Ritornoro [or at least I'm convinced that's how you say "I will return" in Italian] a Roma

[WARNING: this is LONG. 12,000+ words long. don't hurt me please :)]

I think I’ve put off updating this because doing so before I left Rome would constitute a taunting mental reminder of just how amazing Rome is and how much I would/am going to miss it. I am now [sandwiched between Christopher on my left and Adam on my right] on the flight from Rome to Frankfurt [where we have a 13-hour layover], so I thought no better time than to now remind myself of just what it means to live like the Romans do- but Vicki-style: packed with the sights, the miles of steps and stairs on cobblestone, and memories that will last me more than a lifetime. You might say that I’ve always approached my life with a Baroque view, to make it the most it can possible be by maxing out every opportunity—you be the judge.

So what does one do with just 8 days left in a city like Rome?

6/21 Sunday – Evading the Rain, with Brutus and Cassius

                I’ve oddly been easily able to wake up to my alarm in Rome, regardless of how much sleep I’ve had or what I have to do for the day- and what’s even more amazing to me is that the only form of an alarm that I’ve had is the itty bitty candy bar rental phone we got for our program. But, my point is that I woke up at 8am the next morning only to find that it was pouring rain outside our window- I was overly tired, so I was quite pleased and mustered up the energy to go upstairs and shake Harvey [who was, of course, still sleeping] awake to tell him it was raining and I was going back to sleep. Right before I laid back down, the loudest, most ominous, and terrifying clap of thunder erupted, and even though our apartment window was only open 6 inches, I was absolutely scared out of my mind for a good minute. Then the tiredness kicked in, and sleep was easily restored.

I woke up around 9:30am to a call from Shyam, but I don’t quite remember what the call was about [and I’m sure I just mumbled something incoherent in hopes of not entirely leaving my REM sleep cycle]. Shortly thereafter though, I got a call from Stephen asking if I wanted to join him in trying to visit Sant’Ivo again after a cappuccino, and I figured I ought to get up then, so I did.

The grogginess wore off as I got ready and met Stephen downstairs on Via Rasella. Stephen was my cappuccino compadre on this trip, and that morning, after taking a couple of quick shots with the Trevi [which is always empty after it rains in Rome], we ventured off to Sant’Eustachio to try their stuff. I decided on an apple croissant to go with my cappuccino, and that was definitely a brilliant choice- check plus to Sant’Eustachio for their apple breakfast pastries!

It was just another quick stroll around the corner to reach the entrance to the courtyard that surrounds Sant’Ivo, and we were quite pleased to find it open [note: Sant’Ivo is only open on Sundays, starting at 9am]. It’s probably one of my favorite churches that I visited in all of Italy, and it’s actually quite small compared to a lot of the ones I’ve been to. The hexagonal dome shape that protrudes way high makes you feel like you’re actually in the biggest of rooms. My favorite thing about the church though, is the way the architectural design makes it a church with unbelievable acoustics. Any sound in the room is amplified and reverberated in a calming and empowering way. Of course, before I left [and after the church was empty], I said ‘I love Rome’ and just let the sound of my voice reverberating against the walls sink into my mind.

Probably in some sort of mutually willing agreement, Stephen agreed to accompany me to the Sunday morning market in Trastevere to do a bit of strolling and bargaining. The street that the market was on was definitely MUCH longer than it looks from the start. You start walking through and peering left  and right at the vendors selling everything from miscellaneous piles of 1Euro clothes to tables flooded with gaudy jewelry [that is way overpriced, in an attempt to swindle extra money out of dumb tourists], and after getting just 100meters in, you realize that this road goes on for quite some time. I wanted to find some white/olive platform/heels of some sort, but nothing that I saw was simple enough for me to think that I’d wear them more than just once a year or something [note: I actually really dislike shoes that don’t have backs to them]. It took me quite some time before I actually found things that I wanted to get: I bargained down a silver bracelet from 12Euro to 6Euro [having been to Taiwan quite a few times before has taught me that you should never pay the original quoted price that a vendor gives you, and also, that hard cash is the best way to get what you want at the price you want it at] and got a teal dress for 4Euro. Thank goodness Stephen was wearing a red shirt because there were so many bodies pushing left and right and in opposite directions of traffic that I probably would’ve lost him [or vice versa] if I hadn’t been able to spot his red shirt.

After traversing the entire market and then walking out to a parallel street to find a tram to take us back, I saw that the sky was turning an ugly shade of grey again, which prompted us to catch the next bus we saw that was headed back to Piazza Venezia. The II Vittoriano always looks gorgeous regardless of what the weather looks like, so we took some pictures on the grass in front of the monument, and I got a great jumping picture- yay!

We made it back to our apartments and that’s when I sat down to finish writing up the last entry I posted. The afternoon got gobbled up by finishing up my last entry, and then I gathered my stuff together to head over to the AIRC to work on our papers due on Tuesday morning. Among things like my laptop, course packets, and legal pads of paper, I made sure to pack the card that I’d had everyone sign for Father’s Day that we were going to give to KG. [side note: I’m pretty sure we all secretly wish KG was our own Godfather] I am quite proud of the ‘witty’ saying I thought up to put inside the card; it said “Happy [God]Father’s Day, KG! You’re the Augustus of our [Plan II] Roman Empire!” The card presentation was quite successful, and I think it put us all [or at least I know it put me] in a good mood to hack away at the two 5page papers I needed to write.

The time ticked away as we typed away, and soon enough the evening rolled around. I was silly and left my ticket for Julius Caesar back at the apartment, so I had to sprint back home and get it, but everything worked out great. [Explanation: they were showing the play Julius Caesar, in Italian, IN THE IMPERIAL FORUM. If you don’t know how unbelievably cool that is,

Even though I couldn’t really understand any of the words being said [except for the occasional “andiamo!” or “Caesare” and such], it helped that earlier I’d printed out the Sparknotes for Julius Caesar [so at least I knew where we were in the play] and I could tell which character was which. Plus, I made sure to keep Harvey nearby for the occasional “what just happened?” since he’s the only one of us that understands more than 3% of Italian. Remember how I said it rained really hard that morning? Well in Texas that would’ve translated to humidity and mosquitoes later on, but in Rome, that translated into a 10-degree drop in the weather, so I spent all of Julius Caesar freezing my butt off too, but it was totally worth it. I made sure to sandwich myself between boys after every scene change [oh yeah- get this: we changed sets 5 times in the play and therefore the viewers got to move around the Forum, so badass].

The play was scheduled to start around 9:15pm but we probably started 10 minutes late, and then the play ran until close to midnight, so we all trekked back home in the middle of the night, quite content with ourselves and the wonderful play we just witnessed. I’d just like to say that the [oh so cute] Mark Antony from that night’s performance is welcome to give a speech over my dead body any day; the play was cast with some wonderfully tan, toned, and vibrant actors, so maybe that’s where all the cute Italians are… But, the night was quite a success- I’m blown away that I can tell people I’ve seen Julius Caesar stabbed IN THE FORUM OF JULIUS CAESAR. Beat that.

After arriving back at Via Rasella, I’m pretty sure I just crashed on my bed and called it a night since we had an early morning the next day.

6/22 Monday – A pseudo-dig and death march to find out where water comes from

I was quite tired the next morning, from what I remember, after having had such a thorough Sunday, but without a cappuccino, I did alright with getting to the Barberini metro stop and surviving the nature-filled day. We met Albert at the Metro stop Lucio  Sestio, and from there we took a nice 10 minute walk through the suburb-iest part of Rome that I’ve seen thus far, to reach the Vignacce dig site. Because of permit issues with the city of Rome’s higher-ups, we didn’t actually do any digging [not cool!], but instead we cleared off a little space of land, pulling weeds and removing everything to prepare it for being dug up by the other program being run by the AIRC, a 7-week dig program.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have an irrational [and it’s ballooned into something subconscious these days] fear of bugs/spiders/et. al., and so there weren’t too many [just a couple, I think] gasps because the bugs weren’t in full swing just yet.

After finishing up with our dig-evolved-clearing-duty, Albert gave us a small lecture on the aqueduct system that supplied water to all of Rome back in the day. It’s crazy to think that 4million gallons of water traveled through the 11 different aqueducts to provide water for public baths, private baths, and all other types of water needs. The aqueducts have since been replaced by modern pipes and such, but you can still go out to see the actual arches- which is what we did!

Our ‘death march’ was a trek following Albert, all the way out in the fields [we saw a herd of goats along the way!] to reach one end of the Acqua Claudia [I think, which was finished up either by Caligula or Caracalla… oy, too many Cs], and then we got to walk ATOP AN AQUEDUCT. Uber awesome.

Class wasn’t finished there, as we took the Metro back to a southeast part of Rome to reach a different part of the aqueduct system; Porta Maggiore, which is just now a huge set of arches in the middle of a traffic circle, is the location of where three main aqueduct lines used to meet to enter the city. We had time for a lunch break, and I ate the sandwich I’d packed [I’ve eaten more packed lunches in the past 4 weeks than I have during the entire normal school year… go figure] because I’d much rather spend my Euros on other things.

When class finished, we took a tram back to the Metro stop [I want to say, San Giovanni?], and took the red line back to good ol’ Barberini. A bit of chill time was followed by packing up and heading over to the AIRC to work on papers due the next morning. Realizing that this was my last Monday in Rome, I made sure to document part of my walk to the AIRC earlier and just grab a quite bite of pizza for dinner on my walk back home.

I definitely procrastinated my fair share on the papers we needed to write in Rome, but since these were the last papers we needed to write, I thought I might finish them earlier than, say 3am in the morning, so I was done by midnight, and capped off the night with some late-night goofing off with the boys upstairs before bed.

6/23 Tuesday – No day is complete without some adventure, or in my case, a lot of adventure

For this morning’s class, we didn’t have to be somewhere until 9:15pm, so the previous night Stephen and I had planned to grab cappuccinos at Tazza d’Oro, and I invited Alex to join us. Well, that morning, as we were walking to the bus stop to take the 62 over towards the Pantheon area, a 62 came down Tritone as we were still on the opposite of the street. [I hate when that happens.]

