History

Wow I didn't realize that I hadn't blogged in a few days. I'll try to remember everything I've done in the past couple of days. On Wednesday, after my Italian class, I walked around the market a bit. I got some food that was pretty good and pretty cheap too. I didn't end up buying anything else, but next week I definitely will. I saw a few things that I wanted to get, but I refrained from getting them. I feel like there's a lot of stuff that I want to get and not enough space to bring it back, especially if I am getting stuff for other people too. Wednesday afternoon, we went on a "field study" for our class. It wasn't much of a field study seeing as how we literally sat inside St. Catherine's basilica and our teacher talked to us the whole time. We might as well have been in the classroom because she didn't even have us look around or talk much about St. Catherine's basilica. Not to mention it was freezing in the church. My hands and feet went numb and I wasn't able to take notes after a bit because of that. I found out yesterday that our teacher had gone to the hospital afterwards because she had been sick before the field study and being in the cold that long made it worse. Needless to say, I don't think we will be doing anything like that anytime soon.
Thursday I only had one class, so I got to sleep in! It's a good way to sort of start off the weekend. The class I have on Thursday, we will usually end up doing a field study then. So, we went to the museum in the town hall. This was for my renaissance art and patronage class and our teacher talks extremely fast. She's really cute and very enthusiastic about the class, which is really nice. But I got overwhelmed with how fast she talks and having to really pay attention so I don't miss something. Some of the stuff she showed us was kind of cool and actually learning how to analyze paintings a bit was cool. Thursday night we went to a club called Barrone Rosso (the Red Baron) since it's apparently University night on Thursdays. It got really crowded and we basically had no room to dance and people were bumping into us all night. Every time we go out, there seems to be a couple of guys that never leave us alone. No matter how many times we push them away and tell them to leave us alone, they always come back. We aren't going to change our minds.
Today, since we don't have class on Fridays (woohoo!) I got to sleep in again! I keep thinking it is Saturday and it's not. At least it's not Sunday and I'm thinking it's Saturday. It was pretty cold and windy today, which kind of sucks. It's hard to do anything on days like today. I just don't want to go outside and yet I want to go do stuff around town. We went to visit a contrada museum today, which was kind of cool. We went to the porcupine (istrice) contrada. I really wish that some of the tour guides we had spoke English because it can get kind of boring when someone has to translate. A lot can get lost in translation also which means that we aren't getting the whole idea of what we are looking at. I also felt like a lot of the stuff that we looked at was pretty similar. Most of it was banners from different years that this contrada won the palio and what people wore in the past. I think I was just expecting more and I didn't get it. Something I did find interesting though was that there are 17 contradas and only 10 of them race during each palio. There's one palio in July and one in August. They are completely separate from each other. So each year only 10 contradas race in the palio. The next year, the seven that didn't race in the previous year race along with three others that are chosen by the 10 that raced in the previous year. Also, the horses are chosen for the contrada. Horses names are drawn from a bag or something and are given to a contrada. You can't change the horse you get. If it gets hurt or sick, then you can't race. You can change your jockey as many times as you want, but you can't change your horse. Because of that, the horses are treated very well the last couple of weeks before the palio. Someone sleeps with them each night and makes sure they are 100%. They go through all this work for a piece of cloth. They get a banner that they hang up in their contrada museum. All that work for what seems like nothing. I guess the pride and bragging rights is what really matters. I think the tradition of it all makes it that much greater. People will find their spot in il campo 5 hours before the race and just stand there until the race starts. Then the race only last for 60-70 seconds. I think it's fascinating to learn about the history and hear about what the traditions are here in Siena. The pride people take in their contrada is crazy and I love it.