Submitted by David Deming on the 2019 winter session study abroad program in Italy sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures…
Week number four was the week with the least amount of things happening. The fun things that did happen were two specific events. One was a cheese tasting at a local market with a cheese master. The cheese master taught us how to properly smell the cheese, which was very amusing to me because I did not know there was such a way. What you do is crack the cheese so that you get the inside of the cheese that has not hardened into a skin-like peel. It was very weird to not just eat the cheese, but when in Rome, I mean Siena. The second best part of week four was when my roommates and I walked all the way down the giant hill that Siena is on and got to experience the entirety of the city’s area. We were walking for maybe an hour or two and just kept going looking at different buildings and eventually the countryside with farms and villas. The walk was really important for me because during the entire program, we had only gone places we had been taken to on a tour so this was fun to explore freely.