Thus, we spent another 10-15 minutes waiting at the bus stop crossing our fingers that another 62 would come our way, but by about 8:40, nothing had come. Most of the rest of our group arrived at the same bus stop [planning to catch a bus to where we were meeting KG for that morning’s class], and Stephen decided he could do without the coffee. So this is where that morning’s adventure starts.

Alex hadn’t been to Campo di Fiore yet, and since it’s not too far of a walk away [keep in mind, I say this with a previous marching band and running background] from the Pantheon, the plan was to hit all of these stops along our way to meet KG near the Mouth of Truth. After looking at my trusty map, I realized we could take a different bus [the 63] to drop us south below the Pantheon on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II [a main street that runs east-west in Rome], and then Alex and I found our way to Tazza d’Oro. I’m so glad I got to introduce her to what I think is the best cappuccino in all of Rome. We trekked past the Pantheon [where I took a jumping picture of Alex], and because I’d also been craving another apple croissant from Sant’ Eustachio, we dropped by there only to find out there had no more. Sad.

By this time, time was ticking down but I still figured we could make it where we needed to go as long as we power walked there. Back along Corso Vittorio Emanuele II west and then a left turn on Baullari brought us right to Campo di Fiore where I took Alex to get dried fruit and cherries before dashing off in the direction of class. I don’t think we left Campo di Fiore until 9:10am, and the Piazza della Bocca della Verita was definitely a good 15 minute walk away [having walked all across the city, I’m able to now estimate about how long it take to get anywhere] at my power walking speed, which meant that all of the cars driving along Corso Vittorio Emanuele II got to see two Asian girls scurrying along the sidewalk to make it south.

I navigated us to the river, which we just needed to follow south until it reached the location we were meeting at for class. Following a phone call from Stephen and KG, I was terrified that we’d be in big trouble for running late, but I was also crossing my fingers that we’d be able to make it there in time by 9:30, which is when our appointment technically was.

Save for the moment when I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking and walked STRAIGHT into a trashcan [since I had my map entirely unfolded out in front of me], most every single disaster that could’ve happened was averted. The Pantheon gods must’ve been watching over us or something because we made it into the little alleyway where our class was waiting in the staircase, and KG popped out and motioned for us to join them. Alex and I even evaded listening to the ear-piercing alarm once, so we only had to hear it once [it went off twice], and whew- all in a morning’s adventure with Vicki Chang around the city of Rome.

For class that day we were able to go into one of many underground meeting locations for the Cult of Mithras [which was actually only open to men during its existence], which is what Royce gave his presentation on, and then we trekked over to the Tiber Island for Alex’s presentation on Aesclepius, the god of healing. After that, we bussed over to the Church of San Clemente, and went to the basement where another Cult of Mithras was located [in Italian, the location is called Mithraeum, for Mithraeus].

Another bus took us back towards the AIRC, where we finished up the day’s class with a seminar, printing our papers to turn in, and to my surprise we were done by lunch time, which was quite nice. I headed back home and made myself a quick lunch before organizing all of the postcards I needed to write and putting them into my backpack for yet another adventure.

I didn’t want to write my postcards from my apartment, and I also had been wanting to check out Santa Maria Maggiore [which is located just a 10-minute walk away from the Termini metro stop], so I packed my water, pen, and postcards and left for the afternoon to sit against the obelisk in Piazza dell Esquino while writing my postcards. I made it through 18 of the 22 I needed to send, just sitting in the sun and enjoying the sounds of Roman traffic [they are quite liberal with their horn usage, which I quite like], before my hand started to cramp up and thus I decided it was time for a walk around Rome.

I trekked back to Termini thinking that I’d just metro it back home, but the weather was too nice to pass up. I headed from Termini towards the Piazza della Repubblica, crossing lanes of traffic to get a nice look at the fountain in the middle of the traffic circle there, bought a big slice of watermelon for a Euro and ate it as I trotted back towards the general direction of home. I made it to an intersection where there are four fountains, and I remembered Stephen had told me I needed to check out a church that was located there, so I popped my head in for a little bit, but then my dad gave me a call so I came back outside to take the call. [my family left for Taiwan while I was still in Rome, so I just needed information on how to pick up the car for when I arrived back in Houston]

I sometimes wonder if I go looking for adventure and chaos or if it comes to find me- because after taking the call, I ended up taking the wrong street to get back to Via Rasella, and soon enough I found myself at the Piazza del Quirinale [which is one of the seven hills of Rome], where an Italian marching band and army were doing some sort of processional performance. I really had no idea what was going on, but I had a fun time listening to the band and watching them march off back into one of the palaces at the top of the hill. By this time, I figured I ought to look at my map and figure out where the heck I was, and this is when I learned that I was smack on the other side the Monte Quirinale, meaning that either I had to take a long roundabout route to get back home, or I had to cut through using the epically long tunnel that I’ve seen every single day here in Rome.

I opted for the tunnel, listening to the roar of cars and motorcycles whizzing by me, and I was quite happy to make it out onto the other end and head back to my apartment. There weren’t any big dinner plans for the evening, but I went upstairs to ask the boys [Stephen, David, and Harvey] if they wanted to join me to eat at a place near Termini that the Venice group had been hyping up, so I got ready and the four of us headed to the Metro. After we got off the Metro, I got a call from Shyam saying that 9 of the rest of them were also coming to join us, so we reserved a table for 13 and waited for the other group to join us.

Dinner was great, with a nice helping of house wine [Christopher, Ashley, and I split a liter of the house red] and I ordered seafood risotto [haven’t had much of seafood or rice in Italy]. I think one thing that I will miss a lot about being in Rome is the ability to get together with everyone for dinner and genuinely sit down to chat and enjoy a meal.

When we got back home, I definitely was up for some games of BANG! to celebrate finishing our last round of papers [which we also celebrated with toasts at dinner], drank the random bottle of pilsner beer that I’d bought [I’ve tried quite a few new beers while abroad], and then about half of us headed out to try Rome’s night life yet one more time.

The group was aiming to head to The Abbey, a pub near Da Baffetto and Frigidarium, but I thought we ought to stop by Anima [the place that Harvey and I went searching to make sure it existed], and so that’s where we went! Three cheers for no cover, 1Euro shots [although European shots are about a tablespoon big, no joke], and some relatively good dancing music with bass. If I had to make a comparison, Anima was like a sub-par 6^th Street bar, but we all still had a good time celebrating being done with papers.

When we all decided that we were sweaty and tired enough of Anima, we trekked home and called it a night.

6/24 Wednesday – Cramming in more adventure, chaos, and some of my favorite things about Rome

                I got to bed ASAP the night before because Harvey and I’d made plans to go running [what ended up being our last time running in Rome, sad!] along the route that went by the Spanish Steps, Piazza del Popolo, and finished at Campo di Fiore [where I picked up half a kilo of cherries] before heading back to Via Rasella [a 3.5 mile morning run].

                I quickly jumped in the shower and rushed so that I could leave with everyone that was going to get cappuccinos and apple croissants [which I’d talked up quite a bit]. Get this: I am in love with the apple croissants at Sant’ Eustachio but I like the cheaper 1Euro cappuccinos at Tazza d’Oro, so I picked up the former first and then brought it over to the latter. Since Harvey was running late, I got him an apple croissant [of a different type than my favorite, but since I am nice I went splitsies on them with him], and the morning’s breakfast was quite nice.

                Class that day was somewhat different than what we’d been doing all along; Dr. Irene Baldriga met with us in front of the Pantheon and took us on a walk around a central part of Rome to show us both Renaissance and Baroque churches, noting the differences and explaining to us what made each unique. We started with Sant’Ivo [which made me really psyched that Stephen and I had already checked it out, since it is only open on Sundays], checked out Sant’ Andrea della Valle from the outside, as well as Sant’ Agostino from the inside, before finishing at Piazza Navona with the Fontana dei Fiumi [the Fountain of the Four Rivers] and a look at the Sant’ Agnese in Agone church from the inside as well. All in all, a nice insight at what Baroque art is focused on [which makes me want to describe my life as incredibly Baroque- always packed in and wanting to be in motion].

                KG treated us [seriously, we’ve all adopted him as our grandfather in our minds] to gelato on the north end of Piazza Navona, and then everyone split into their separate ways. I stayed in Piazza Navona to finish off writing my postcards next to the Fontana Nettuno while Stephen grabbed lunch and walked around the Piazza to look at the art. It’s been quite fun wandering around Rome with Stephen, and we finished with our respective things about the same time, so we took a wind-y route back towards Via Rasella, and it actually brought us to this antique art area, where all these vendors were selling prints and art of all sorts. I got a small panoramic painting of the Trevi Fountain area [which I will forever be in love with], and then I needed to head back home to address all of my postcards.

                Little did I know, but more adventure was about to find its way to meet up with me. After addressing all of my postcards and picking up the ones that the boys were finished with to send those, I went and hopped on the 62 bus [with an hour left before needing to be back at the AIRC for a seminar], and headed off to the Vatican to pick up stamps for the girls and mail off all of the postcards.

                My problem was that the same bus I took to the Vatican had already left by the time I was done at the post office [where I only spent 5 minutes, max], and so by the time the next bus showed up, it was already 3:30pm, and then I learned that the bus driver was going to take a nice 10 minute ‘break’. By 10 minutes he must’ve meant 15, because I immediately started freaking out and debating how on earth I was going to make it back to the AIRC by 4.

                Well, after HP convinced me that Albert would probably understand that I couldn’t afford to really down a 20 Euro taxi ride to get back by 4pm, and calling Ashley to ask her to tell Albert I’d be running just a bit late, I waited for the bus and took it over to the Largo Argentina area, where I figured I could power walk back to the AIRC. Only problem was, I ended up going too much toward the south and not enough east on these small streets that I found myself on, and thus around 4:05pm, I found myself back at THE RIVER and somewhat freaking out.

                I was hot, tired, and thankfully the Pantheon gods were looking out for me again because I came upon a taxi and immediately hailed it, for a 5Euro ride that dropped me off right near  Trajan’s Column. I rushed upstairs to the AIRC on the fourth floor, and made it right in time for the start of our HUM 350 final review. My family also called me in the middle of the review to tell me where they’d parked the car at the airport, and so I was all flustered and over the place.

