the way we move, hold ourselves, and how we anticipate speaking. 

Commedia - This week we just had a lecture about the history of commedia from the director of the program. I arrived late, and when I went to apologize to the director after class, to which he said "You. came in late? I'm drunker than I thought." It was 11am. Good.

This morning I walked into town and went to the market which lines the streets. Tomorrow I'll go in to look at the antique fair and (hopefully) work on my Italian a little bit. I want to familiarize myself with the city a bit more as well... My inability to communicate only makes asking for directions even more difficult.

Ciao ciao ciao!

Ciao Arezzo.

Good Morning!

I've made ​​it! I'm sitting at my desk with my roommate Siobhan (somehow "bh" = "v" ... Pronounced Show-von) and she's typing away at her side of the room.

After a 7 hour flight to London, at night in London, a 2-hour plane ride, a train, and a taxi ... I'm finally here. This place is gorgeous. Unfortunately, my jet lag Has jet lag so I did not get a lot of sleep last night. However, I Took That early morning time and went for a walk around my neighborhood. 

This town is stunning.

As I Walked along the street (dirt roads, some cobble stone up here on the hill) I saw (nay, encountered!) A lot of drivers zipping past the narrow roads. Note to self: No listening to iPod while walking from now on.

Continuing this post a few hours later ....

We just had our first classes. At 9am this morning I had Italiian with a woman named Silvia and the 20 other members of Group B, the group I will be spending the most time with over These next few months. The Majority of them are Boston University students (as is the Majority in my program ... It's about 2/3 BU kids) and they're all incredibly friendly and warm and love gutteral moaning while doing movement work. It's cool! I tried doing some of my own vocal work in my movement class with them and found That it felt great. 

We just Had lunch and are going to be going into town in about an hour to mosey about and figure out cell phones. I'm anche going to try to buy a bunch of things That I did not bring along with me ... Like soap. Poor Siobhan.

I'm off to do a little bit of reading before our adventure in town. 

Hello!

Rig

A few pictures from this morning:

Pre-sunrise over Arezzo.

Sun's finally up!

Church near La Villa Godiola

Katie U. and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Am I human or am I monster?

I haven't slept in 21 hours. I couldn't do it in the airport. I found a Lady Friend to keep me company, and our conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi! Are you looking for a seat? Come join me!
LF: Look of pure disgust. Okay.

Me: Where are you flying to? 

LF: Are you using this seat for your bags?
Me: I'll move them.

LF: She didn't speak past this point. I miss her.

God continues to stroke, and stroke he did as I made it through both checking my bags and security fairly easily. I wore exactly 14 layers on my torso on my way through security, and made exactly zero friends in doing so. For those new readers who don't know me, I am 6 feet tall, blonde with almond-shaped eyes, 250 Horse Power cheekbones, and a 34DDD with a 28 inch waist. Much like Kate Upton. In fact, I am Kate Upton. Good. Now I know who my audience is. For most, the sight of Amazonian supermodel Kate Upton coming at you in any context means to part the water a la Moses, but this was not the case. Instead, I spent a lot of time dodging Londoners for little plastic tubs to put my things in. I got a lot of dirty looks, and nobody complimented by ingenuity in sneaking past another checked bag by wearing everything. I didn't even have Lady Friend to back me up.

Now, I have made it through security and it's 6AM. I had a caesar salad with a latte because that's all that Starbucks had. I questioned my latte and its caffeine content due to my lack of sleep, and so did God, apparently, because he dumped it all over the floor and my pants.

In addition, my tendinitis hurts. Terribly. Ah yes! I, Katie Upton, have tendinitis in my left foot thanks to bad shoes and over-use. "It ain't easy being lean (UUUHM HAS THAT BEEN PATENTED YET?). " - K.U. 

I will have missed orientation at school thanks to all of these mishaps, but it's still... Okay. I'm getting really good at Solitaire.



PS. Unfortunately, I can't imagine blog posts being anywhere near this frequent in the future. I'm just really bored.

Grounded.

Darling readers (that may be overly optimistic… Hi Mom and Zac I love you both),

            My trip has come to a screeching halt. Picture this:

I’m sitting on the bus, writing my blog entry that was posted merely an hour before when I come to the realization that I do not have the folder with all of my travel documents inside of it. Shock. Horror. But I keep it cool because the girl sitting next to me dons wearing a U Chicago sweatshirt and is reading a court briefing. Calmly, I pick up my phone and pointed it at the ground. Nothing. I turned the flashlight on. Something. I look around on the ground to no avail. The kind driver man had not put it underneath the bus with my backpack because I had it out to give my ticket to the man. I take a deep breath and turned to U Chicago: “Have you seen a yellow folder?” Response: “No.” Damn, she was cool. Not in the overhead bin, either. By some stroke  of God (it’s act of God but this was more of a gentle nudge) a man went into the overhead bin above me to retrieve pretzels from the bus stash, and out falls my yellow folder. However, my passport is not inside of it.

I don’t have my passport.  I still don’t have my passport and it’s 3 hours later. This is very bad. I now know what it’s like to be a mother at an amusement park looking for my child. I yelled its name a few times but the kid had certainly slipped the leash. My mother called the Dartmouth Coach while I sprinted the halls of the bus, and indeed, the passport was two and a half hours away at the bus station in Lebanon, NH.

