#this quote is what i thought of when i first saw the scene in sab where inej and kaz interact for the first time lol

[these-conquered-woodlands]

kaz: I've been expecting you, Inej.

inej: How did you do that without turning around?

kaz: Let's just say the first few people I did that to were not you.

[sanktyastag]

I know people have already talked about the changes Mal has gone through in his show adaptation vs his book self - most of which are changes people generally agree are for the better, since they’re sanding off some of his less endearing character traits. But something that baffles me are the changes that they didn’t make as a consequence to the changes that they did. And by that, I mean, some key pieces of dialogue.

And even more specifically, this dialogue choice:

And to explain why this line of dialogue doesn’t make sense to me in the show, I need to talk a bit about the original book context for it:

In the books, Alina has been harboring a one-sided crush on Mal for years. And I don’t mean she thought it was a one-sided crush, when really they were both mutually pining for each other. I mean that Mal genuinely didn’t have romantic feelings for her in the beginning. Or at least, not ones he acknowledged:

“Wrong. I was planning how to sneak into the Grisha pavilion and snag myself a cute Corporalnik.”

Mal laughed. I hesitated by the door. This was the hardest part of being around him - other than the way he made my heart do clumsy acrobatics. I hated hiding how much the stupid things he did hurt me, but I hated the idea of him finding out even more.

This is something Alina battles with herself over for most of the beginning of SaB, before she’s taken to the Little Palace. She had a close relationship with Mal in Keramzin, when they were both just two kids in an orphanage. And then they join the second army and Mal is suddenly a popular, capable, respected soldier in people’s eyes, while Alina is stuck battling her own resentment at her inability to fit in, as well as some pretty gnarly feelings of inadequacy.

Feelings of inadequacy that are a reoccuring issue with her - in the beginning, she describes herself as a mapmaker “and not even a very good mapmaker”. With Botkin, she’s unable to keep up with the other Grisha in physical combat, and with Baghra, she’s unable to master her Grisha abilities. It can be summed up nice and tidy in the Siege and Storm quote, when Alina isn’t using her powers because she’s in hiding with Mal:

I was so frail and clumsy that I’d barely managed to keep my job packing jurda at one of the fieldhouses. It brought in mere pennies, but I’d insisted on working, on trying to help. I felt like I had when we were kids: capable Mal and useless Alina.

So at the beginning of the books, Mal gets the chance to gain acceptance and respect from his peers, and Alina is stuck feeling inadequate and ineffectual. The natural progression of this type of rift is that they would begin to grow apart: Mal would make friends and find a sense of belonging, and Alina would remain alienated and isolated from her peers. Which is exactly what happens. It takes less than a year for them to change from being inseparable, to a normal, casual friendship:

“So what are you doing here?” When we’d first started our military service a year ago, Mal had visited me almost every night. But he hadn’t come by in months.

And that’s pretty much how their relationship stays until they’re reunited after the Little Palace. It comes to a head with Mal talking about his jealousy over seeing her with the Darkling, and with Alina admitting she’d been happier at the Little Palace than she’d been in a long time, largely because she’d finally found what Mal had found in the second army: A place she fits in and feels accepted:

“That night at the palace when I saw you on that stage with him, you looked so happy. Like you belonged with him. I can’t get that picture out of my head.”

“I was happy,” I admitted. “In that moment, I was happy. I’m not like you, Mal. I never really fit in the way that you did. I never really belonged anywhere.”

“You belonged with me,” he said quietly.

“No, Mal. Not really. Not for a long time.”

And this is where that “I’m sorry it took me so long to see you” line drops. It’s specifically about Mal acknowledging that he started taking Alina for granted when they joined the second army, because he was so caught up in finally feeling like he could belong somewhere, and feel pride in himself, he stopped prioritizing their friendship. Which is a very understandable thing!

The books don’t really go into this, but at this point in the story, it feels like something Alina might finally be in a place where she could understand how he felt: living a life where you’re taught to be grateful for other people’s charity, and that you’re a burden on other people, and then suddenly being put in a position where your existence isn’t just tolerated, but celebrated and respected, is a very validating and heady experience. It’s easy to get caught up in a new life where you don’t have to think about how ashamed you felt in your past, and can instead be the person you’ve always wanted to be. It’s a shared experience of theirs that I feel like would have been worth exploring. What actually happens is that they seem to play resentment tag around each other throughout the trilogy, with one of them getting the chance to be respected amongst their peers, and the other feeling inadequate and resentful about it, and then something coming along that flips the dynamic, over and over again.