                Thankfully the review went by relatively quickly and then I headed back to Via Rasella, where Christopher called me and asked if I wanted to join part of our group and Albert at The Abbey for a drink, since Albert probably wasn’t going to be able to make it to our farewell dinner on Friday night. This is where I hurried up and got dressed, ran upstairs to snag the Stooges [who were coming along as well], and headed off toward the Abbey [which, getting over there is always a 15 minute walk, minimum].

                We made it there and between the four of us, ordered a pitcher of Strongbow cider [although wine comes cheaply in Italy, all other alcohol doesn’t; a pitcher ran us 11 Euro, and that was considered cheap], and had a great time just chatting with Albert [who I think most of us are so excited about his visiting Austin later this year in September] about what he’s done in life and such.

               All this time, Stephen and Alex had gone to Termini to pick up Kristin [who just finished studying abroad in England], and they brought her straight over to Da Baffetto [which is catty corner across the street from the Abbey, whee!], and so the timing was pretty sweet- they arrived just as Albert needed to leave, and so we all got in line for one last time of yummy pizza in Rome. To summarize how dinner went: we had the absolute flirtiest [but nicest, of the three times I’ve been at the pizzeria] waiter, Davide, who definitely kept on putting the moves on Alex and Meagan, and a good time was had by all 8 of us [Stephen, David, Christopher, myself, Alex, Kristin, Meagan, and Ashley] as some of us had the red house wine with our last round of Da Baffetto pizza [this time around, I got the Pizza Baffetto- if you’re ever in Italy, always try the pizza named after the pizzeria, it’s bound to be good!].

                As this was Kristin’s first night in Rome, post-dinner we headed next door so she could have the legendary Frigidarium for the first time as well. I love their free whipped cream and sprinkles, and/or free chocolate shell topping. We walked back home, bellies full and happy, and that night I remember playing some more games of BANG!, finishing up the last of my postcards, and calling it a well-done night.

6/25 Thursday – Deep down in Rome, last trip to Despar

                The morning started off with a metro ride from Barberini out to Circo Massimo, where we watched our fearless KG dash across traffic [of course, I was right behind him, after which we made it to the other side and had a nice high five moment], and then went to a bus stop to wait for a bus to take us all the way down south on the Via Appia Antica to reach the land of catacombs.

                First we went to see the Jewish Catacombs, which we had to get special permission for [thanks to Dar who used his connections to get us in!], and it was quite the adventure below the ground. Seeing hundreds of slots in the tufo dug out, of all different shapes and sizes, for anyone from babies to grown adults… it was a tad creepy, scary, yet interesting all the same. My only problem was when I decided to shine a flashlight all around where we were walking, and I discovered the BIGGEST bug on the ceiling. Absolutely terrifying for me.

                The second set of catacombs we visited were the Catacombs of San Calisto, just a short walk away. If the Jewish Catacombs were like Herculaneum, then the Catacombs of  San Calisto were like Pompeii in the sense that they were utterly overrun with tourists, and my least favorite kind too- the ones that just chat about senseless stuff instead of paying attention to what they paid admission to see in the first place! We were herded through the underground route and saw a few neat things here and there, but I wasn’t too sad to exit the tombs because the tour we were given wasn’t that great- it was just neat to see another set of catacombs and be able to compare them with what we’d been able to see earlier in the morning.

                We found a nice set of benches to fit all 15 of us at afterward, where we sat and listened to David give his presentation, and I went through a pack of saltines in the meanwhile. Afterward, we took the metro back home, and I got off at Colosseo with Meagan, Ishanee, and Apu. We were all going to head in the direction of a place that had great buffalo mozzarella [near the AIRC], and by the time I got to the place, it was just me. I picked up a nice 2Euro ball of the cheese there, along with a prosciutto and mozzarella panini, and then proceeded to go on a small adventure [are we seeing a theme yet?] to get back home, venturing yet again on roads I’d never been on, which resulted on me having to walk through the epically long tunnel again to reach home.

                I made myself a caprese salad [think cut tomatoes with cut mozzarella cheese] and immediately ate the delicious buffalo mozzarella, after which I read a little bit for our seminar later in the day, before I absolutely crashed for a mid-afternoon nap. I woke up in time to get my stuff together and headed over to the AIRC for our last class in Rome- a seminar with KG that basically went along with the theme of what we would do, had we been emperors of Rome back in the day. I loved the discussion that went along with the seminar, and before I knew it, following a small final exam review, class was over for the day.

                Side story: everyone on the trip knew I was a big scrapbooker [in my planner, of course], KG included. So, he struck a deal with me so that I could get the only ticket stub we had from visiting San Clemente- I’ve let him borrow my Livestrong bracelet for the time being, and now my planner has a pretty blue ticket stub reminding me of the day we visited San Clemente. [be sure to ask me to see my planner- it’s awesome].

                I caught up on some of my technological life at the AIRC afterward, using the internet to check email and all that jazz, and Harvey, David, and I made plans for dinner together [because a bunch of the rest of the group was going to l’Archetto and Da Baffetto, but I didn’t want to go to the former because I’m holding a grudge against their owner who yelled at me for taking a business card- ridiculous- and I’d already ended my time at Da Baffetto for this trip to Rome]. David and I went to Despar on our way home and told Harvey to head home because he had a BHP interview, and we picked up some pasta, sauce, mushrooms, bell peppers, and sausage. Needless to say, with Harvey’s cooking and help from David and myself, dinner was quite delicious. I’m going to miss hanging out on a daily basis with those two. I did some laundry as well and then I continued to catch up on some more miscellaneous things- gluing things into my planner, internetting, reading a little, and then crashing around midnight because the last few nights I hadn’t really been getting that much sleep. [I know some people went out to the Abbey that night and to Anima afterward, but all I remember thinking is that sleeping on my bed never sounded so good to me.]

I’ve got to take time to go eat dinner right now though. Long story short, my laptop battery didn’t last the entire flight, and I’m now in Austin actually. Will explain at the end of this post, of course :)

6/26 Friday – The beginning of the end of my time in Rome

                Since I’d fallen asleep around midnight the night before, waking up the next morning at 8am happened naturally and felt quite good. Something about sleeping in a bed where the one set of windows we had would shine light just enough to provide a nice morning glow was awesome. I did some copying of notes for our finals later in the day, reviewed some notes, finished up a reading, and got ready to go on a market date with my enantiomer.

                Shyam and I took the metro from Barberini, south to San Giovanni and found ourselves checking out a strip of markets [only a third or a fourth the size of the markets in Trastevere] along Via Sannio, where the vendors mostly had the same things- knockoff purses, gaudy jewelry, ties, and miscellaneous clothing. I didn’t really buy any clothing while in Italy at all because I’m about to see all sorts of really cheap clothing when I go to Taiwan, and it’s a bit better quality for cheaper too. There’s just something I really like about casually strolling about, giving your eyes something to glaze over for a short period of time, whether it’s trees or clothes or people. I think that’s why grocery shopping is so appealing to me, it’s just time to let your senses do the thinking.

                The second market Shyam wanted to visit was actually the same art market that Stephen and I had wandered upon on Wednesday, so we browsed around and I made sure to introduce Shyam to the same lady that Stephen and I bought art from. Shyam picked up a print of the Fountain of the Four Rivers [the central fountain in Piazza Navona] as well as some wood carved prints, and then I had to rush back towards home to get some last minute reviewing done. Shyam went to check out a church, so we just took different stops home off of the metro.

                I picked up a yummy panini on the walk home, from the deli on Via del Boccaccio, and soon enough had to head over to the AIRC for our finals at 13:30. First we took the TC 357 final, then the HUM 350 final, and then we were done. It’s amazing to realize that in 4 weeks we knocked out 6 hours of college credit and had quite a good time doing it. We needed to check out of our apartments afterward, so I headed home to find Alex and my apartment clean! [later on Kristin told us that she got bored and cleaned up for us, including doing the dishes- which I am SO appreciative of, to no end] I hopped in the shower really quickly, ran downstairs to buzz Meagan and let her know Giovanna was going to check out the girls’ apartment first, and then ran back upstairs to my place to finish getting ready. I intercepted the buzz for our apartment complex and when Giovanna came up, I asked her if she’d do our 2-person apartment first before getting to the boys’. Ours took like 3 minutes to check out our place and make sure everything was where it was supposed to be, and then she went to check out the boys. Meagan had to leave to catch a train because she is traveling with her grandma across other parts of Europe, so we all went downstairs to send her off.

                I wore the 4 Euro dress I bought at the Trastevere market and grabbed my stuff to meet Shyam, Apu, and Ishanee [who KG calls his ‘slumdog millionaires’] and we caught the metro over to Termini to go see Santa Maria Maggiore [the last new church that I saw in Rome]. It was the second biggest church I’ve been to on my trip. I said a prayer for Thomas’ mom, walked around to see all of the different side altars, took pictures of the beautiful artwork [mosaics and a gorgeous stained glass window], and then we headed back to Via Rasella so the three of them could take their stuff over to KG’s and the other 12 of us could walk over to the restaurant for our farewell dinner.

                Dinner was delicious, as always- all 5 or 6 parts to it. Bread, a couple appetizers, two plates of pasta, salad, dessert… I think I am going to miss the multiple-dish style of meals in Italy; you get a wider variety of things to eat in every meal and each one fills a different part of your stomach. It was great to have one last meal with almost all of our Plan II group, plus Lynda [the academic coordinator of the AIRC], Dar [one of our humanities professors who you can find on the National Geographic channel], and KG, of course. Eventually dinner had to come to an end and we all said our well wishes to each other.

                We rushed back to the apartments because Alex and Stephen had to pack up and catch their 11:58pm train to Bari [from where they flew to Greece]. Cobblestone is not fun to walk on, and it’s even less fun to drag luggage across, so our huge pack of people helped carry luggage and such to Barberini and we saw the three of them [Kristin, Alex, and Stephen] off, which left every apartment short one person at the end of the night.