Now at Logan airport, I ran to Lufthansa (my airline) to see what I should do. After all, I had a printed copies of my passport and visa page just in case this happened. No dice. I ran to the ticket office. “We can’t refund your ticket. You got it through a travel agency that looks shifty.” For the record, Student Travel Association is not a shifty name. Lufthansa, however, sounds like an airborne disease. From there I went on a goose chase to customs, back to the ticketing office, to the boarding desk, and then finally settled in on a public chair to talk to my mom.

Thanks to my phenomenal, endlessly forgiving, brilliant, kind mother, I’m going to be arriving in Florence, though a day after everyone else. And that is okay. I have sauntered past rage, disappointment, and sadness and moved into quiet submission that is, finally, gratefulness.  In order to get this passport and ticket my brother drove two and a half hours to come deliver my passport to me, and will be doing the same drive after its delivery it to get back home. My mom jumped through a lot of hoops to get to talk to the same travel agent she booked a flight with, got me an Uber account, and spent money that I so wish she didn’t have to.  In addition, one of my close friends from home offered up his Boston home for the night, and I had the ear of a wonderful boy to listen to a mini tantrum. I’m not going to be getting to Florence when I thought I would, but I will get there. There's a big snowstorm tomorrow, so I'm going to try to get into the air as quickly as possible. Tonight, I’m spending the night in Logan airport, and tomorrow I’m going to be sleeping in London (hello old friend!) before finally flying to Italy that following morning.

My guardian angel for organization and groundedness clearly never made it past inspection when I was born, but somehow I was granted an incredible variety of people in my life to try to make things okay when I need help. It’s okay to reach out, it’s okay to trust in others. 

When Jerry Seinfeld goes onstage to do his stand-up he has a little trick: He gives himself an “impossible task” to get past before he starts his set. Whether it’s picking up his microphone in just the right way, making the step onto a stair in just the perfect manner, whatever before he gets going. As this adventure to Italy has begun, I dropped the microphone and tripped up the step, but that doesn’t mean the set is over. I’ve got this and I’m starting to feel good again. May this be the worst of my problems.

Home for the night

And… I LOVE YOU MOM!

Leaving day.

"I'll read your blog until you inevitably get wrapped up in what you're doing and forget to update it."
      - My accurate, loving, wonderful boyfriend Zac.


I'm back and writing on blogspot again! Tell your friends. I must be trending by now, especially after my last blog as an 18 year old in Ireland who primarily only waxed philosophical on why I didn't have a boyfriend. As evidenced from above, I'm truly a new woman.

I'm currently on the Dartmouth Coach, a bus headed for Logan Airport. At around 8pm I'm going to be getting on a red-eye flight to Arezzo, Italy, where I'll be studying commedia dell'arte at the Accademia dell'Arte for the next 3 months. Arezzo is about 40 minutes south of Florence by train, and we will be living in a villa. Stick a fork in me this blogpost is DOOOONE!

 Yesterday, Zac and I watched Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni. The movie has been my favorite for years, and while we were watching the most beautiful thing happened. With a picture of a car careening down the Tuscan countryside as its backdrop, the opening credits read the words "AREZZO, ITALY  1939".  Immediately upon this realization, a lightning bolt hit and Miley Cyrus was knighted.  I had never noticed this (rather large) detail in the movie, and I spent the next hour in a frenzy of excitement watching Guido and his family traverse the city that I knew I would call a temporary home.

I don't speak Italian. I find that rather concerning. I've taken Spanish off and on for around 7 years, so my hope is that having some knowledge of romance languages will help me. I will be taking an Italian class as part of my curriculum, but the next few hours will be full of familiarizing myself with common words, phrases, and quips.

National Gallery, London

I spent last semester in London, and the two years before that were at Skidmore College. First and foremost; I love Skidmore. It fit all of my requirements for a liberal arts school when I was in high school, and for the most part lives up to all of my dreams of what college years should be. However, when I was in high school I spent a lot of time debating between going to an acting conservatory or a liberal arts school with a bangin theater program. What this year abroad has done is helped to satiate some of my wanderlust and also included two schools in which I am able to fully immerse myself in theater. In London I saw an incredible amount of theater, and also finally sat down to read the plays I've always told myself I would. In addition, the semester was full of some of the most wonderful, kind, intelligent, curious people I have ever met. There were several students from Skidmore at my program, most of whom I barely knew upon starting the program, and also around 40 others from schools including USC, Tufts, Vassar, Northeastern, Bowdoin, Whitman... To name a few. London's program provided a comfort in socializing that I hadn't experienced at Skidmore for a while. I am so lucky to have had that experience.

That last paragraph was extraneous. The truth of the matter is that the bus driver just put my backpack underneath this bus so all I can do for the rest of this bus ride is blog. But, truly, I am very lucky.

The classes I'm going to be taking: Commedia dell'arte (or, "Acting"), Movement, Voice, Beginning Italian, The Philosophy of Art and Performance, Extended Performance Topics: Physical and Visual Comedy.

I don't know what to expect (in Italy... At the airport I will be drinking beer and preparing for a night of being gassy and uncomfortable), and that feels good. I know I have a few personal goals that I want to achieve (adopt a slower pace of life, be gentle with yourself, reduce my pore size, etc.), but for the most part I'm going to let this semester take me where it will.

Oh! - 18 year old me would also be thrilled to know that I'm on stop #1 of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love journey.  Since then I've realized that Gilbert had a book deal before even leaving her front door and that the whole thing is a bit self-obsessed and implies the only way to get happy is to leave the hemisphere. Ha. Yes, 18 year old me would be thrilled. My blog (thank you Boco) is Eat, Eat, Eat.


Arrivederci!