Mi piaccino gli apertivi.

Florentine Scribblings

So my Italian grammar may be incorrect. I’ll correct it once my Italian improves a bit–it has been over six months since I’ve spoken it with any frequency before arriving.

After a day of travel, I arrived in Florence, cold, exhausted and excited. I did the math and realized that I had been awake for over 24 hours–I think the final count was 28. All I could think was, “Now I know how Jack Bauer feels at the end of the day.”

Italy has a spectacular custom called “aperitivo” or “apertifs.” Now, what are apertivi? You know how when you go to a bar, get something to drink and decide that you’re hungry too? Now you have to buy food. Not so with apertivi. Food is provided with the cost of your drink–as much food as you want to eat. These aren’t your typical bar peanuts. These are full out meals. The bar I visited (a mostly Florentine establishment) had home-made Chinese style food. It was delicious, not your usual New Year’s Eve stuff. This has to be the greatest thing ever.

We asked our Italian hostess if we could eat the food. She looked at us, very confused.  Through a pidgin Italian-English-hand signals language, we managed to ask her if we needed to pay for the food. She said no, and we told her that in the States we need to pay for the food as well!

My classes start on Monday, but tonight I have a cooking class. I’m really looking forward to it, as I can’t cook well!

I’ll have something more writing related up soon, probably a word portrait of the city.

On the road again…

Florentine Scribblings

Well, I’m taking She Thinks Too Much on the road. On Sunday, I’m departing the States for Florence, Italy. For four months.

I’m going to be studying there, fumbling my way through a foreign language (well, io capisco un’ po’ l’italiano). Not to mention living on my own in a completely new city. And attempting to learn to cook.

So what does this mean for the blog? Hopefully, only that the updates will be a little less frequent. I’m not going to have internet access in my apartment, but I’m hoping to update once a week from my uni.

The posts might be a tad more travel-and-fish-out-of-water focused, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to apply my experiences to writing.

Of course, I’ll be journaling daily. Some of my word sketches might make appearances here throughout the next few months (alas, the pencil ones won’t until late May).

Here’s to people watching, laughing, and trying not to freak out too much!

A New Tool (TOY)

General Geekiness

I got a new tool to test-drive. Alas, it isn’t mine to keep, only to play with for the week. A brand-spankin’-new Wacom Tablet!

In honor of this nifty new device, I created a new picture thingy for the blog. It’s going to live on the “About” page until I come up with something better. But here it is for all to see!

A cartoon self-portrait of me.

I’ll try to create some less-self-indulgent images, but I figured that it was time for a new picture. 🙂

AW Blog Chain: Guilty as Charged

General Geekiness

Claire Crossdale and Fresh Hell are tough acts to follow, with delightfully diverse guilty pleasure (I’m guilty of a few of theirs as well). After much contemplation (and many “guilty” pleasures later) I determined the one that, while I’m not particularly embarrassed to enjoy, this is suitably ridiculous:

I love typeface.  It isn’t a simple “oh, that font is pretty.” It borders on obsession (much like footnotes).

My love of typeface isn’t one like an adoration of a band, author or actor. I’m terrible at remember what specific typefaces look like (even the all obvious Helvetica. Put that next to a similar sans serif and I won’t be able to tell which is which). But there’s a certain beauty to typeface. Words sometimes just look right in High Tower Text (my current header’s font) or the ever-present Helvetica.

Typeface, of course, adds to the flavor of the book, whether we recognize it or not. Patrick O’Brian books are printed with a close set, old-timey serif. It feels right, meshes with our understanding of the subject matter so perfectly that it becomes second nature. The reader expects that typeface, they know the feel of the words and almost what to expect because of it. Again, the story just wouldn’t have the same flow if printed in a sleek font like Helvetica.

Harry Potter is set in Adobe Garamond, which the little blurb at the back of the books informs us is “a typeface based on the sixteenth century type designs of Claude Garamond, redrawn by Robert Slimbach in 1989.” The font has a whimsical but stately quality to it, one that fits with the feel of the book.