But I digress - so here is the context of that line in the book:

“I missed you every hour. And you know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. I’d catch myself walking around to find you, not for any reason, just out of habit, because I’d seen something that I wanted to tell you about or because I wanted to hear your voice. And then I’d realize that you weren’t there anymore, and every time, every single time, it was like having the wind knocked out of me. I’ve risked my life for you. I’ve walked half the length of Ravka for you, and I’d do it again and again and again just to be with you, just to starve with you and freeze with you and hear you complain about hard cheese every day. So don’t tell me we don’t belong together,” he said fiercely. He was very close now, and my heart was suddenly hammering in my chest. “I’m sorry it took me so long to see you, Alina. But I see you now.”

Now, when we look at the show... none of this is really relevant? We never get the sense that their relationship has changed from what they were like in Keramzin. Mal doesn’t grow distant from Alina - it’s almost the opposite. The only reason they aren’t together at the beginning of the show is because their units weren’t together. It’s not Mal creating distance, it’s their job. And the second that he gets the chance, he seeks her out. In the flashback, as well, we see him immediately look for her, and he goes so far as to hit someone with a glass, because he was told the guy said something shitty to Alina, just so he can be with her in a cell.

Similarly, instead of them sitting at separate tables in the mess hall, Alina simply doesn’t get served at all (because Racism), and so Mal goes out of his way to steal food from a Grisha tent, just to cheer her up.

He’s present, attentive, loyal, and completely in tune with her emotionally. He is, I would argue, also completely in love with her (which is something I think they flipped from the books - I get the impression that Mal’s been in love with Alina for a long time, and Alina is the one who hasn’t quite made the leap from “best friend” to “romantic interest” in the show, although that’s obviously a personal interpretation). So what, exactly, is he apologizing for in that scene? What about her didn’t he see?

The only way I can try to make sense of the scene now, is that he’s apologizing for perhaps not realizing she was a Grisha? Or maybe for inadvertently “making” her repress her powers for all this time, because she didn’t want to be separated from him? And that works, I guess, except that the lead up to this apology is Alina saying that Mal looked at her “with fear in his eyes” back in Kribirsk, after he finds out she’s Grisha. And that’s, again, a book thing. In the books, Mal apologizes for just standing there as she’s taken away, for not chasing after her. In the show... he does chase after her. He does literally everything in his power to go to her. There’s no pause, there’s no moment of doubt. The last time she sees him, he is afraid for her, as she’s being taken away, but he is not, for one moment, afraid of her. So I just... don’t get where that line comes from.

It seems weird to completely erase all of Mal’s flaws from the books, but then keep the dialogue where he apologizes for how those flaws have negatively impacted their relationship, without recontextualizing the apology into an appropriately impactful moment.

[mhevarujta]

Mal in THAT scene from Siege and Storm

With Archie Renaux giving a shoutout to baeblades, I decided to make a post I had meant to write for a while.

This is a breakdown of a scene in Siege and Stom that Mal-antis hold as proof of how bad he is for Alina. I have seen SO MANY TIMES antis saying that Mal wanted Alina powerless even though HE suggested that she should go after the Stag, even though HE helped her end Rusalye, even though if HE gave his life to give her more power and put his faith in her.

They use the quote about her power being carved out CONSTANTLY. But words are given meaning by their context, so let’s see what was happening and the content of that conversation.

The scene happens after Alina has seen Mal kissing Zoya back. Zoya was kissing him and he remained frozen for some time and then kissed her back in his drunken state. This was after Alina had recently flinched, because she saw the Darkling, and Mal was left to think that she flinched away from him and didn’t want him after they had spent weeks apart. During the time they were in the palace Mal tried to support Alina in his limited capacity, was treated as an accessory by the nobles and did not belong with the Grisha, his position was mostly Alina’s way of keeping him close even though they weren’t supposed to be. And then with Alina’s status came more and more distance between them.

Before hating on how Mal treats Alina, let’s consider Alina’s words.

Alina does two things here: She throws out of nowhere a comment that is actually classist and she tells Mal that she doesn’t want him. And yes, I KNOW that she doesn’t mean what she says and it’s her hurt surfacing but she literally hits him with the two things that are tearing him apart. Mal has NOT ONCE blamed Alina for her power. Even back in SaB his harsh comments were about the class-difference between them; not about the power that are inherently hers. In fact, I’m certain that I can disprove any claim that Mal’s ill-sentiment was about her Grisha-power itself with actual quotes from the books.

