On Thursday, we got the day off, so the dialogue group went to San Benedetto's market, one of the largest indoor markets in Europe. The amount of fresh vegetables, meats, cheese, bread, and wine made me wish I had a kitchen! I ended up buying a little wedge of parmesan (my favorite cheese), with great difficulty. I'm pretty sufficient ordering basic foods at restaurants, but when it comes to kilogram and unknown numbers spoken for prices, I was out of my element. I ended up with a lot more cherries and cheese then I needed! 

Later that day, me and my roommate went exploring in Cagliari, and saw the inside of this pretty church. 

The next day, we started off by Professor Onnis-Hayden giving us a lecture on waste characterization. This was before we had to enter a lab, and learn how to get a small sample of waste that was representative of the whole collection of waste. To do this, we would put the waste in a circle, divide it into quarters, and scoop alternating corners of the quarters into a bag, and then make a new circle with the remaining quarters left. We would then repeat this process until (theoretically) we got down to one gram of sample. However, this is a long and tedious process, so after we got the technique, we used machinery to generate a sample. Once we had the sample, we could look at the composition of the waste. We looked at ash, bottom ash, and the waste used for RDF. 

After lab, we had another lecture on waste collection, and then a guest speaker from a local waste collection came and answered all of our questions on collection. 

The next day, we woke up early to go to a Geomining park in the Sulcis region of Sardinia. The views were absolutely spectacular. 

We then explored the mining tunnels of Fort Flavia, a fort that sent out the precious metals to sea. Being trapped in a dark tunnel is definitely not my thing--I get very claustrophobic and would really not want to be a miner! I'm also paranoid of mining after watching a documentary on the Chilean miners that were trapped. 

Again, the views were amazing. 

Still beautiful! (Of course we had to climb on the rocks)

A cute little vespa! 

For our next stop, we went to a Nuraghe temple. It was interesting, as many different civilizations built temples on the same foundation. You could see all different types of stone where the archeologist had dug out the floor!

We finally headed to this adorable bed and breakfast for the night. 

 

The next day, we had a cooking class were we learned to make gnocchi! (Well, roll the gnocchi at least). You'd get a small piece of the dough, press it on this instrument to get the ridges, and then roll it off. The technique requires lots of practice, so none of us were very good at it! However, the pasta was amazing afterwards. 

 

At the villa, there were all sorts of animals, but the puppy was my clear favorite! Although the cat was really cute too. 

For the last part of excursion, we went to a beautiful beach with sand dunes (and of course I got burnt, despite the excess amount of sunscreen I put on). Tomorrow, we are presenting our first project, so I got to go work on that!