Museums & Chocolate

I am so so sorry to all of my blog readers! I know it has been almost a week since my last blog. This week has been amazing. As always, I mean if I ever have a day that isn't awesome that will be something to write home about. Well I can't go through every detail of my week but I will hit up some highlights and per my boyfriends request I will include lots of pictures detailing what I am talking about:) Your welcome Sam.

Classes are going well, and I am loving everything that I am learning. I really have yet to have a bad class. In my ceramics class we were told to try and imitate a sketch or a piece of pottery we liked. So I picked out this adorable little vase with a spout on it for pouring to copy. I spent the next five hours painstakingly crafting each coil to look exactly like the vase I was trying to imitate. Apparently I am not the greatest at copying other peoples work. By hour four my vase looked nothing like I wanted it too. It actually had started to resemble a fat little bird, so naturally I turned it into a fat little bird. And surprise surprise I am pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Cute right? I am pretty excited to fire and paint it. I will take suggestions on colors:)

My other classes passed by without incidence until Thursday when my Medici class was scheduled to take a tour of the Duomo. However due to the weather my professor decided to cancel and lecture and show a documentary instead. Before I left for Italy I watched this three part documentary on the Medici family so I wouldn't be going into the class blind, and I actually enjoyed it. Well we watched this exact same documentary in class on Thursday. So being who I am and not thinking before I talk I grinned and said "Oh I have seen this documentary it's really good" to the girl next to me. She, apparently thinking I was joking, replied with a snort and a "good one." Apparently watching documentaries where she comes from is unheard of, whatever she is missing out.

Thusday night my roommates and I had dinner at the dining hall associated with our school. Every Thusday night is aimed toward a specific type of food and educating us on what we are eating. The night we went was a night of food and beer pairing all prepared in a six course meal of amazingness. We also tried three different types of beer to eat with our food.
The first course was steak tartar with a little baby egg fried on top and a sweet biscuit.

The next course was two succulent pieces of shrimp wrapped in prosciutto topped with a bit of beer foam. This was paired with an Italian beer, which I really liked.

Next was a creamy risotto topped with beets and toasted almonds

By this point we were all bursting at the seams with food but everything up to this point had been so amazing we were dying for more.
The next item was the best yet it was beer braised beef cheek with saffron potatoes that literally melted in my mouth.

By this point we had reached the deserts. The first was a small sphere of the best tasting Gelato I have ever had. According to the chef who came to talk to us it was glazed with malt! Even the Ice cream was beer themed. Oh also by this point we were tasting our third and last beer. It was a dark thick beer with a sweet tangy taste that was meant as a desert beer.

Finally we reached our last dish. It was a chocolate mouse with barley cream and lemon crumble. This almost pushed me to the edge of bursting, and for once I couldn't finish my desert!

By the end of the meal we were all grinning from ear to ear pleased with our company, the food, and the lovely evening. By the time I got home I was in a blissful state of happiness.

On Friday Mariana and I attended our first Museum, which we actually just stumbled upon on our way home. We bought the 8 euro pass that allowed us access to 9 other Museums all over Florence, which we thought was a pretty good deal. This Museum was called the Museo Horne and was a collection of art collected from homes all over Italy.

On Saturday four of us used our new 8 Euro pass to get into the Palazzo Medici Riccardi which was extremely beautiful! They have this room in one of the upstairs room that is covered in some really beautiful frescoes depicting some of the life events of the Medici Family. Downstairs they have an interactive exhibit where you stand on a designated spot in front of a projection screen showing the frescoes from upstairs with little boxes around certain areas. A camera tracks your movements and all you have to do is point to what you want to see and it zooms in and then gives you a little short clip of what that part of the painting is about.
Another one of the upstairs rooms had this amazing ceiling painting that we all stared at with our mouths open.

Beautiful right? 

After we left the Museum we went straight to the chocolate festival that was happening right down the street. Yea... you read that right... the chocolate festival. There were about 15 different booths selling everything you could imagine in chocolate.  

Everything in that picture is made out of chocolate! I ate a chocolate shish kabob of strawberries and bananas and because it was so cold I also bought a hot chocolate. The festival is going on all week and I am sure I will be back. Especially since I have to walk by it every day on my way to class. 

Well that has pretty much been my week. As always I will report back with more later. Love you all

Love from a very happy girl,

Natalie