So it has been a busy few days to say the least:
I went to two wine tastings this week, one for my food and culture class on Wednesday and one through the school on Thursday night. They were both very different, I do have to say that I enjoyed the wine tasting from my class much better than the one through the school. The Sommelier who lead the class wine tasting did not speak a word of English, but our teacher translated for us. He told us the history of wine in Italy and how many of the vineyards in the north were attacked by a virus and they had to ship vines from America to save their crops (Go Napa :) ). The wines we tasted were absolutely amazing, I am actually still trying to get the names of the wines. The Sommelier that lead the wine tasting with the school was less informative: she spoke in english and even though she taught us how to taste the wine and look at it and such, she was not nearly as entertaining. Either way, both were a lot of fun: and as a matter of fact, I have decided to do my final research paper for my food and culture class on the virus that attacked the grapes and how that affected wine in Italy.
Then on Friday, Ariel (one of my roommates) and myself decided that we wanted to tour around Perugia a bit more and see the sites. Our plan of action: don't bring a map, just walk, and if we get lost then we get lost. So we walked around Perugia for about three hours (granted its a small town so we covered a lot of ground). But what we forgot when we set out was that Perugia is a hilltop town and all we did was go up hills, go down hills and then once again go up another hill. It was good though, we got to see parts of Perugia we had not seen yet and take a bunch of pictures. It also helped me with assimilating myself to the town so it was overall very helpful.
The following day, Saturday, Ariel and I dragged ourselves out of bed and made the short trip to Assisi. It was only about a 20 minute train ride; but once we got there by train, we had to figure out how to get on the bus let alone buy a bus ticket. Between ARiel and myself, we know maybe a total of 10 words in Italian. By the time we finally made it to town--we walked up the big hill that took us to the church of San Francesco. It was gorgeous! It has two different levels because one part of it was ruined in the earthquake of 1997. But the inside of the church was beautiful and I was so sad that we could not take pictures however it was breathtaking nonetheless. The rest of the day, Ariel and I wondered aimlessly around Assisi, (although, not entirely aimlessly, we had Rick Steves to help us out a bit and so we followed his self guided tour around Assisi). We got home just in time to take a nap, eat dinner and head out for the night: it was an extremely productive day to say the least.
Next weekend we are planning on heading up to Venice and Bologna so stay tuned....
Ciao!! xoxo
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