As most of you already know (and the rest of you have by now figured out), I am about to embark upon the adventure of a lifetime - studying abroad for about 3 1/2 months in Orvieto, Italy. I will be living in a monastery owned by Gordon College and studying Italian, Renaissance History, and Literature, while taking in a completely new culture with 23 other students. I’ve made this website to share my adventures with those who would like to read about them.

Here’s the basic info straight from the school’s website:
Gordon In Orvieto
VISION
The Gordon-in-Orvieto semester program takes an experimental approach to learning in the landscape of our contemporary post-culture. The intent of the program is to foster in our students an attitude of responsive looking and listening for signs of new life in the traditions inhabited by artists and poets, saints and mystics, of the past, especially those of pre-modern Europe in Italy. With a discerning eye neither nostalgic nor ironic, we wish to explore the disintegrated fragments of the classical-Christian civilization of the West, raiding the past in order to rebuild the present. For a brief, interactive tour covering the program location and its missions, please visit the Gordon In Orvieto Tour page.
http://www.gordon.edu/page.cfm?iPageID=611&iCategoryID=59&Global_Education&Gordon_In_Orvieto

**All of these pictures are taken from the internet and will be replaced once I’ve been able to take some of my own

sabato 28 novembre 2009

This year Christmas begins in November

Some people have rules about when they can start listening to Christmas music: after Thanksgiving, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the first Sunday of Advent, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, etc... I'm fairly certain we broke all of these by not only listening to Christmas music before any of these dates, but giving an entire Christmas concert before any of these dates. But we feel good about it.


On Tuesday we performed 7 Christmas songs in front of our Italian, American, and mix of other countries, friends. But let me back up a bit and explain why we did this. It all started when our RA, Christine, told us about the Christmas concert she and her friends put on the semester they lived here. This got us all started thinking, but Erika most of all. About a month ago Erika announced that she would be willing to direct a Christmas choir, if we would be willing to join. Naturally, about half of us jumped on board and we started rehearsing about once a week. We planned a concert for around our second to last week here, figuring that would be fairly close to Christmas and would give us enough time to plan and prepare. All seemed to be going well until two Sundays ago Erika gave us some very sad news: she would be returning home early at the end of our third class (Dante for me). She has MS and with that come quite a few painful side effects; she'd been living in pain basically all semester, but now her doctors told her she might be doing permanent nerve damage by staying here out of their care. Reluctantly and courageously she made the hard decision to return home. This meant that if we wanted her to direct our concert, it would have to be before her flight on Wednesday, thereby giving us the right to sing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving.


Our concert was a lovely thing; we invited basically everyone we know which, granted, isn't that many people, and quite a few came: 4 Italian families, a Japanese friend who is also studying here, another American who knows one of the girls on our program, Erika's mom, our RA's friend, our Italian RA and her two friends, our 2 professors, our program director and his family, 3 of our nuns, and a Dutch couple whose vineyard we helped harvest in October. We sang 7 songs in English and gave readings out of the gospels in Italian so that everyone could enjoy and understand at least part of the evening :) After we finished, we had desserts and apple cider, the contents of which I attempted and failed to explain to our elderly friend Mima, for everyone to enjoy. It was a great time to be able to be together and sing, even though I had a very sore throat, naturally.



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