Siena, Italy: Lucca and Wine :-)

Ciao i miei amici e mia famiglia!! Mi dispiace molto perche non ho scrito niente per quasi tre settimane!
Hi friends and family!! I am so sorry I have not written anything in almost three weeks!

Lets pick up where I left off last time…

Top of the Church in Lucca

The week following Germany was accompanied by a chorus of sniffles and sneezes as almost everyone that went to Germany got sick. This was definitely due to the mixture of cold, rain and lack of sleep. That Thursday I aced my first Italian test ( yay!!) and then decided to stay in Siena for the weekend to rest up and save some money. This is always fine by me because I could wander around Siena or sit in Il Campo all day.. Which I do frequently. Il Campo is now my new favorite place to plop down with a good book and to people watch. It NEVER gets old because the tourists keep it interesting. One thing about people watching here: nothing will ever beat California amusement park people watching because that is where you can find the real crazies, but here is a close second. European fashion is so different, not bad.. But just different. The men especially never cease to take me by surprise. They often sport very white and very tight pants with nice shoes and a pink or purple scarf, and its totally acceptable. Some of them can pull it off quite well, and some.. Well.. Just make me chuckle a bit. I am not trying to make fun of fashion here, but living in California all of my life and being used to t-shirts, board shorts and flip flops makes this 180 difference all the more amusing.

Siena has become much more vivacious as the tourist season is beginning to end and all of the Italian students that attend the universities here have moved back to attend classes. Now, Il Campo is packed with young people milling about until 4 in the morning whereas before it turned into a bit of a ghost town at about 2. Along with the students has come the cold weather and the rain, so I finally have to put on my heavy jacket and boots every day. The best thing about the cold though is that I get to wear a scarf EVERYDAY, and if anyone knows me well they know that I love scarves.

The week after my lovely relaxing weekend was quite normal, except that I got to go to a winery in Tuscany! It was beautiful and simply breathtaking. It was a little bit bittersweet though because while I was thinking the whole time “ ah yes.. This is why I am studying viticulture” the reality of me having my own Tuscan vineyard and winery is probably not too feasible. However, I will just have to recreate my own Tuscany in California, so when I do you are all invited! Dievole Winery sits nestled in the rolling hills of Tuscany just a half an hour outside of Siena, and I was so pleased with the tour because I actually knew what was going on and I understood the mechanics behind what was explained. I was also very impressed with the GIANT wooden fermentation barrels they used, seeing as one would equal the cost of about half of my college fees and they had at least twenty of them. I left the winery feeling so excited about my course of study, but still very frustrated that I don’t have that internship yet. I bug the director about three times a week and every time it’s the same answer. Italians have a very different sense of time, and its always “ maybe today, maybe tomorrow… who knows? I will ask the guy.” and then I think ‘maybe never :-( ’. Either way, I am glad I at least got to experience one really good winery while I was here.

On Friday, about thirty of us went to an old Italian town called Lucca. It is very small and quaint and is still surrounded by a fort. We had a wonderful time renting bikes and riding all over town and around the entire wall. My friend Becka and I decided that we would be brave and try the tandem bike. We thought “ hey, we are both from Davis, we can bike with our eyes closed and no hands, this will be a piece of cake.” Two falls, a pole, and a fence later we were eating our words. It took us about ten minutes to finally get the rhythm and the hang of it but once we figured it out we were golden.

We then left Lucca and went to a garden where there were several real Italian villas. To say they were beautiful would be an understatement and my pictures do not do them justice. We got to walk around the gardens and villas for several hours. My favorite place we visited is a little bit hard to explain. It was an outdoor party area but it was build for an orchestra and was constructed into a giant semicircle by really tall hedges. The design was in such a way that it was supposed to be acoustically perfect because back in the day there were obviously no such things as microphones. So, of course, we had to test the theory, and had a great time singing a few popular songs to find that indeed we reverberated throughout the whole area quite easily. However, we were put to shame about five minutes later when a group of Italian tourists came along a erupted in a song that was so loud I am surprised you guys didn’t hear it?!?

Faraway View of a Villa

Me at a villa

Other features of the villas included HUGE outdoor showers literally as big as an apartment, and huge ponds/swimming pool/ bodies of water with statues and fountains galore. Many people still use the places for vacation.. Not a bad place to relax for a while. We returned to Siena later that evening and went straight to sleep to prepare for the rest of the weekend.

The next morning Chelsea, Becka and I woke up very early to go to Cinque Terre. Read my next blog to find out about that adventure!!

( This blog is really difficult to edit so I put most of my pictures here at the bottom, so just scroll down to view them! )