Our principal secured us a conference room in a nearby hotel so we walked there at 8:15 for class. We began class with my 30 minute seminar on Sophocles’ Antigone (technically Аντιγονη) which was a surprisingly engaging for a 2500 year old play. I got the class to do an activity then lead a philosophical debate about the nature of laws and such. We continued the class with a lesson on the Hellenistic revolution (Alexander the Great) and the subsequent end of Classical Greece. Jam then gave his seminar on Heroditus (Ηροδότον) and his account of the Persian Wars. After class I learned that I got 90% on my seminar. My teacher made everyone a proposition that if we took a second seminar he would average the marks, and then add 10% of the average to the mark. For example, if I got 90 on the first and 70 on the second, the average is 80, +10% is 88. I decided to take on a second one (The Aeneid by Virgil) because, by my calculations, as long as I got 74% or higher my 90% would increase.
For lunch I headed to the café with Ty and Lex (Two of the other guys) and had a pizza burger on a pita, which was messy but very good. After that we hurried back in order to make it in time to load the bus for Pisa. The bus ride took about an hour and a half, some of which I dozed for. Once there we realized that there was nothing but a nice church, the leaning tower and tons and tons of cheap touristy things as well as quite a few African guys trying to sell us “authentic designer sunglasses” out of cardboard boxes. After our 45 minute visit we loaded up the bus again and headed back for another hour and a half. I know you can’t do Italy and not see the leaning tower of Pisa, but it really is not much more than a tourist trap.
Dinner was pretty much right after Pisa. The day before we had had an unexpected addition to our group: Georgia Hardy, the woman who started the company that runs our tour. She stayed with us until we left Florence, then she was staying with another group that was coming into Florence the day we left, and then going to France to meet up with yet another trip. She accompanied us to lunch and then stayed and chatted in the common room afterwards. After dinner I used the hotel internet (they finally relented) and finished my second travel journal (the description of David from the day before). After curfew I finished (500) Days of Summer which turned out to be an outstanding movie.
Congratulations on doing so very well on your seminar.....30 minutes, good god, that must've seemed like an eternity (or at least it would to me if I had to present!). By the way, I came home from our week away to a phone message from Victoria at Georgia Hardy Tours, saying your mid-term mark is 90%. Bravo, mio figlio!
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