I feel compelled to blog this morning - maybe a sign of missing family and friends - but I'm still lacking a particular subject. So, with hopes of saving you from a rambling post, I'll just try the images/thoughts/highlights format again, but this time from Florence, Italy.
Street Scenes: It's fun to notice images and situations that are either completely foreign - as in things I feel I would never see in the U.S. - or familiar but just a little "off" from my expectations. As an example of the former, the other day I watched as an older man on his bicycle passed by with not one, but two, little white dogs sitting up and barking at me from the baskets hanging on either side of the back of the bike. The dogs were each wearing raincoats -- which, admittedly, I probably would see in the U.S. -- and nestled next to groceries (which I probably would not). And it turns out they may not have been barking at me. When I turned, I noticed yet another dog in a bike basket passing the other direction. As for almost-familiar sights: yesterday I watched a simple but sweet encounter between two elementary school aged boys. We happened to walk through a neighborhood just as school was getting out and all the parents were picking up their kids. For most, this meant taking them by the hand and walking rather than getting into a car. For the others, this meant putting them on the back of a bike. Just in front of us, a little boy sitting on his mother's bike, and as she passed a storefront, the boy saw one of his friends and his face lit up. He waved and yelled, "Ciao, Lorenzo!!!" "Ciao!" the other boy yelled back with a smile. I know it's not all that different from an American boy saying, "Bye, Johnny!" but something about the back of the bike again made it feel fresh.
Seeing things: I often find myself comparing new cities, places, and even churches to places I've already been or lived. Sometimes I wonder how legitimate these comparisons are. Am I just searching for familiarity, or is there really a similarity? When we were in Israel, for example, I looked over the eastern ridge of Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, where the landscape quickly descends to desert, and I thought of the transition between Julian and the Anza-Borrego desert in San Diego county. When I mentioned this to our host, the Rev. Bill Broughton, he sort of paused. "Yes, sometimes it's helpful to make those kind of comparisons." But his answer also indicated that sometimes it's not. Here in Florence I find myself thinking of Eugene. I'm not sure this comparison has been made all that many times, to say the least. So maybe I'm just seeing things. Yet as we looked down over the city from a hilltop piazza across the river, I noted all the similarities to Colin: the hills framing the town, the river, the lush green. Of course, Eugene is missing the beautifully dense red rooftop landscape and major features like the Duomo. But I can't seem to stop with these comparisons. Hopefully it doesn't indicate a lack of imagination or openness to truly new experiences.
Earth Tones: One of the most delightful surprises about the cities in Italy has been the earth tones used to color their buildings ... and by extension, their cities. Florence is brown and red and yellow and green and orange: never blue or purple or bright pink or white or unnaturally bright or light shades of red/yellow/green/orange.
Gifts to our Marriage: While Colin and I wrestled with whether or not to take this trip, and thought of it as a sort of field education before seminary - which we both feel it is - other people also encouraged us to see the time as a gift to our marriage. And indeed, it is that too. The other night in Florence we sat in the Piazza Republica and listened to a street opera singer while a nearby carousel lit up both the square and the big arch behind her. We had no place else to go, and we didn't even feel a need to "get home because we have to wake up early to do XXXX tomorrow." This space, which feels more open than any time since our roadtrip to D.C. just weeks after we got married, isn't something we take for granted.
Museum Prep for Seminary: We are both struck by how much we feel the art education we're receiving in Italy is preparing our minds for seminary. Perhaps this isn't surprising, since most of the art is either in or taken from churches, and the themes - religion, the nature of humankind - are ones we expect to wrestle with in divinity school. But it's surprisingly hard to look at a painting or sculpture without trying to decide what I think about it's expression or representation of god/man/woman. I seem unwilling to simply engage on an aesthetic level. Hopefully I'm not doing the works a disservice in this. I should say that sometimes I AM simply surprised and delighted, as with the David. For me, the most wonderful thing about this most famous man was his ambiguous facial expression. Most guides describe the look as one of sheer determination, as in, "I can totally take this giant," but I saw an equal measure of fear and uncertainty. And the ambiguity between these two opposites was really wonderful, and, I think, really human.
Okay, it's probably too early for this sort of writing, and this post is most certainly too long. The summary would be that Florence is lovely, and we're learning and thinking, but we're also just enjoying spending time together. Sorry if that's a little cheesy, but maybe it becomes less so if I admit that we're both surprised to not yet be tired of spending time almost exclusively with one another :). We've met some friends along the way (like a couple we had dinner with in Volterra, and then Nina Sung - a friend from Stanford - who we randomly ran into at our hostel in Florence), which is really fun. But so is traveling with my husband. (
Aaaaaw.)
8. I'm pretty sure I discovered the equivalent of a chorizo burrito in Italy in Bolzano, close to the Austrian border, in the form of heisse fleischkase, a magnificent combination of chewy delicious brown rye bread around a somewhat greasy slab of pork-beef loaf with mustard...it's crazy, crazy good, and like a chorizo burrito, should probably not be consumed more than a couple times a week. That same day, after taking a gondola up into the nearby mountains and hiking through cute Austrian-looking villages, we ordered a second apple strudel because the first tasted so good!!
(Hey, there has to be a reason to return to Florence some day, right? Besides, 