                Of course BANG! was going on in the boys’ apartment and I had to partake in a round or two, but following that most of us went for a last hurrah at the Abbey, joined by some people participating in the other AIRC program. Another pint of Strongbow cider later, we went to Anima again for a bit of dancing, and once we were all sweaty enough, came back home to do more packing and wrapping up.

                Quite a few people were leaving the next morning, and being the sentimental person I am, I wanted to be able to say bye to all of them, so I opted to stay up and write postcards [which, to explain- since I bought 3 packs of the 20 postcards for 1 Euro, plus David gave me some extras, I decided to write everyone in our group a postcard, telling them how much fun I’d had and what I enjoyed about this trip with them] to the people who were departing the next morning. Around 4am, I stole Stephen’s pillow and decided I might sleep on the boys’ living room table… which was a good idea until I woke up an hour later with two mosquito bites on my left arm. I relocated downstairs to my apartment and my bed [which was partially covered in miscellaneous stuff that needed to be packed] for another hour, before waking up at 6:30 to head upstairs and [wake up and] catch Bhargav before he departed and headed off to the airport.

5/27 Saturday – A day devoted to Rome

                I also made sure to call Ashley around 6:45 and wake her up, because she had to go pick up her family from the airport. Before she left, I caught her downstairs on Via Rasella and gave her a big hug goodbye, along with her postcard. Next to leave [but not leave Rome, since they were going to southern Italy for the weekend] from Via Rasella were Shyam, Ishanee, and Apu. I gave them hugs and postcards as they left to go catch their train south, and finally, I went back upstairs to sleep for a little bit.

                I should note, as much as I hate bugs, goodbyes are a close second on the list. I think because it was early in the morning I wasn’t able to cry [like I did the night before having to say goodbye to Alex], which might’ve been a good thing [crying = puffy eyes = not fun]. I snagged Stephen’s comforter and crashed in the closest room with a made bed, which happened to be Bhargav’s. Around 9am I woke up craving eggs and bacon, formulating a plan that we’d make breakfast the next morning, and then I went back to sleep thinking I’d have just have a quick powernap, but I crashed for the better part of an hour.

                I woke up at 10:15, went downstairs to get ready, and left the apartment with David and the Stooges [Christopher went to see the art museums in the Borghese Gardens area that morning and Harvey was still sleeping] to head over towards the Vatican. Wanting to ride the metro as much as possible, we took it up to the Ottaviano stop, where the Stooges headed off to do the Vatican museums, David went souvenir shopping, and I walked across Via Cola di Rienzo [a somewhat popular shopping street in Rome] to see what it had to offer. There wasn’t much to see, and I poked my head around a few vendors’ wares, but I actually wanted to go check out this enoteca [wine store] that Albert had recommended to us  the day we went to Castel Sant’ Angelo for class [but it was closed during the afternoon while we were in that part of town].

                The place had an AMAZING wine selection downstairs [I saw a bottle of wine that was labeled 1.535 Euro, which when you realize that they use commas and periods interchangeably in Europe, means that bottle of wine cost over 1500 Euros… oy], and I went straight to the chianti section. I had forgotten to write down the name of the chianti we had with dinner in Florence, so I gave Harvey a call, got the name from him, asked the owner if he had any, and low and behold he brought me a box with four bottles of the Castiglioni Chianti we had in Florence. [note: we paid 18 Euro/bottle with our dinner… and at this enoteca, each bottle was only 6 Euro!!] The Asian-deal-seeker in me was quite pleased, and I called Christopher to ask if he wanted a bottle, and after that… I figured I’d just go ahead and buy the entire box :)

                I’d made plans with the rest of the boys [minus the Stooges] to meet up at the Spanish Steps at 12:15, so I started on my trek east, across the river, to meet them there. I must’ve looked like one heck of an alcoholic tourist, what with carrying a big box of wine as I walked down some major streets that led me up to the Spanish Steps. I arrived a little before 12:15 and just sat near the fountain and on the steps getting some good people watching in, and then the boys started to trickle in. Christopher made it over first, then Harvey, and finally David arrived, and then we headed to the Spagna metro stop to walk through the underground tunnels to reach the Gardens.

                Something about Saturday was quite hot and the big field we walked through to start off our venture into the Borghese Gardens made me wonder where the actual garden was. Then we got to the roads that weave through the Gardens and began seeing all these groups of people riding around on 2 or 4 person cart-cycle-esque things… and we instantly started searching for a vendor that was renting these out. I swear we walked a good mile through the Gardens before we started seeing all these bikes come out of this one road, so we followed it uphill and finally found a vendor.

                We termed the thing a ‘quadcicleta’, and I got to be the first driver, haha. Imagine me behind the wheel of this thing, with Christopher next to me, and Harvey and David in the second row. All of our backpacks and whatnot [including my box with 4 bottles of wine, each one wrapped up, thankfully] fit into this little basket thing in the front and thankfully never fell out at any point during our hour rental. It took us some guessing and pedaling around to get a hang for the feel of powering the quadcicleta [not to mention that it was rather hot and sunny, but there did manage to be a breeze for most of the time we were in the park, and the quadcicleta had a shade covering it too. At one point, we made a stop to get some lovely SPQR [pronounced spi-cue-er, if you’d like] water, and a red ‘Roma’ bag caught my eye so I had to bargain with the vendor to get it. No sooner than had I pulled out my 8 Euro [down from 15, ridiculous!] and gotten the bag before I saw the quadcicleta pulling away with all of the boys pedaling! I’m sure I must’ve been a funny sight running after them…

                Let me tell you a bit about what happens when you put 4 Plan II kids behind the wheels of a quadcicleta- it is absolute rampant, ridiculous, thrilling chaos. Once we figured out that there was a looped street that involved a windy downhill road and a not-TOO-bad uphill path, we lapped it four times, haha- once for each of us as drivers. Sitting in a cart-cycle thing that is definitely not meant to go any faster than maybe 10-15 mph [and we were probably coasting downhill at some 15-20 mph, I think] is so much fun. Of course David and I have videos of most of the runs and I haven’t had a chance to look at them just yet, but I’m sure I’ll be laughing really hard when I do.

                The afternoon in the park was quite a nice way to get a nice leg workout, enjoy the greenery of a park, and spend time with friends just having fun in ways that you normally don’t get the chance to experience. When our time was up, we brought back the quadcicleta [and escaped scot-free, even though during the hour a handful of things went wrong with the machinery, not entirely our fault either] and trekked back to the underground metro tunnel to take the metro one last time, from Spagna to Barberini. Christopher split off to go find a café to do some reading at, David went to the AIRC to get his umbrella, and HP and I headed back to make some food [late lunch for me, first meal of the day for him]. It’s been quite nice to have someone around who knows how to cook, and talents like those are much appreciated by all.

                Post-pasta [we finished off the pasta Kristin left in my and Alex’s fridge], I went back to my room to really get close to being finished with packing so that I could spend a good chunk of the afternoon doing some more personal roaming around Rome. I walked the touristy strip from our apartment to the Trevi, popping my head into places and trying to find deals on things like shirts and other souvenirs for a few people, taking note of what places had what deals. Then I walked all the way over to the Pantheon area so that I could coffee beans for me [as a gift to my research group] and Adam from Tazza d’Oro [since they aren’t open on Sundays]. I also trekked over through Piazza Navona to try this gelato place that one guy who I met at the AIRC who studied there this spring recommended, and I tried their strawberry and hazelnut [fragola e nocciola], which were both okay, but not the best I’d had in Rome. Last but not least I headed back and was sure to get one last cappuccino from Tazza d’Oro and savor every last sip of it.

                As I left Tazza d’Oro, a red suede Gucci knockoff caught my eye [note: there are street vendors who sell knockoffs at almost every corner and they’ve got their purses all nicely set up, yet they’re swift enough that they bundle them all up at the sight of a policeman]. Lynda had told me that the going rate for purses is 18 Euro, but having had some bargaining experience underneath my belt, I got mine for 15 Euro.

                Back at the apartment, I unloaded my stuff and showed the boys [poor things, they had to listen to me talk about my afternoon’s adventures since no girls were around to squeal to about my purse] what I’d gotten, and then HP, David, and I decided to go get stuff for dinner and for breakfast the next morning. One last trip to Despar and back, and then we had bell peppers, mushrooms, sausage, tomato sauce, and whole wheat pasta for dinner.

                Obviously some games of BANG! had to be played while David was still in town, since he was the one who introduced us all to this wonderous game, so we went through a couple of games of that and reveled in all the fun that this game brought us in the last 4 weeks. I’m probably going to make it the next game I buy.

                Since it was David’s last night, he did some packing, and then we all prepared to make a Frigidarium run. I woke up Christopher from his nap, and 5 of us [David, Christopher, Adam, Harvey, and myself] trekked over to the other side of town [seriously, I could do the Via Rasella to Via Governo Vecchio walk in my sleep] and joined David in his last helping of Frigidarium. I also got a picture behind the counter with Fabbrizzio e Stefano, two of the awesome servers at Frigidarium [which is a family owned gelateria, making it even cuter]. On the way back home, the five of us took the cutest Trevi fountain picture and ensured that we’d all come back my throwing a coin into the beautiful fountain. After that, Christopher headed back and I took the three other guys souvenir shopping at the places I’d noted earlier- we got things for siblings, grandmas, friends, etcetc, and then Adam and David took back the goods while I went to attempt to find a purse for Harvey’s grandma and mom.

                Our search took us back towards the Pantheon direction, and then we finally wandered up Via del Corso before trekking to the Spanish Steps on the way home. I’m all for finding new routes home every single time you walk somewhere… it’s a shame time and lack of new-ness at UT doesn’t permit that [I did it a lot when I was a freshman]. No purses were bought, but we scoped out some good ones and then made it back to the apartment.

                More packing ensued, as well as a couple more games of BANG! for good measure, and then everyone trickled off to bed. Again, I stayed up late because I had to secretly write postcards for everyone since our trip was almost over, and then I got ready for bed and fell asleep in Shyam’s old bed that night.