Back to our topic, Alina does not explain why she flinched and makes her anger about his coping mechanisms about how they reflect on her; not about her feelings, not about Mal’s trauma and sense of alienation, not about their relationship. And from what I recall, Mal is not in Alina’s perspective (like we are) to know how much she loves him and he’s not freaking clairvoyant.

The scene continues with him saying that he wish they hadn’t come at the palace and with Alina saying that they should run away and with her insisting that she would indeed do it. Mal calls her out on the fact that she wouldn’t do it even if she could and that she is running away from the truth. He tells her the very thing that has been pushing him further and further into depression. He threw away his position in the army, he has no status that would allow them to be together and maybe she was just meant to become a queen and he was meant to not be able to share that life with her.

Alina is still in denial and Mal, still proving his point, he asks what place she sees him holding in her life. As they grow closer and he closes his hand around her wrist, a jolt passes between them because of his amplifying power.

I don’t see what’s wrong with Mal being hurt by the knowledge that they cannot even have a moment’s peace. I think it’s a very human reaction. Moreover, while I understand Alina’s feelings too she snaps at the fact that he is hoping for a simple life with her.

This is just unfair though. Throughout their stay Alina kept giving him hopes about their relationship and even five seconds ago she insisted that she would run away and have a simple life with him. She was giving him false hope when he was trying to be realistic.

Here I would like to point out is that ‘And what if I could’ is very different from people’s claim that he wanted to carve out her power. For starters, it’s an answer shaped based on her own wording. And he is not speaking of a forceful procedure. Alina has made it about him carving out the power but he shifts the question: ‘Would you let it go? Woult you give it up?’.

Alina kept saying that she would run away with him. Now she’s going back on it and says that she COULD NOT. Mal understood that before her. It’s why he has been falling apart. What he wants to know is if she would if she could. She can’t have both the status that comes with the power she has AND Mal in the society they live in and he already told her he doesn’t believe she would leave everything behind for him as she claimed. He told her: “You’d just find your way back”. He sees that Alina WANTS the power enough to choose it. He doesn’t ask her to give it up. She asks her to admit this once what she’d choose if she was given the opportunity. He wants to know her real feelings.

Alina confirms that she would not choose a simple life either way. This admission that was forced out of her is the first time that Alina has let her feelings out unfiltered. After this, Mal does not explode. He does not retort anything to make her feel bad. In fact after this one time that Alina finally stopped having him set his eyes on a future that they’d never have together Mal slowly turned it around. He pulled his act together, he started deciding what he wanted to do with his life knowing that he would never be with the woman he loved. He got out of the existential crisis that one being told they have a place but knowing they don’t entails. Knowing that he could not be what he was hoping for, he was left to make his decisions without any blinders on and it made his pain more manageable and he deserved that courtesy.

P.S.: I’m definitely not saying that Alina was some monster stringing him along for her benefit. They were both teenagers who were in situations they had never thought they’d be in and who were pushed apart by circumstance. They were way over their head and both are right and wrong at the same time. But I hate how Mal’s perspective and what is happening to him is completely disregarded and his reactions are taken out of their context.

[yukinojou]

I already squeed quite a bit on Twitter, but turns out my Shadow and Bone thoughts demand longform. So that was a 40+ tweet thread or using my Tumblr for an original post for once.

I was wary about the Shadow and Bone adaptation the way I'm usually wary about good books being adapted onscreen. It was amplified because my actual favourites are the Six of Crows books, and because the American-based movie complex has a bad track record of doing anything based on Eastern Europe. 8 episodes in 3 days should tell you how much I loved it - the moment I finished, I wanted more.

First, the technical praise:

Damn but the plotting is tight. It took me a while to realised it's based on heist movie bones, where every little thing (The Freaking Bullet!) is important. The story fulfills its promises and manages not to bore at the same time - it delights by the way they're fulfilled. I called out a few plot developments moments before they happened, and I was happy about it. Such a joy after so many series where "not doing what viewers expect" led to plot holes and lack of sense. It might be an upside to the streaming model after all.

From a dramatic point of view I can tell all the reasons for all the changes, especially providing additional outsider points of view on Ravka (Crows) and letting viewers see Mal for themselves the way he only comes across in later books.

