Midterms, Spring Break, and a Haircut

Well, I officially survived midterms!

• Monday: Music Theory
  
• Tuesday: Italian Oral exam
  
• Wednesday: (thankfully nothing but a composition lesson…)
  
• Thursday: Italian Written, Aural Skills, Music History II
  

For my Italian oral exam I had to talk to my professor about a trip I took this semester (I told her about Switzerland)

My Aural Skills midterm included singing some atonal melodies and this rhythm sheet where you “sing” the rhythm written on the page (on “tah”) and clap another rhythm (like beats 1&2 or 2&3 or 3&4). That was individual. Then we did dictation as a group (where we write music that he plays on the piano…in various forms…).

We had that Music History essay due on Thursday on “the meaning of ‘Baroque’ as it applies to the music of the late 16th and 17th centuries. But for our in-class final we had to write ANOTHER essay on one of three topics, I chose the topic of comparing and contrasting the Baroque drama and music in Italy, France, and England. Woo! Exciting stuff! 

They say that study abroad courses are supposed to be a joke, and that they’re really easy, but honestly this is perhaps the most stressed I’ve felt about midterms in my college career. Maybe it’s because this is the first time that they’ve all really fallen on the same week. They’re always “supposed” to but professors I’ve had often do their own thing.

Now that midterms are over: SPRING BREAK IS HERE.

And I’m off to GREECE.

I’ll of course blog when I get back about all of it, but here’s a brief itinerary:

• Saturday: Fly Pisa to Rome, fly Rome to Athens, sleep here.
  
• Sunday/Monday: Ferry boat to the island of Santorini, staying here.
  
• Tuesday/Wednesday: Ferry to the island of Paros, stay here.
  
• Thursday/Friday: Ferry back to Athens, stay here.
  
• Saturday: Fly home.
  

I’m travelling with my friends William Spinnato and Alanna Fox, whom I knew from choir back at NYU. Alanna’s roommate (also named Alanna, ironically…) will be joining us for our time in Athens at the end of the week. Several of my friends here are also going to Greece with touring companies (like how I went to Switzerland) and they will be in Athens at the end of the week as well. So there’s potential to hook up there.

One small anecdote before I leave for a week: today I had my first haircut in Italy! “Un taglio” (OON TAL-yo) it’s called in Italian. There’s a small barber shop at the bottom of the hill on Via Bolognese where I live. I looked up in my travel dictionary all the phrases it had about getting your haircut and I marched down there. It was a gorgeous day today (it rained all week during midterms…and now is mysteriously sunny and beautiful once they’re over…hmm…) and I managed to hold a fairly decent conversation with the barber about the weather. I told him I was a student at NYU studying here and that I was going to Greece tomorrow.

He was such a character! I suppose caricature is a more appropriate word, though. He was this old man with kind of wild, receding hair (funny that he’s a barber) and these large glasses that magnified his eyes considerably and made him look cartoonish. You could tell he LOVED cutting hair and had been doing it for years. The whole thing was a grand production it seemed…the way he glided around the chair and twirled his instruments. If anyone reading this has seen Toy Story 2 where the old man (from the Pixar short where he plays chess with himself) comes as a doll repairman…that’s what this guy reminded me of. It was well worth the € 14.50 and I’m sure I’ll be going back before I fly home in May.