6/28 Sunday – Never before has a city been so good to me in so many ways: Rome, the last day

                I woke up early that morning at 6:30am to make David breakfast before he headed on out, gave him his postcard, and helped him get his luggage over to Barberini [seriously, cobblestone is no friend to the weary traveler] before hugging him goodbye. By the time I got back the apartment, I just got ready and then Christopher and I headed off to the Trevi fountain to film something for Plan II. We got what he needed in two takes and Harvey met us soon after at the Trevi, and then we headed off towards the Pantheon area so that we could grab one last cappuccino at Sant’Eustachio and so I could show the boys Sant’Ivo. Turns out the former doesn’t open until 8:30 and the latter until 9, so we just strolled around and enjoyed quiet Sunday morning  Rome, with a stop back at the Pantheon, before making it back to Sant’Eustachio and getting the usual caffeine and apple croissant. Yum.

                Back over we went and sat on the steps to the courtyard of Sant’Ivo until they opened it, and then the three of us went inside the church. It was so neat to have the church pretty much to ourselves- I forget where but I heard that Sant’Ivo has this feel that makes you feel like it’s just you and the church, regardless of how many people are in there. I just wanted to soak up the feeling as much as possible and so I just laid back in a pew and stared up at the domed roof, thinking about how many amazing experiences I had in the last 4 weeks. After that, we made one last stop at the Pantheon, which was nice and empty too… and just, reveled in its awesomeness. It’s rare that you get the peace of mind to really let something penetrate your mind and permeate in your breath, and I really tried to soak up every last bit of Rome on Sunday in that way.

                Of course we wandered back home again, picking up a purse for Harvey’s mom that we’d found the night before, and by then it was just about time for me to make breakfast for Adam, Royce, Harvey, and myself, and so I did that, ate my omelet [I’d been craving protein big time], and went to finish packing for the very last time. It’s probably a good thing I finished packing then because I didn’t think that everything I’d had planned for the afternoon would literally take the rest of the afternoon.

                I went back upstairs, got Harvey, and made sure to grab my checklist of things to do on my last afternoon in Rome. The list took us all around Rome [do you think I’d have it any other way on my last day in Rome? Cooome on], starting off with the Knights of Malta Keyhole, which is waaaay south. I wanted to take a tram one last time, we HP and I walked to Largo Argentina, caught the 8 Tram across the Tiber, and hopped off to go south towards Malta. Harvey and I happened upon the Trastevere markets and I thought it’d be a good idea to check and see if we could find any suitable purses for his grandma, but the only thing that got purchased was a tank top by me [because I, unintelligently, wore the only clean shirt that wasn’t packed and used to cushion my wine bottles, which happened to be a black ‘I -heart- Roma’ shirt, and it was an incredibly hot and sunny day]. After making it back out of the market [which we didn’t go too deep into, because I knew how we’d get sucked in], the Malta Keyhole took us south across the River again, and I had to call Shyam to find exactly how to get to it, but we hiked up a mini hill and made it to the top [of what I think was the Aventine Hill?], where we looked through this round keyhole to see St. Peter’s Basilica frame by these beautiful green arches, and there was also a gorgeous vista of all of Rome from the balcony inside the park up there. We didn’t have long, so we took some pictures, and then it was off to find the Mouth of Truth.

                Problem with the MoT was that the line to take pictures with it was some 15 people long, so we opted for photos from outside the gate, just to show we’d been there. We followed up Via del Teatro di Marcello to reach two sets of steps- one that led to the Piazza del Campidoglio and one that led up to Santa Maria in Arocoeli. Of course we climbed both and took pictures from both. [side note: I shudder to think about how hot and sweaty the weather and all the trekking had made me by this point] My time was winding down [because our ride to the airport was arriving at 3:30pm], so we made a quick stop in front of the Victor Emmanuel monument, took pictures, and then rushed off to find Albert’s favorite gelato place, only after stopping at the AIRC building one last time and taking pictures of it and of our good ol’ Column of Trajan.

                After such a hot day, the fruity combination of gelato flavors I got at Il Gelatone was just what I needed to help cool down a bit [mango e pompelmo = mango and grapefruit], and I ate all of the gelato along the walk to the last stop on my Roman list of places… the one and only Frigidarium. I purposely got a fruit selection at the previous gelateria just so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the chocolatey-sugary flavors I was going to get at Frigidarium- I got a nice combination of some of my favorites: fior di latte, baileys, and the one and only crema fiorentina. We couldn’t stay long, but I said bye to Italia [she’s Fabrizzio’s wife] and Harvey told her he’d be back the next day on his last day to try their new peanut butter flavor [ugh, I am so jealous].

                By this point in time it was about 3pm and thus we power walked the 15 minutes back to reach our apartments, and I scrambled upstairs to grab my laptop [from which the boys had been stealing all 2500+ of my pictures from this trip], throw together the last bits of things into my backpack and red ‘Roma’ bag I bought, and do a headcount of how many bags I had [one blue suitcase, Alex’s red suitcase, my Texas backpack, and my Roma  bag]. Between those four suitcases/bags, there must’ve been some 100+ pounds of stuff [I brought home 3 bottles of Chianti, Harvey’s bottle of Sciacchetrà for his parents, a jar of honey from the La Spezia farmers’ market, a big jar of Nutella [yes, I know they have it here but it tastes different], and three tubes of Smarties- PLUS all of my clothes and things, as well as some of Alex’s clothes, Stephen’s books and papers, and my books and papers, oy].

                I needed help getting suitcases down to Via Rasella so Harvey grabbed my big blue suitcase, and I hobbled along with everything else and got downstairs last to put all my stuff in the van [Christopher, the three Stooges, and I all departed on the same flight, leaving Harvey as the last Plan IIer at Via Rasella]. Like I’ve said, I can’t stand goodbyes- as the van pulled away from our apartments my eyes watered up and tried not to think about just how much the last four weeks meant to me, lest there be another huge waterworks. On the drive southwest to reach the Aeroporto Intercontinentale Leonardo da Vinci [also known as Fiumicino], I looked outside the windows and tried my best to soak up one last sight of Rome, but the lack of sleep over the past few nights caught up with me and I took a nap for the rest of the ride. [I’m going to continue recounting things until the time when I reach Texas]

                When we arrived at the airport, our driver tried to charge us for the ride when all of us knew that the AIRC had covered our trip, so I had to call Lynda and have her talk to the driver for a solid 10 minutes before he let us go and we headed inside to check in our luggage. I hadn’t looked up the weight limits [and since we didn’t have scales in our apartments, there’s no way we could’ve known in advance], but when it was my turn to put my luggage on the scale, the blue suitcase checked in at 7kg over the limit of 23kg, and total both of my suitcases weighed over 50kg. I thought I’d ask the lady checking us in how much the penalty fee was for having overweight suitcases, thinking that it might be something on a Euro/kg basis- but nope, it would’ve been a 100Euro charge! Thankfully, traveling with 4 other boys [who obviously don’t pack as much as me] means that I was able to disperse enough things between them to make my suitcases fit the limit, and off we went to find our gate.

                We had a good 2+ hours to kill before our flight at 7:30pm, so we all chilled in the airport, walked around to get some snacks, and I called  up Shyam and Harvey to see how they were doing, in Sorrento and Rome. Soon enough we boarded the plane and I found myself sandwiched between Adam and Christopher. The flight to Frankfurt was a short one, and once we landed, we all headed off through the connecting walkway to a hotel room that Christopher’s mom had kindly booked with hotel points for me and Christopher [but the Stooges stayed with us, of course!] for our 13 hour layover in Germany. I showered first thing, the boys settled in, and we all watched the last third of the Brasil vs. USA soccer game [which USA sadly gave us 2 goals in, during the time we watched, to lose], after which we headed downstairs at 11pm to the hotel bar to celebrate Mendez’s [erm, I call him Mendez, but I mean Daniel] 20^th birthday, which happened at midnight.

                Fun was had, consuming peanuts, trying to pretend we were at least older than I’m sure we appeared, and I definitely had a good laugh at what each of the Stooges ordered for their first drinks [inquire within if you’d like to know]. A toast at midnight for the birthday boy, followed by my immediate need for sleep [in an oh-so-comfortable bed], and soon enough it was Monday.

6/29 Monday – Return to Texas, both the state and my school

                We got our stuff together, watched some CNN news that was obviously just on a loop, and then Christopher and I headed downstairs to the hotel lobby to use the free internet momentarily. The Stooges followed shortly and then we all took the connecting walkway back to the Frankfurt airport to get through security and go wait for our flight back to Houston. On this flight, Christopher and I sat next to a nice lady who was American but had married a German physics professor, so she was enroute to Houston to visit family back home.

                The 10 hour flight was filled by some brief bouts of sleeping, journaling about my trip, using my laptop battery life to type up as much of this entry as I could before it was nearly drained, chatting with the lady sitting next to me and Christopher, eating two delicious meals of Lufthansa [the new favorite airline of mine and Christopher], having a good laugh with Christopher over how at one point we were having all sorts of free drinks; I had a helping of straight up Bailey’s liqueur, a bottle of the German beer Warsteiner, and a sip of Christopher’s white wine- not to mention a cup of water and a cup of coffee as well, which the latter I mixed in with the Bailey’s at the end. We were definitely having the last of a last hurrah on the airplane, you could say.

                The 10 hour flight was entirely in daylight [because of the direction we were flying and the timing of our flight], so it was 2pm when we landed in Houston [which is 9pm in Rome, also known as their dinner time], and I was definitely glad to get up and stretch my legs [note: if you think 10 hours is a long flight, I’m about to have to undergo a 13 and a half hour flight to Japan, followed by a 3 and a half hour flight to Taiwan, on Friday].

                We exited the walkway leading to the main terminal in IAH, and sure enough Christopher’s dad was waiting for him [and they kindly took me to the car my family left for me whenever they flew out to Taiwan last week], and Mendez’s parents along with Royce’s dad were there to pick up the Stooges. This is when it hit me that our Roman adventure had come to an end, and I wiped away a few tears as Daniel’s mom took a couple pictures of the 5 of us before we all split our different ways.