And then, we have the book I’m currently reading, With Wings Like Eagles. It’s an engaging, well-written book, but the typeface is just so darned interesting that I get distracted. Even while reading about how pilots managed to escape from burning cockpits, I find I need to reread the paragraphs because I get hung up on the letter “A” (both upper and lower cases) when I catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. There are two main problems: a) I actually really enjoy reading this book and b) the publisher wasn’t as nice as Scholastic and didn’t include any information about the typeface.

Up next:

lostwanderer5.blogspot.com
Lindzy1954
RavenCorrinnCarluk
ForbiddenSnowflake
AuburnAssassin
DavidZahir
Charlotte49ers
Fokker Aeroplanbau
laharrison
collectonian
capes and corsets
vfury
Bsolah –
JackieA

Footnotes!

General Geekiness

I adore footnotes. Honestly. While doing research (or just reading history books for fun), few things delight me more than those little gobbets hidden in the lower margin. Even when reading about a topic that interests me greatly, a digression proves too inviting to resist.

Let’s look at the book I’m currently reading, a history of the Battle of Britain called With Wings Like Eagles by Michael Korda. Now, apart from being a well written, engaging book with an ample bibliography, Korda makes use of footnotes. Enjoy this snippet (digression taken while discussing the difference between Luftwaffe and RAF bases):

“Our quarters at a former Luftwaffe base near Hamburg…not only had indoor baths and showers but featured a mysterious-looking porcelain basin set in the wall which was too small, too high up, and too elaborately decorated to be a urinal, and which turned out to be a flushing vomitorium for those who had drunk too much beer” (64).

Will that ever feature into my works? Probably not. Will that ever be something I’ll need to know? Again, probably not, but I’ll bet it will make for interesting conversation fodder.

For the Love of Harry

Nerds Have More Fun

I remember the day my mom bought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was in fourth grade and Harry Potter-mania had yet to hit. “I found this in the clearance section of Marshall’s,” my mom said. “It sounds pretty interesting.”

We devoured the first book and scaled the bookshelves at a now-defunct bookstore to get Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets the day it was released.

Fast forward ten years.

Harry Potter is now, of course, incredibly popular and profitable, with movies, books (and controversy surrounding the books), and a new exhibition of artifacts from the movie, which I saw at the Museum of Science Boston.

It was awesome.

I’m a movie junkie (as well as a Harry Potter fan), so I considered it my duty to go to the exhibit. I’ve enjoyed previous movie exhibits at the MoS (there was an awesome Lord of the Rings one, and an okay Star Wars one). Though I still think that the LotR one was the best, I thoroughly enjoyed the HP one. There were costumes and props from the movies with fun activities throughout (like harvesting Mandrakes and throwing Quaffles into hoops).

As a GD junkie, one of my favorite parts of the exhibit was looking at the textbooks. It was really quite cool, seeing the different covers up close. I wanted to flip through the books, but that would never happen, given that they were encased in glass and arrest is not on my to-do-list.

I also really liked looking at the wands. We never really get a good look at them on screen, just flashes of them here and there. Being able to study Voldemort’s, Dumbledore’s and McGonagall’s wands was quite cool. Each has character hidden until you get a really close look at them.

The various portions of the exhibit were set up like different parts of Hogwarts. There was the Gryffindor Common Room (and dormitories), Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts classrooms, the Great Hall, the Quidditch pitch, Hagrid’s Hut and the Forbidden Forest. The details were extraordinary.

All said, I had a great time, and decided to reread Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, only to realize halfway through that the parts I really wanted to read were in The Half-Blood Prince. Oops.

The exhibit is one that I recommend when it comes to a city near you (I imagine that a stop in NYC will occur).

I also was sorted into, of all houses, Ravenclaw. Or Slytherin. The Sorting Hat was a little confused. 😀