Speaking of which, this is a masterclass in rewriting a story draft. SaB was Bardugo's first, and having read later books you can really see where she didn't quite dare to break the YA rules yet, especially Single POV that necessitated a tight focus on Alina's often negative feelings rather than the big picture and a triangle that felt a bit forced. The world in the series is so much bigger, the way Bardugo could finally paint it when SaB success gave her more creative freedom, and some structural choices feel familiar too. It's a combination of various choices by crew and cast, but the end result meshes together so tightly and naturally.

Visuals! Especially the war parts because Every Soviet Movie Ever, but also the clothes (I would kill for Nina's blouse in the bar), the jewelry, the interiors. The stag was so very beautiful. And a deep commitment to a coherent aesthetic for each character and setting.

Look, you can do a serious fantasy series with colours! Both skin colours and bright sets and clothing! And all scenes were well lit enough to know what's going on, even in the Fold!

Representation (aka I Am Emotion)

To start with: I was born behind the Iron Curtain, in the last years of the Cold War. The Curtain was always permeable to some extent, and we have always been aware that while we have talented artists of our own, we never had the budgets and polish of the Anglosphere Entertainment Machine. So we watched a hell of a lot of American visual storytelling especially because yeah, you can tell we don't have the budgets. 90s and 2000s especially, it's getting better now.

In American stories, the BEST case scenario for Eastern European representation is the Big Dumb Pole, the ethnic stereotype Americans don't even notice they use, where the punchline is that his English is bad or that he grew up outside Anglo culture. Other than that, it's criminals, beggars, sex trafficking victims, refugees. Sure, we may look similar (except we really really don't, not if you're raised here and see the distinct lack of all those long-jawed Anglo faces), but we are not and have never been the West, never mind America. It's probably better for younger people now, but I was raised under rationing and passport bans. Star Trek and Beverly Hills 90210 were exactly as foreign to me.

The first ever character I really identified with was Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5 (written by J. Michael Straczynski, yay behind-camera representation). This was a Russian Jewish woman very much in charge, in the way of strong women I know so well, not taking any bullshit, not repressing her feminity. I recognised her bones, she could be my cousin. The sheer relief of it. There have been few such occasions since.

The reason I picked up Shadow and Bone in the first place was recommendations from other Polish people. I've had no problems finding representation in Eastern European books because wow our scene is strong in SFF especially, but it's always a treat to find a book in English that gets it. And Leigh gets it, the bones of our culture, and I could even look past the grammar issue (dear gods and Americans, Starkova for a woman, Morozov for a guy) that really irked me because of the love for the setting and the characters, the weaving in of religion/mysticism (we never laicisized the same way as the West, natch), the understanding of how deep are the scars left in a nation at war for centuries. The books are precious to me, they and Arden's Winternight and Novik's Spinning Silver.

To sum up: Shadow and Bone the Netflix series gets it. You can tell just how much they've immersed themselves in Eastern European culture and media, it comes across so well in visuals and writing and characters. Not just the obvious bits (though the WWII propaganda posters gave me a giggle), but the palaces, the additional plotlines and characters, the costumes, the attitudes. About the only thing missing in the soldier scenes was someone singing and/or quoting poetry.

I will blame the Apparat's lack of beard on filming in a non-Orthodox country. Poland's Catholic too, but I very much imagined him as an Orthodox patriarch, possibly because I read the books shortly after a visit to Pecherska Lavra in Kiev and the labyrinthine holy catacombs there. Small quibble, not my religion, not my place to speak.

(I've seen discussion on the issues with biracial representation in the show, which is visceral and apparently based on bad experiences of one of the show writers in a way that's caused pain to other Asian and biracial people. I'm not qualified to speak on those parts, other that Eastern Europe is... yeah. Racist in subtly different ways. If anything, the treatment of the Suli as explained in Six of Crows always read so very true of the way Roma are treated, and even sanitised.)

And now for the spoiler-filled bits:

Kaz and Inej. I mean... just THEM. So many props to the actors, the writers, the bloody goat.

I adore the fact the only people who get to have sex in the show are Jesper and a very lucky stablehand.

Ben Barnes needs either an award or a kick. The man's acting choices and puppy eyes are as epic as his hair.

So Much Love for Alina initiating the kiss. Her book characterisation makes sense, she's so trapped in her own head because she has no time to process everything that's happening, but grabbing life by the lapels is a much more active choice. Still not making the relationship equal, but closer to it.

Speaking of, Kaz's constant awareness of how unequal his relationship with Inej is, and attempts to give her agency. I'm really curious how his touch issues come across to someone who doesn't know the backstory there.