Epilogue, abridged: After picking up the car, I drove straight to Austin, as per a dinner invitation from Ivo et al. to have dinner with him and roommates [which, I definitely was not in the mood to either cook something for myself or eat some horrendous American fast food just yet]. I made it into Austin at 7pm [to discover that my apartment’s microwave- which is still under warranty thank goodness- is emitting a very annoying triage of beeps every two minutes, taunting me as if something I’ve microwaved is now done, EXCEPT THERE IS NOTHING INSIDE and I can’t turn the damn thing off], had a delicious dinner cooked by Nestor and Ivo [bokchoy and tofu stirfry, and eggplant parmesan, respectively] with desserts from Eric and Alyssa and myself [chocolate chip zucchini bread, blondies, and German chocolate, respectively], fell asleep on their couch at 11pm, and then Tuesday consisted of Chipotle [my first craving of a meal], typing up more of this epic entry, catching up with Rachel and showing her probably 80% of my 2500+ pictures from Italy, picking up Richa with Colin, Eric’s going-away dinner for Ari, play Taboo with Rob et al. in town, and catching up with Thomas about Rome. This morning [Wednesday] I had breakfast with Rachel, and since then I’ve been typing up the very last of this gargantuan entry. I’ll be headed back to Sugar Land after today [which consists of lunch with Richa and Matthew, and possibly other festivities tonight], then on Thursday is catching up with the R4L [Alex], and finishing up with clothes washing and repacking for my flight to Taiwan on Friday!

I am sure there will be many more posts to follow this one, with more thoughts and reflections on living an entire month [for the first time] in a foreign city, country, and continent, but I just want to end this one with some words on what few things I am most incredibly thankful for, from the last four weeks. Academically, I feel like we accomplished so much [6 credit hours in 4 weeks], but in a fashion that few people ever get to experience; I got to couple ‘sight-seeing’ of the ruins and museums of Rome [gotta love that James Joyce quote about Rome] with learning about things firsthand from some highly qualified experts, and coming from someone who’s always been overloaded with work from all different areas of study [especially the sciences], it was nice to be able to focus on just one subject and get into the nitty gritty at times. I’m a bit museum-ed out at the moment, but I’m sure that the next time I visit one I’ll be able to compare it to so much more and appreciate it for its value, knowing just how much museums can teach you. More importantly though, the last four weeks gave me a chance to be someone I’ve always wanted to be during the school year but never really had the freedom to be- an adventurer. I am at heart a planner and a stickler for rhyme and reason, but being in Rome reminded me that sometimes half the fun of making plans is using them to figure out an adventure when things go haywire [which they inevitably will, and Rome has taught me that sometimes you just have to go after your desires and forget about the little things that might weigh you down]. I’ve been able to travel to so many different cities in Italy [Rome, Tivoli, Florence, La Spezia, all of Cinque Terre, Pisa, Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Ostia Antica, Naples, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Sorrento] and find myself a different adventure in each, and it’s been the most freeing and exhilarating feeling just trekking all over Italy with no real plans past what I might be doing in the next few hours of that day. Also, I feel like I regained my sense of independence again; after a semester of ups and downs, relying on friends and trying to find ways to keep myself going other than my own desires and wishes, and stressing out over needing other people to validate my abilities, I spent all of Italy reminding myself that I’m entirely equipped to carve out my own path and go after whatever it is in life I want to accomplish. What that is, I still haven’t entirely figured out yet, but this trip has tempered me to accept that uncertainty is certainly acceptable and sometimes even produces the more memorable experience.

Mille grazie per tutto, Roma e Italia.

I quite like a quiet Rome. And I love a long day in Rome.

Compared to last time, when I updated just a couple days later, I’m running a week behind this time. However, to aid my memory, at the end of each day I listed everything I did, and so now I’m going to use those notes to write this entry. I have a feeling this entry might be a million words long too, so bear with me- today was also a super-off day for me, probably my most off-day here in Rome, which is only being slightly remedied by the fact I’m sitting upstairs with my most recent traveling companions [Harvey and David], while they pick and address postcards [something I won’t be doing at least for the next hour… oy.] Scratch that, this is going to be LONG, so maybe read it in bits and pieces, lest you get overwhelmed...

Onto the last week of my life…

6/13 Saturday – Catching up

                So last Saturday was a rather low-key day. It was quite nice to sleep in [until 11am], then I woke up to write the last entry I posted, and followed that up with some time to catch my breath and relax. We had a review session at the AIRC for our upcoming midterms, after which Stephen and I walked downstairs and through the Gay Pride Parade that was the reason for all of the people crowding the area of Piazza Venezia. That night I played a few games of Bang! with the boys upstairs, copied notes  for the midterm into my notepad, and then called it an early night after the relatively calm day.

6/14 Sunday – High Mass at the Vatican, More Prepping

                Sunday was the day KG planned to accompany a bunch of us to the Vatican for High Mass, so I woke up that morning, got dressed [shoulders and knees covered], and met up Stephen for cappuccinos at Pepy’s Bar, which is right around the corner from our apartments on Via Rasella. We crossed Tritone and waited about for the #62 bus to come around and pick us up. Just as we were about to decide to take the Metro [because the bus hadn’t come for about 15 minutes] and started walking to the end of the street, a #62 whipped around the corner, right as Ashley, Alex, and the Three Stooges [Adam, Daniel, and Royce, who I’ve aptly given that nickname to- and it’s stuck!] popped out onto the street. We all got onto the #62 and rode it all the way across town to Vatican City.

                After taking a second round of photos of the most interesting things in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican [because I already came to see all the sights at the Vatican my second day in Rome], we found KG and went through security to get into St. Peter’s Basilica. The Basilica was set up differently inside than it was the time I visited [because of mass], so after taking a few more pictures and meeting up with Harvey and Bhargav inside, we were able to file into a pew after the earlier mass finished.

                I can now say I’ve been to an entire Catholic High Mass at the Vatican. Most of the mass was in Latin, with hymns and prayers translated in a nice little book that they handed out, so at least I wasn’t entirely lost. When the mass finished, it was nearly noon and apparently if there are a lot of people in St. Peter’s Square, sometimes the Pope makes an appearance from his window in the Papal Apartments. Well, we waited it out in the sun and sure enough, Pope Benedict XVI came to his window and gave blessings in languages of all sorts, including English! I got to see the Pope. Definitely an experience, and I think that if I were Catholic, that’d be along the same lines of a scientist meeting the premier Nobel laureate in their field, to draw a loose analogy.

                After leaving St. Peter’s, we went to get lunch at a nearby trattoria and were kindly treated to pastas and such by KG, our shared Italian-speaking godfather [and professor, of course].  Post-lunch, we split up into a few groups: KG headed home, Ashley and Alex went to get some postcard stuff done, the Stooges went on their own adventure, and the rest of the group and I went to find the Metro stop and get home. A little bit of wandering around the part of town north of the Vatican ensued, but we found the Metro soon enough, took it back to Barberini, and by the time I got back I was beyond belief tired,  so I crashed for an afternoon nap.

                I’d been freaking out in my mind all day long because I thought I’d lost my trusty [waterproof, very detailed, and life-saving] map in the last 24 hours because I couldn’t find it, and I’d already even made plans to go to the bookstore [here, the Barnes and Nobles equivalent is called La Feltrinelli’s] to get me another if I didn’t find my map by the end of the day. Thankfully though, I found it, tucked into one of notebooks or folders, I think.

                Post-nap, I did some more copying of notes for the midterms and that was enough to make me sufficiently hungry, so I made some pasta for dinner, with cut up orange slices for dessert. [On a side note, the oranges from the grocery store here are absolutely delicious. Every single one in a bag of about 12 was ripe, had no rotten parts, and was super sweet- I can’t remember the last time that’s happened to me with a pre-packaged bag of fruit.] I trotted upstairs to catch the wireless connection from the hallway in the boys apartment, got corralled into some games of Bang! [which, I am now convinced is a very addicting game, especially because of the strategy and fun it induces], and finished up the night by copying more notes and then going to sleep. Just the usual pre-test schedule, you know.

6/15 Monday – The day to get things done: Rome, midterms, and the Janiculum

                I woke up at a crazy time, 6:55am to be exact, and got ready to go running. I went upstairs to get [and by get, I mean wake up] Harvey, and then we went on a run across downtown Rome [part of it was the same run I’d done before, but this time I wanted to end at Campo de’ Fiori to check it out the morning markets there]- passing through Scalinata di Spagna [the Spanish Steps] to reach Piazza del Popolo, back down south via Via del Corso towards the II Vittoriano [Victor Emanuele II monument], and hanging a right just before reaching the II Vittoriano to get to Campo de’ Fiori.

                Harvey and I walked around the market – you can find everything from fresh fruits and vegetables, to jewelry, to kitchen utensils and spices of all sorts – and I came upon the best discovery: fresh cherries, sold at 3.50 Euro/kg. Even better, when I handed the vendor a 10 Euro bill, he had no 50 cent pieces for change, so Harvey and I actually got a kg of cherries for 3 Euro! [that’s absolutely unheard of the in the US, I feel like, not to mention that the cherries were nice and deliciously ripe]

                I had told Stephen I’d meet up with him at 8am to try a coffee bar near the Pantheon that our professor Albert recommended, but by the time HP and I left the market, it was nearly 8am [and Campo de’ Fiori is a good 15-ish minute walk away from our apartments], but Stephen was nice and let me run to take a shower once we got back to Via Rasella, and then off I went with Stephen.

                Our agenda included going to Tazza d’Oro [the Golden Cup] and seeing the Pantheon without the large masses of crowds that are there during the day. Tazza d’Oro is a huge café, and let me tell you, I’d never had a Nutella-filled croissant, topped with powdered sugar, before that day but I have now, and let me tell you, they are GOOD. Utterly loaded up with sugar, to say the least, but so good, and a perfect morning companion to a good cappuccino.

                Post-coffee, Stephen and I saw Christopher sitting outside of Caffè Sant’ Eustachio [the other coffee place Stephen and I need to go check out] on our way to Pantheon. It was pretty sweet to be able to go see the Pantheon with Stephen, who is an architecture student, and hear him talk about the neat little things that make the Pantheon so unique [it’s walls are 8 meters thick, and the oculus at the top of the dome is 6 meters wide!], all the while checking out what’s inside the Pantheon [Victor Emanuele II, the first king of Italy, is buried there, along with Raphael], and be amused by a bird that was circling inside the dome. When we finished up with the Pantheon, we went to find Sant’Ivo. The church wasn’t open, but we’re going to go back and find it later on.

