art and pop quiz.

so today we had a pop oral exam in italian. let me just say that stress levels were slightly elevated. luckily we all made it through alive and as enzo, our teacher put it, "it is only a conversation!" as i frantically looked over all my notes from the past month of lesson's i started to feel ok about having a "conversation" with him. my partner and i decided to go up and of course when we got up there he decided to have a break and told us that we would have to wait. we waited. the anticipation was killllllling me. it took forever. when we finally got done and took our seats at the front of the classroom in front of him. he asked us (all in italian of course...) to describe our family and what our parents did for occupations. then he asked each of us how to conjugate verbs into the past tense. then we were done. that was it. finished. i couldn't believe it! i had almost had an anxiety attack and crammed all my italian into my brain and then it was fine. no harm done (well maybe a little but i think i will recover from it. )and i am very very pleased with my grade. i don't really know how he came up with it from the short amount of time i spent talking to him but i won't complain. i will admit that if i had known about this oral exam before the fact i would have been so overwhelmed with school work that i might have had a melt down. i spent the last week working on hours and hours of art and i am still not completely done. i have no idea how my art major friends do it. art projects take forever--pretty much a standard amount of time is 5-6 hours. and that is diligent work with probably not a lot of detail. i have totally lost count of how many times i have said "peter" out loud the past weekend due to my lack of any other way to express my utter frustration with some of the homework assignments. for example- i spent an hour walking completely around siena to find the perfect spot to draw atmospheric perspective. "i want you to have the experience of sitting outside" peter says. well thank you- i sat outside. hopefully i get a good grade because my poor little bum got really sore sitting on that park bench for 6 hours and my stomach was pretty hungry afterwards (only to be greeted by not to yummy leftovers from fiorella...). well needless to say the experiences here in siena are always changing and leave me quite frequently out of my comfort zone.