A Small Wanderer

I'm back!

Sorry for the lack of updates. I'm going to blame it on a combination of classes starting, the wireless being dumb, and me being lazy.

I believe I have slightly more than a week since the last post to cover, no? Well, most of the past week was spent in class and therefore not doing anything terribly exciting, but I'll review the highlights.

Last Saturday I finally met up with Carmine and Raul. Dana and I walked around the city with them for a while. We saw the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps (which looks much cooler on the postcards covered in azaleas than it does when we saw it covered in tourists), and the Piazza del Popolo. We found our way up to the Hard Rock Rome and met Carmine and Raul's roommates, Josh and Kevin (from PhilaU, not GW, in case you're wondering) for a light mid-afternoon meal (Italian dinnertime is somewhere around 7:30-8:00, and our poor American stomachs have been slow to adjust to that). For the record, the Hard Rock Rome has the same overpriced menu as the Hard Rock Pittsburgh and every other Hard Rock, and the staff did not seem to speak English as their first language as we thought they might. It was good though. Later that night Dana and I went out to a couple of the clubs with Raul and Josh. Good times. Dana had some interesting encounters with a couple of Italians, Orlando and Francesco, but that's a different story.

(the Trevi Fountain)

Last week was the start of classes. I think all of my classes are going to be pretty interesting. I'm taking Intensive Italian, which counts for 6 credits instead of 3 and should theoretically give me a year's worth of Italian in a semester; Ethics and Global Policy, which would be much better if half the class didn't sleep or talk to each other over the professor the entire time; The Mediterranean World, which the professor has decided to divide into two units, one on anthropology of the Mediterranean and the other on the political science of the region, though the class is listed as an Anthropology course, and I'm really not sure how it's going to transfer back to GW; and Survey of the History of Ancient Rome, which should be pretty interesting and includes a few on-site classes. Most of this past week was jsut starting class and marginally getting back into a slightly academic schedule. One of the highlights of this past week was when I bought knitting needles (my roommate Aurora wants me to teach her to knit) from a little shop whose owner spoke no English. My Italian extends nowhere near the realm of knitting vocabulary, so this was accomplished with both myself and the shopkeeper rambling on while we knew the other couldn't understand and me making akward gestures and charades to try to communicate "knitting needles". Fun times. Now I just need to buy yarn.

This weekend Dana and I saw the Colosseum. We actually saw it twice. We went Friday, but the weather was quite gray and rainy, so we didn't go inside (which costs money, and we were out of cash) or stay very long. We did make friends with one of the tour guides there. At places like the Colosseum there are guys walking around dressed as gladiators and centurions and Romans of that nature who walk around trying to get people to take pictures with them. One of them walked up to us when he saw that we had cameras. We said we didn't want a picture but the guy took Dana's arm and led her over to the chair they'd set up for pictures. One of them took our cameras and the other two posed with us while the first took our pictures. Once they'd taken our pictures they handed back our cameras and demanded that we pay them 5 euro for the pictures they'd so graciously allowed us to take of them. Being broke and slightly annoyed at what had just happened, we refused, so they made us delete the pictures off our cameras. The one guy actually tried to take my camera and delete the pictures for me. Not a very friendly bunch, really. We walked away and then took their picture from a distance just to be spiteful. The next day the weather was slightly nicer, so we went back to the Colosseum (avoided the gladiators this time) then walked to the Pantheon and met up with Carmine and Raul. We walked around the Pantheon, then walked up to a church not far away (that's kind of silly to say; you're never far from a church in Rome) and explored that, then we came back to the Pantheon to go to Saturday evening Mass. That's right, the Pantheon is also known as the Basilica of Mary and the Martyrs - a Catholic church. We went to Mass in the Pantheon. That was pretty cool. The organ sounded amazing - round stound buildings have sweet acoustics. It was rather cold, but nice all the same.

(the oculus of the Pantheon)

Sunday Professor Kirk, one of AUR's art history professors, led a walking tour of the city that followed the walls that had been built to defend Rome throughout its history. Dana had originally planned on coming along, but then decided that her bed was a much nicer place to be at 8:30 on a cool Sunday morning. About 40 people showed up, around a dozen or so leaving the group at various points during the day. There were only a couple people I knew in the group starting out (Tommy and Melissa, a girl from GW), so I got to meet a lot of new people over the course of the day. A bunch of the people I met were from PhilaU. I also met a few resident students and some other study abroad kids from random schools. The walk itself was awesome. We left the school at about 10 after 10, stopped around 1ish for about an hour for lunch, stopped for about 15 minutes a couple hours later for coffee and gelato, and finally got back to the school around 5:15. We stopped fairly often along the way for Professor Kirk to do the tour guide thing and talk about the history behind various portions of the wall, but most of the time we were walking fairly quickly. Sadly, I don't remember much of what he told us about the walls. They were built over centuries under the sponsorship of various emporers and popes, many of them by Emperor Aurelio for fear of an impending barbarian attack. Some segments of the wall were built rather frantically in the fear that the barbarians were coming to attack the city in the immediate future. During the construction of the wall builders used whatever building materials were handy - bricks laying around, random stones, old temples, ugly statues that were broken to bits and cemented in the wall. Some parts of the wall were built as experiments in the latest military technology. Some parts have been destroyed or buried by the flooding of the Tiber. All in all it was a pretty cool day. When I finally got back to my apartment at the end of the day the entire lower half of my body was just one mass of numbness. I think I'm still working on replenishing all the calories I burned. Good times.

(portion of the wall)

As far as tourist-y type things, that's really all I've got for the moment. There's a chance I may be going to Florence this weekend. The school is leading a guided tour of Florence, the only catch is that you have to make your own travel and lodging arrangements. My roommate and I are working on it. I think tomorrow morning we're going to see about buying train tickets.

Other than tourist-y things...let's see...Dana and I have been cooking a lot. Food is so fresh and cheap here that it's hard not to want to cook. Mostly we make soup from mixes we buy, but we've also done pasta a few times, chicken marsala, parmesan crusted chicken, and a rice-mushroom-broccoli casserole thing. Good times. By the time we leave here we'll be great cooks. Tomorrow we're planning on making pasta alfredo. We have a charcoal grill on our balcony (how cool is that?!) so eventually we plan on having some sort of cookout(s?) with various friends of ours.

That's all I've got for now...it's bedtime. I'm trying to see about signing up for a website where I can post all the pictures I've been taking, instead of just posting a few here or on Facebook. Will keep the updates coming.

posted by Stacey @ 10:09 PM