                I took Stephen over to Campo de’ Fiori as well, picked up some more cherries and some dried mangoes, and then on the way home we dropped by La Feltrinelli’s as well. The afternoon consisted of midterms and getting ready for dinner at the American Academy, and then we caught a bus from the Vittorio Emanuele II monument over to the Janiculum.

                The American Academy is absolutely beautiful, for the record, and it’s located on the Janiculum hill, so from the rooftop you can oversee all of Rome, which looks even prettier with a sunset in the background. We had a chance to look at the photography exhibit at the Academy, and we were treated to a delicious dinner [multiple courses matched with a non-dry white wine- although I prefer my whites dry and my reds with flavor], after which KG took us on a walk through Trastevere to get gelato at a place frequented a lot by last year’s group [who lived in Trastevere].

                Post-gelato, we walked back home [stomachs full of a delicious dinner: the most amazing tomato salad (and I don’t even like eating raw tomatoes!), stuffed bell peppers, and cherries for dessert], giggly off of the night’s wine, and thankfully I’d already walked the path back home twice earlier in the day, so I knew exactly where we were and how to get home.

                The night wrapped up with a short game of Phase 10, followed by happy sleep- you know, the kind where you’ve had a good day and know that the pictures you took are going to bring back lots of smiles when you look at them in the morning.

6/16 Tuesday – Wandering, eating, and talking for enjoyment

                The morning started off with class [we tried to visit the Forum of Augustus, which didn’t pan out, but we did go to the Pantheon, where Stephen gave his presentation, and the Circus Maximus [which is nothing but a big grassy field with sloped grassy sides, which the boys ran both down and up]. I made sandwiches for lunch at home that day, and after I finished eating them, I took a nice long nap that afternoon.

                With our papers due on Wednesday, obviously Tuesday was the day to procrastinate, or as I liked to put it, adventure a little. I got pizza at the little place next door to us, and my goal for the evening was to check out the international  La Feltrinelli’s to see whether or not it would be anything like Barnes and Nobles back home. I thought it wouldn’t be, and I was right, but it was a fun little adventure on the Metro to find the three-story bookstore, and it was a nice pre-paper writing break to put me in the mood to type up papers.

                I’m the kind of person who needs a big table with lots and lots of space to do my work on [note: I have an L-shaped desk in Austin and an entire kitchen table to myself in my apartment, so it’s been a bit of hell having to work from my bed and not having a desk here in Rome], so I went upstairs to the boys’ apartment and commandeered their kitchen table all for myself.

                Around 10:30pm, we [Shyam, Ashley, Stephen, Harvey, and myself] went for a late night Frigidarium run, and then we came back and I finished my papers. Get this: they give you free whipped cream and hard-shell chocolate topping on your gelato- YUM! I’m absolutely in love with their crema fiorentina flavor, mmm.

                I came back and finished my papers, and when I went back downstairs to my and Alex’s room, we launched into an epic girl talk. R4L [roomie for life], you are awesome. We eventually just sat around on my bed and went through nearly all of our pictures from our time in Rome until we both decided we had to go to bed, lest we be absolutely dead the next day. I couldn’t even fall asleep that night until about 3:30am, but when I finally did fall asleep, it felt great [which, btw, is weird for me because I usually have no problems falling asleep, granted the sugar and caffeine probably didn’t help].

6/17 Wednesday – Out to Ostia and Roaming around Rome

                Even though I went to bed so late the night before, I still managed to wake up nice and early [without getting any coffee either!] and get myself out the door to journal for like 10 minutes at Barberini Piazza in the beautiful morning sunlight. We all took the Metro to the Piramide stop and switched onto a train to take us out to Ostia Antica. Get this: on the train to Ostia Antica, this lady gets on with her own portable karaoke system, providing us with the most displaced music you could imagine.

                Seeing the ruins in Ostia Antica was awesome- minus just one thing, my fear of bugs. We walked all throughout the old city, which dated back to the 4^th century BC, seeing everything from shops, to forums, to temples, and it’s pretty unbelievable that the city is still being excavated today. Both Bhargav and Apu gave their reports, thankfully, while we sat in the shade both times.

                In the middle of the day we had a nice lunch break [in the cafeteria that had A/C], which I tried to supplement with a quick nap to no avail, and then it was back out into the sun [which really, compared to Texas summer heat and my memories of marching band, wasn’t that bad] to visit the excavation sites out at the far ends of Ostia Antica, after which we traipsed all the way back through the tall grassy areas and made it to the train. I’d like to note that singing songs at the top of your lungs in a group-sing-a-long fashion makes trekking through tall grass a lot more bearable for folks like me. Also, my developing Chacos tan line definitely got helped out by our day at Ostia, that’s for sure.

                While Ostia was quite awesome for giving me my first real look at an entire town after being excavated, the day was equally as fun after class ended. We made it back to the AIRC, printed our papers, and then I concocted a crazy plan for myself. Up until Wednesday, I hadn’t really had the chance to just go roam around Rome- we’d been traveling on weekends, catching up on sleep, writing papers, and… you get the picture. Plus, it’s hard to find someone to go adventuring with me because I am: a. a fast walker, b. not your typical girl shopper [I peek my head into places I find interesting, do one go around, and usually leave right afterwards because there’s nothing that immediately catches my eye], c. interested in being spontaneous as long as I have a map, and d. enjoy poking around everywhere.

                Well, I got back to Via Rasella and got ready [which means I put my wallet, a snack of cherries, a bottle of water, my sunglasses, my trusty map, and my iPod into my shoulder bag] to go adventuring around Rome. I left our apartment at 5:30pm and wandered for a solid two and a half hours around a lot of Rome. I’ve gotten pretty familiar with Rome too, so it’s made wandering a lot more fun and less scary, too. If you look at a map of Rome, I went from Via Rasella, up towards the Spanish Steps, weaved all the way through the streets perpendicular to the Spanish Steps [where you’ll find the Prada, Louis Vutton, Gucci, and such stores… all with price tags higher than the total amount of money I’ve spent in this country in three weeks!], up to Piazza del Popolo again, and back down Via del Corso for a bit. I saw some breakdancers in front of a big church on Corso, and then hung a right [in the west direction, if you’re looking at a map] towards the Tiber River. I meandered through a bunch of small streets, picked up a bag of potato chips [I’ve missed eating potato derivatives while here in Italy] at a small liquor store, and continued to walk all around the western part of Rome, weaving all the way towards where the Via del Vittorio Emanuele almost meets the river. I spent time on VdVEmanuele, dropped by Campo de Fiori, and generally wandered back towards Via del Corso, taking that all the way to Via del Tritone to get back home.

                Wandering around Rome is awesome. Period. I didn’t buy that many things [just another copy of the dress I bought at Florence’s H&M, but in teal, and a pair of shorts], but it was good to see the city and get a feel for what types of stores are in what part of town. I also stopped by a different Despar [the equivalent of HEB here] on the way home to pick up some turkey and milk, and decided it was probably time to get home. I wore my Chacos for the adventure too, so my tan got a second helping of sun that day. Power walking through Rome for 180 minutes will get you nicely tan and absolutely sweaty as well, so it was wonderful to make it back to my apartment and first things first- shower and relieve myself of feeling like sticky.

                The boys upstairs were cooking dinner so I kindly bummed onto their dinner plans [thankfully, because I was way too tired to even think about making myself dinner], played a few games of Bang! with them, and then my exhausted self fell asleep quite easily that night.

6/18 Thursday – The tired day

                After my epic Wednesday of adventure, I slept like a baby and when my alarm went off to go running with Harvey, I definitely just went upstairs to return his keys and mumble something about going back to bed. Normally I try not to sleep in, but the extra sleep felt so good.

                We successfully made it into the Forum of Augustus Thursday morning and had the chance to see the Forum at ground level – definitely pretty sweet. Imagine being up close and intimate with the columns and flooring of the actual Forum of Augustus- I know, awesome. The day included going to the Ara Pacis as well, where Christopher gave his presentation on the controversy surrounding the building of the museum that now houses the Ara Pacis [Altar of Peace, from Augustus’ reign]. Talk about a modern museum in a city that showcases ‘his grandmother’s corpse’, I think the Ara Pacis is actually in a really neat, albeit sort of oddly-unfitting, building.

                Lunch followed, as those of us who packed our lunch got to hang out in KG’s apartment [which is near the Spanish Steps] for a little bit, but I had a craving for McDonald’s french fries, so David and Harvey accompanied me over to the McD’s at the Spanish Steps [which is overridden with Italian people who are much too willing to pay for the most overpriced fast food known to mind; a value meal costs about 6.50 Euro, and the 1 Euro french fries that I get, are the small US kids’ size version] and back to meet up with everyone to walk over to meet Albert back at the Ara Pacis.

                I’m not much for castles, but the afternoon was about the Castel Sant’ Angelo, complete with a presentation by Daniel and another city-spanning view of Rome from the top of the castle. Post-class, a group of us tried meandering over to catch a bus near Piazza Cavour, but thanks to fences and awkward city planning, we ended up wandering around, through a little vendor market, and finally caught a bus over toward the AIRC region, checked my email really quickly, and went back home ASAP to shower and clean off from yet another day of sweaty hot sun. Granted, this was probably one of the hottest days we’ve been here, and it wasn’t even that bad, so I can’t complain too much.

                Most of our group went out for spaghetti dinners at a local place with, literally, a hundred different sauce combinations. I got to sit at a great table with Harvey, David, and Stephen, and we shared a new appetizer [prosciutto e melone = ham and cantaloupe, which actually has a very distinct taste to it, not bad but not something I think I’d normally mix], half a liter of the house red wine, and we each got our own dishes. Of course, after the dinner a handful of us went for a good ol’ helping of Frigidarium [the people there now know me by name, haha, and I’m pretty sure they think I’m just some crazy American girl who’s amused by the fact they give out free whipped cream and chocolate topping], followed by one round of Bang! back at the apartment, and then I finished out the night by typing up the necessary parts  for my paper rewrite and prepacking for Friday’s adventure.

