we's a cookin up a party fa you

i'm busy with work that i care little about. manifestos and midterms. i'm ready for this final project but i'm worried we won't have enough time to create the next great building in our lives as architecture students. imagine the next great housing complex/market place for castiglion fiorentino, toscana and send your entries to me at room 33. many will play, one will win.

so tomorrow is halloween and i'm dressing as my photography professor but i lack glasses, white hair, a black vest, and a brightly colored ralph lauren tshirt. but good lord i have the beard. this thing is creepy long and coffee house approved.

and monday morning we leave for sicilia on the last great italian vacation. has anybody heard of this election coming up? tensions have been relatively tame here at campus but i imagine the results will show everybody's true colors. what's my true colors you ask? did you even ask? i feel pretty passionately about stuff but i try not make a big deal about it around others for some reason. let's just settle on the fact that i probably disagree with you either way.

that's all you get.

Deep into Fall

Today felt like autumn. More importantly it felt like autumn in the states and everybody seemed a little homesick because of it. It was cool though how the field trips kinda sucked (considering that we just went to see more churches and museums) but we spent most of the time just chatting and taking pictures of each other in the leaves.

On a related note, they all seem to long for someone back at home. That or they've all had someone visit them recently here or will have someone visit. I'm feeling kinda solo on this whole life thing right now and I'm strangely ok with it. Being content with yourself could be the greatest thing in the world. Be content along with someone else might be nice too. How melancholy.

Oh boy, I registered and got all the classes I needed plus I added tennis right at the last second. The past few days have included a bit of long term school planning which I've never been a fan of cause it makes me have to think of the future.Throw in the fact that many friends are already graduating/getting married/doing grad school and here I am content with whatever it is I'm doing right now. How pensive.

Gretchen is a smart girl.

swiss yearbook

What more can I say about the frustrations and resulting fun of traveling? Basically it gives you headaches and takes all your money, but when else do you get to bike across Salzburg at night to buy train tickets? When else does going to the grocery store involve trekking through tiny Swiss farming villages? You can only plan so much until the unplanned events become more memorable.

I want to tell the whole story but instead I’ll just give words and phrases that make sense to only Gretchen and me. It’s like when groups of friends buy ads in the back of the yearbook for all their inside jokes!

leaving on a jet plane…gimmewald or grindelwald?…ugly swiss money…smoking baby trains…friendly swiss transportation workers…the bus to stechelberg that we never took…japanese luggage…“10” minutes through murren….gimmewald or grindelwald part 2…waking up in the mountains…goats, chickens, cows, and tiny horses…bunless burgers…SCHILTHORN…gretchen’s fist snowball fight being at 3000 meters…mountain beard...let’s stop for pictures…fondue and lager bier hell…watching the cheaper, earlier train leave from your later, more expensive train window…running through the Milan train station…running through the Florence train station…creepy eurostar man!

Stay sweet. Never change. Have a great summer!
Marc
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Gutenblog

Well I´ve made it through Venice with som sort of (deadly) headcold. Being well would have helped the experience but I got enough architectural inspiration to make me want to get back to work soon.

No time for that though seeing as I´m in Austria. Yeah, after hoppinng a overnight train wth Gretchen and a few drunk kids from St. Louis, we´re now surrounded by Germans. Or at least they all speak German. It´s fun to slip into Italian though and get strange stares.

We watched the sound of music last night with everybody at the hostel. They´re watching pimp my ride now. Today we rode bikes to the outskirts of the Salzburg, then rode bikes through the old inner city, and basically spent the whole day on bikes. How very grand.

Tomorrow we leave for Switzerland to go find some snow. Why am I headed to the Alps with a deadly cough? Ricola.

It's waterweek on the Discovery Channel.

Quiet days have come again to Santa Chiara. Or at least quiet day of no a&m or cal poly folk to cover up the sound of a beautiful rainstorm and an even more beautiful rainbow. Rainbows don't actually make sounds but good riddance anyway.

By the way, I leave for Venice tomorrow morning until Saturday. Then miss Gretchen and I head off to Austria and Switzerland for a couple days each of eating chocolates, and cheeses, and clocks. And this girl hasn't seen snow so this should be good. I guess I won't say too much about this grand trip now cause I'll have plenty to say l when I get back.

Bring on the precipitation!

life is life

I had to go to Florence this morning to pick up my camera. It's good to remember what you're actually doing everytime you get to run down that hill to that train station, but it's hard to forget that trek back up the hill at the end of the day. Plus it makes you realize why Italians think it's silly to go jogging.

So the camera repair was 120 euro. Damn. I don't want to ask for help on this one from dad cause for some reason mom just deposited a few hundred onto my account last week for no apparent reason. You can talk big of financial independence for only so long.

By the way, running through Florence back to the train station brought a fresh face to the city.







Oh and I finally got everything up on my photopage. Check out the link here. I think you just have to sign up with an email address, which is no problem. Come on. Or just look at the picture above if you have ADD and more than one picture is just too much.

entry 1

there was a full moon last night. not literally, but you could sense it, in the way you can sense it's a rainy day before you see a cloud in the sky. what does that mean?

i guess i should have expected santa chiara to be much like the school of architecture back at ut. a limited amount of people spending way too much time together, eventually giving rise to love, hate, and late night trouble making. but i'm enjoying the hell out of it. you have no other choice but to become good friends, fall in love, and then hate each other only to start the cycle again next week.

it's a cycle that's been going on for more than a month now and sadly won't go on for many more months. our little oasis of time will reach the half way point soon and then we're back to our normal lives. but who says you have to count the days and furthermore, why go back? again, i'm not talking literally. life is a metaphor for life.

Northern Italy

After hiking up every Tuscan hillside ever to star in a film, it was nice to see Italy has a 21st century prescence. On a related note, I see how money effects people's moral compass when faced between bangladese child labor and fun pin striped pants! It'd be easier to say Ihad no problem with it but I did, and that's the problem.

I guess people (and by people I mean me) can really repress how they feel when it just makes things easier. Apparently long downhill climbs* and sitting on the edge of hillside lakes help you express those feelings though, so spend a hundred euro then run to the mountain air and your karma is set. All observations aside, I love Milan and Lake Como.

*Is going downhill really climbing? And wasn't I just complaining about going up and down hills?