Feodor and his actor. He looks exactly like the pre-war heartthrob Adolf Dymsza, a specific upper-class Polish ethnic type that's much rarer now that, well, Nazis killed millions of Polish intellectuals in their attempt to reduce us to unskilled labour only. The faces he makes are the Best.

Nina!! Nina is perfect, those cheekbones, that cheek, I was giggling myself silly half the time. I cannot wait to see Danielle Galligan take on the challenge of Nina's plotline in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, she'll kill us dead.

I already mentioned that the writers fixed Mal's absence from the first book, but Mal in general! The haircut gives him a kind of rugby charm, and Archie Renaux is outstanding at emoting without talking. Honestly, all the casting in this series is inspired, but him in particular.

Extra bonus: Howard Charles and Luke Pasqualino playing so very much against the type of the swaggering Musketeers I saw them play last. Arken dropping the mask at the end... Howard Charles is love.

I can't believe not only was Milo's bullet a plot point, but the fact Alina was wearing a particularly sparkly hair ornament in a long series of beautiful hair ornaments was a plot point.

In conclusion: so much love, and next three season NOW please. Okay, give me a week to reread the books, and an extra day because new Murderbot drops tomorrow...

[khaotungsfirst]

showyourprocess #2

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

@theyilinglaozus with this wkx set

@wei-gege with this jyl set or any of your sparkly sets ✨

@seance with this sab set

@bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb-8 with this doodle-y sw set

@wuxien​ with this fire wkx set

-

@fengqing tagged me to explain my process for this set, thank you em 💕

1. Planning

This was a request for the mdzsnet one year anniversary. The reason I took this request was because I already made a set with this quote before since I also saw @morifinwes‘s post about it but I thought I could do it better this time around. 

So I already talked about how I use Notion for my ideas in my previous #showyourprocess post. The idea post for this set looked like this:

I actually didn’t plan on making it a hand focused set at first. I only wanted that for the third gif, as I felt like that would symbolise the reassurance of the line “never believe” nicely. But as I started think about it more I realised I could use hand scenes for all of the lines so that’s what I went with in the end.

2. Creating

2.1. Coloring

Coloring was definitely the hardest part of this set. I’m usually the type of gifmaker who makes everything vibrant and colorful. But the scenes I had chosen were not the easiest to make colorful so I resorted to desaturated colors. Especially the second gif was a pain in the ass about it I mean look at all of these layers:

I never need that many adjustment layers for my coloring! But I just really wanted it to match with the other gifs (it still doesn’t match 100% but it’s less noticeable now). For the other gifs I used a coloring I made for a completely different gifset and it mostly worked. I only had to adjust some layers or add some Exposure.

2.2. Typography

For the handwritten font I actually saw it in one of @leonzhng’s set and asked about it in the tags and she saw it and told me the name. So I immediately used it for this set 😅 I think it fits nicely with the coloring.

The red font is one white layer set to Difference and one red layer set to Linear Dodge. I think it looks better on a darker background (see gif #3) and less so on a light background (see gif #1) but I wanted to keep it consistent. Then I added a third layer of the same font, gave it a Stroke layer, lowered Fill to 0% and moved it slightly off-center. I randomly tried out putting the handwritten font on top of it and thought it gave the gif another interesting layer so I left it there.

3. Posting

Since this was a request for the net, I uploaded it to the Google Drive and waited for the net to post it instead of posting it myself. I obviously still tested how it would look in my drafts and made some adjustments as necessary before uploading my files.

[gelato-of-the-day-blog]

February 1, 2017

         Hello everyone! I want to use this blog to write about each day of the four months I’ll be spending in Europe. However, I will probably (I hope) be very busy, so I will post as often as I can. Today (Wednesday February 1, 2017) is, I guess, my second day here but the story starts on Monday. There were a lot of tears saying goodbye to my best friends (my dogs) but I made it through and was able to get to the airport in pretty good time. Both my bags were exactly 23kg which was an incredible feat until it turned out you only get one bag free even though I checked the website and it said 2. So I had to pay anyway. After getting rid of my bags and unsuccessfully ditching a selfie with my father, we said goodbye and I watched him go down an escalator while giving me a peace sign. At least he didn’t quote “Victorious”. We killed a few hours in by the gate, saw Hailey Baldwin get on a flight to Paris, and then we were off. I watched “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” on the plane and was extremely disappointed. Then I tried to sleep. I’ve come to the conclusion that I will just never in my life be able to sleep on a plane. I was extremely tired and took Valium and Melatonin and still I don’t think I slept for more than 10 minutes at a time because I had to keep readjusting my position. Those seats are just too small and uncomfortable. Unless you can sleep literally sitting up I don’t know how you could sleep on a plane. 

