Week Quattro,

This email is a bit late as the 5th week of my stay here is coming to a close. I hope everyone receives this since I am sending this on Friday the 13th. I just finished my first week of new classes. They went well, naturally. I give props to the professors teaching in their second language. There are some words that I will have to get used to hearing in an odd manner, such as “area”. One of my teachers stressed the “e” hardcore making it the word “area” rhyme with diarrhea. Enough about classes…

Thursday night of last week I went to the 100th anniversary of the Futurist movement, which supposedly started in Milan. The first portion started with some modern dance performances in the middle of the Galleria (big shopping area, the shops on the 4 corners of this intersection were Louis Vuitton, Mercedes, McCafè and some other expensive store). The next morning, Friday, I left Stazione Centrale at 7:50am for Nice, France. I met up with my roommates there and then we left for Aix-en-Provence. The trip from Nice to Aix usually takes about 2-3 hours but ended up taking 6 hours as our train broke down.

Aix-en-Provence
Aix is a small college type town in southern France.
I arrived around 7pm and met up with my friend from high school. Went back to her apartment and had some good food and went out around 11:30pm in search of a good time. Including myself there were 6 members of my high school class in attendance (2 came from Florence, my roommates, and my friend). We went to a nice pub of sorts and were successful in having fun. We ended up returning around 2am or so. The next morning we all got going around noon and headed to the local market. We all walked around exploring for the day (you can check the pictures on snapfish). My roommates and I took the bus back to Nice (2 hrs and whole lot cheaper than the train that broke down).

Nice
Nice was nice. (a large town on the Mediterranean)
We arrived around 8pm on Saturday and checked into our hostel located about 3 blocks away from the sea. We left the hostel for a bar that my roommates new of called Wayne’s. There was a very international crowd there with the common language being English. We met 2 girls, one from Denmark and one from Holland. We talked with them for most of the night. After the bar we found some amazing pizza on some small street that was still open. I ordered the pizza in French and heard the owner speaking in Italian so I tried some of that as well. She was really nice. The pizza was probably so good because she was Italian. We ate the pizza on the boardwalk with the moon out and the waves crashing against the beach. That was nice. The next day we climbed these steps to a top of a hill where there was once a castle. I took some good pictures from up there. We left Nice around 1:30pm for Milan and made it home around 9pm.

It was an awesome weekend.

Today, I got to finally play some soccer with some locals. I had seen this park that had some goals and decided to go there today around 3pm. There were 8 guys warming up and my roommate and I were asked to play. The field had a little grass in each corner and compact dirt everywhere else. I was sliding a bit when trying to cut but managed to put in quite a few goals. My team won both games easily. One of the Italians on the other team thought I had hit him in the face on purpose and wanted to confront me about the contact but resorted to just staring at me. He tried to come after me during the game with late hits but it was not enough to help his team win. I had no idea what he was saying but he was constantly talking. That was a good time.


Futurismi pictures
http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=254502169/a=157838589_157838589/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish

Aix-en-Provence pictures
http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=254502289/a=157838589_157838589/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish

Nice pictures
http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=254502101/a=157838589_157838589/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish


Karl