Day #96 in Orvieto

May 29, 2013 – Wednesday

This morning we had to get ready for the Gordon College president, Dr. Michael Lindsay, and 26 guests (either people on the Board of Trustees, donors, friends of the college, etc) because they were coming for a tour of Orvieto and our monastery today. They came to our class to see what we were up to and Professor Stevick asked me to read my poem out loud to them. I wasn’t nervous at first but as I waited for Professor Stevick to talk about our poetry class and explain the assignment, I suddenly got really nervous and I was worried my voice would shake as I read my poem! Thankfully it seemed to go okay and a few of the guests came up to me after to say that they enjoyed my poem, so that was good, but I was happy that it was over.

We continued class for a while as everyone left to visit the art class, Text & Image, but then we also joined them in the studio to watch a short video on the monastery. Over the winter, the completely renovated the monastery for the Gordon-IN-Orvieto program (the program that I’m on…) so it was so cool to see the “before and after” pictures of our home here. There were also a few pictures/videos of our first day here when everything was revealed to us. It was a really nice video and there were a few tears (okay, maybe I’m the only one that was tearing up a bit, I don’t know).

We didn’t have chapter meeting today (crazy, right?) but we had to go to lunch at 1 with all of the donors at Locanda. A few of us students were spread out at different tables so we could talk to the different guests at lunch. I sat with Dr. Lindsey’s assistant who works at Gordon and then a couple who lives in Texas. It was a really enjoyable lunch (with like 5 courses) and it lasted from 1-3:30! It felt like Thanksgiving dinner or something. We said goodbye to them and they left to continue their tour of Italy (seriously, they’re going all over Italy) while we went back to the monastery to do our work for the day. For poetry homework we were each assigned a panel on the door of the duomo, so we had to write a poem about our assigned panel. So I took a trip up to the duomo to write for a while!

Even cats love the duomo