          We landed in Rome, customs was a breeze, and then boarded our next flight to Florence. As soon as the plane pulled out of the gate I’m pretty sure every single person on the plane was passed out. Too bad that flight was less than an hour. When we got off the plane it was the moment of truth: did our bags make it as far as we did? The first 2 flights that got in before us were not so lucky, but somehow all 55 Wells students on our flight got all of their bags. Miracles do happen. Cart and I squeezed ourselves and our 3 bags each into a cab and raced off through the streets of Florence. I know the culture is different but I’m pretty sure texting and driving is still dangerous here. Maybe even more so considering how people drive and how tiny the roads are. But I refrained from asking our cab driver to not literally read articles on his cell phone while driving us to our apartment. We almost hit like 3 cars and 15 people but we finally made it. The location of our apartment is amazing. It’s right next to the Uffizi museum, Palazzo Vecchio, and Ponte Vecchio. We can see the Palazzo Vecchio out our window. However, this is when our struggle began. 

        Our apartment is on the top floor of our building. Up maybe 7 flights of stairs, maybe more. And we each had 2 50+ pound bags, carryon, backpacks, and heavy coats. We probably spent over an hour dragging 1 bag at a time up the stairs. By the end we were all sweating, our legs were shaking, and my lower back and shoulder were killing me. I don’t see how I could possibly gain weight here if I have to walk up and down these stairs every day. Even worse, other people’s apartments have elevators. Anyway, the apartment itself is so cute and Italian looking. We have a big living room, a kitchen, 2 rooms with double beds, an empty room, and a bathroom. Sab and I are in one room (bunkmates for life) and Cart and Paige are in the other. We were all so hungry so went out to the streets to look for a place to have dinner. For some reason a lot of restaurants were closed at 8 pm on a Tuesday so we crossed the Ponte Vecchio and went to the first open place we found. We got a bottle of wine and I got gnocchi. It was absolutely amazing. I finished every last bit. I made a picture of the meal my snapchat story and multiple people responded to it saying “Omg”. We sat there for a really long time until Paige asked for the check with what turns about to be a universal hand gesture (think the scene from “Trainwreck”). We got back to the apartment and started to unpack. We don’t have great closet space so we each unpacked one suitcase, took showers, and passed out. Great discovery of the night: they have all 8 seasons of “Full House” on Netflix here! Couldn’t be happier! 

        This morning we had to meet at the Duomo at 10:45 but I could’ve slept for 5 more years. We stopped at a little café on our street on the way and Cart and I bought chocolate muffins that turned out to have Nutella on the inside! So good. I also was able to navigate our way to the Duomo based on my memory of being here in the summer of 2013. It’s all starting to come back to me the more I walk around. I already feel like I know my way around. We did our morning orientation session where they basically just scared us about all the terrible things that could happen to us while we’re here so that was really fun. Then we had a short lunch break before we had to meet back at the Duomo so we found a tiny sandwich shop right across from it. The owner of the place gave us a sample of all the meats and cheeses so we could choose what we wanted on our sandwiches. I’m trying to be adventurous here so I tried everything (including salami and ham!). For my sandwich I went with the first cheese (I can’t remember the name) and ham and then got some greens and peppers as toppings on crunchy bread. It was incredible. I ate the whole thing in 10 minutes. During the afternoon orientation I learned I could sleep with my eyes open. On the way home afterwards we stopped for GELATO! Finally! We went to Venchi (which I remembered from my last trip) and I got chocolate (shocking). We thought about running some errands but were way too tired so we just came back to the apartment. 

         This is my first down time since I left for the airport so I’m trying to enjoy it before our complimentary dinner tonight. I also just got great news because I finally checked my email. I got an interview for the summer internship at Madison Square Garden! I’m beyond excited because I already thought I didn’t get it. It will be a phone interview on Friday at 2pm home time (8pm here) so I need to try to find some time to prepare. Not really sure when that’s going to happen though with going out tonight, our day trip to Pisa tomorrow, and the rest of our orientation programs. Very stressed about it and nervous for the interview. I hope I come off #smart! Gotta leave for dinner soon so I will check back tomorrow (or as soon as I can)!  

xoxo Bagels in Florence