                Note: I definitely didn’t get to bed until closer to 2am, haha.

As much as I’d like to finish out this epic post right this moment, it’s now 1:43am and since Harvey and I are planning to go running at 8am, I’m going to pause my typing on this entry and finish composing it after my morning run. The internet isn’t working right now anyway, so all of you people wouldn’t be able to read about my week anyhow, so just appreciate that my epic Friday will be written about after an endorphin-filled morning.

[It’s worth mentioning that this morning it rained the hardest I’ve seen/heard it rain while here in Italy, and I was frightened by the most threatening successive claps of thunder I’ve ever been awake to hear. Back to storytelling!]

6/19 Friday

               In terms of the epic adventures I’ve had while in this country, this past Friday ranks right up there near the very top. As the group who went to Venice termed it, we did the trip “Vicki-style” – I’m all about seeing as much as possible and making the most of every single second while getting the most out of your money and time.

                It was a good thing that I packed my bag before I went to sleep because on Friday I woke up a little later than I wanted to- our train out of Rome’s Termini train station left at 5:41am, and I woke up late at 4:55am, ran upstairs to tell David and Harvey [who were already packing their lunches for the day] that I’d just woken up but that I’d be ready in like 10 minutes. Packed my lunch really quickly, double checked that I had enough money to last me the day, threw an extra white shirt into my backpack, and went through the quickest mental checklist ever before snagging my map and water bottle and heading out the door. I went back upstairs to get the boys, who you would’ve expected to be waiting on me, but I ended up rushing them out the door.

                You might wonder why I was freaking out about leaving the apartment ASAP [which, we didn’t get onto the road until about 12 or 13 minutes after the hour], and it was because we couldn’t count on catching the Metro over to Termini [two stops away from the Barberini stop that we’ve become all so familiar with], and thus we had a nice morning wake-up with our uphill trek/sprint towards the train station. Thankfully it only took us like 15 minutes and there was absolutely no traffic on the roads that early, so we got to Termini with enough time to buy our tickets from the kiosks, validate them [probably one of my favorite things about train stations in general], and book it over to our train.

                I remember staying awake at the start of the train ride, but the utter tiredness settled in and I tried to sleep, but I can’t sleep on Italian trains to save my life- the seats, something about the way they’re structured, make it impossible for me to find a remotely comfortable position to sleep for, for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. The cheapest train rides are always the longest, and I wasn’t about to complain about a 10.50 Euro train ticket, and it helped that the 2:42 long train ride went by relatively smoothly, too. David fell asleep first, Harvey called his mother [which he did when we did Cinque Terre as well, since it was just before midnight back home in Texas], and I journaled a smidge before letting the sleep take me over.

               We got into Naples a little before 8:30am, and our first task was to find where to buy a Campania ArteCard. Basically, the region of Campania has a combo card that’ll get you into the first two sites/museums of your choice for free, as well as ride the regional trains as much as you want for 3 days [and even though we were only there for one it was worth it], but by the time we found the counter, it wasn’t open yet, so we made a stop at the farmacia [pharmacy] so Harvey could grab some contact solution. Once we purchased our ArteCards, we headed over to catch the regional train to Herculaneum [known as Ercolano in Italian].

                There was a cute water fountain that greeted us as we left the train station and walked about 8 blocks downhill towards the Scavi di Ercolano [excavation site of Ercolano] to reach the entrance. The site is in a really awkward part of town, basically. It’s juxtaposed against these sort of rundown apartment buildings set down into the ground [since it was buried in the 79 AD explosion of Mount Vesuvius]. Also, it doesn’t look that big from up high, but it’s a cute little place to walk through when you get to it. Using Harvey’s Rick Steves’ guidebook and the map they gave us at the front door, we weaved through quite a few buildings in the city [everything from the public male and female baths- which we successfully decoded were baths even before reading the sign and looking up the word ‘terme' in Harvey’s dictionary, to temples, to a gym, to a house, to a eatery/winery place], and it was great timing that we’d been to Ostia Antica just two days before, so a lot of things were fresh in our mind from there. I was absolutely floored at how well preserved some of the rooms were- and most impressive [of all the ruins we saw on Friday] was a small room that was part of the House of Neptune and Amphitrite [Casa di Nettuno e Anfitrite], where there was an exquisitely preserved mosaic on the wall, not to mention a really nice arch/shelf/statue type thing that was entirely awing.

                There must’ve been something in the water because between Harvey and David, all the jokes seemed to be flying in my general direction, haha. Harvey guessed that a tunnel would lead us out of the site, and sure enough it did so once we finished with Ercolano, we headed back to the train station and hopped on a train to get to Pompeii.

                We were doing great for time, but since it was a little before lunch time, I was already starving and ate my sandwich on the train to Pompeii. The Pompeii excavation site was about as big as Ostia Antica, flooded with many too many tourists for my taste, but it had a few gems inside. The site really was enormous, especially compared to Ercolano, and I didn’t like it nearly as much as Ercolano, but thanks to Rick Steves, we had a route to hit the big parts of the city. The main forum and basilica, [what seemed like] food restaurants every other corner in the city,  temples, plaster casts of victims that were buried alive by the eruption, baths [which weren’t nearly as neat and empty as the ones in Ercolano], the stepping stones in the road [since they would flush sewage down the street and people needed a way to cross without getting their feet all mucked up], a Temple of Isis, the theater, a BROTHEL [yes, complete with stone bedrooms and preserved frescoes depicting positions… um, yeah], and last but not least we tried to find our way into the amphitheater… Thankfully Harvey and David were up for adventure just as much as I was, and we ended up going up the hill a bit, climbing back around the circular outside, only to discover that there wasn’t going to be any way that we could see into the amphitheater, so instead of walking back the way we came, the boys devised that we ought to scale down the side of the hill- which was REALLY steep, and make our way back down to the ground that way. Those two are crazies. Then again, so am I :)

                Post-mini adventure at Pompeii, I had never been so glad to see one of the running water spouts, and we each cleaned off ourselves before exiting the site. The day had been pretty sunny as well [meaning David and I turned a few shades darker with sunscreen on our faces and shoulders, while Harvey applied sunscreen over every inch of himself], so I accrued an intense desire for granite [think American Icees/slushies, but in strawberry/lemon flavor] and searched for a cheap place to get it from as we walked back towards the train station. We basically had to loop all the way back around the outside of the site, through some souvenir stands, and then we had a snack break at the train station waiting for the next train to Sorrento.

                On the ride to Sorrento we all got seats together and chatted up a nice man [from Ohio] who was on vacation with his family, and we learned a little bit about where he was from, what he did, and he gave us his opinion on a few parts of Italy- the boys continued to chat with him through the 30 minute train ride, but I was absolutely exhausted and fell asleep about halfway through the ride.

                Soon enough we made it to Sorrento, which is a very cute little town next to the water, and the nice man pointed us in the direction of the water as well, so first things first, we went to figure out what times there were for ferries to get back to Naples. [note: this is what it means to travel with someone like me- I come up with these wicked crazy-awesome plans of how to see all the sites and travel ways to get somewhere, all in a day’s work :)] The 20 minute walk to the water side and down [what felt like a hundred stair steps] was all that we got to see of Sorrento though, actually, as we asked the guy at the counter when the next ferry was leaving and he told us it was departing in 5 minutes. We hurried up and bought our tickets and dashed off to the dock to catch our ferry.

                Let me say- I love blue water, I love feeling the wind in my hair, and I love beautiful sights. There were people napping on the inside of the ferry, but I pretty much spent the entire 35 minute ferry ride outside, peering over the edge and letting the wind blow in my face. Continuing with our adventurous theme for the day, Harvey climbed up onto the top deck to ask the captain [in Italian, of course- it’s been great to have someone who can legitimately speak the language] if we could climb up there, and so we got to catch maybe the last 5 minutes of the ride from the roof deck.

                Once we got back onto land at Naples, we realized we had about 3 hours to kill before our train back to Rome, so we began trekking through the city towards the train station [where the pizza place recommended by Rick Steves’ was conveniently located, as well]. Naples is just as sketchy as anyone will tell you, but if you’re a smart traveler and don’t display your riches, you’ll be fine making it through the city. One thing I noticed about Naples though- it’s the trash can of Italy. The city just looks grungier and more over-run with hoodlums and questionable people all over the place. We almost saw a fight break out too! We checked out the Royal Palace [Palazzo Reale] from the outside, got a picture with Vittorio Emanuele II [whee, first king of Italy!], walked quite a ways up Corso Umberto I, and made it to the Duomo [probably the nicest looking thing in Naples, period] before finally reaching our Pizzeria Trianon.

                Thanks to David’s inquiry as to what the “Pizza Gran Trianon” had [to which the waiter responded by starting to list some of the 8 things they put on it], all three of us ordered it and sat happily in the A/C at our table in the non-crowded pizzeria [since Italians don’t really eat dinner until like 9ish, and it was more around 7pm when we ate dinner]. We were so thankful for clean working restrooms and sinks with soap upstairs, and I also changed into the white t-shirt I packed [making it so that all three of us were wearing white shirts now]. I watched the cook make our pizzas right before my own eyes, got a picture with the owners, and went back to chatting with the boys about how awesome our day had been [and more importantly, how we’d survived trekking through sketchy Naples and not lost a thing].

                Only a picture could do the pizza justice, so I will post one online once I get back to having a fast internet connection, but just know that we started to devour our food once it arrived at our table. The 8 ‘flavors’ were sausage, pepperoni-type meat, three types of cheese, bell peppers, anchovies, and mushrooms- and I could only get through about half of my pizza before I had to ask for a box. They also had glass-bottled Cokes at the pizzeria too, and I was telling the boys how much I wish they didn’t cost 2 Euro because I was craving a Coke—and before I knew it, David had gotten me a Coke [just last week, in true Mama Vicki manner I got him a Sprite the other night when he had an upset stomach], and it pretty much topped off an amazing dinner and amazing day.

                I wanted to drop by the gelato place that Rick Steves mentioned in his guidebook- and thankfully it was just across the street, so I went over there to Polo Nord Gelateria and decided on a scoop of Kinder-flavored gelato to top off our time in Naples. The train station was just a short walk away, so we headed over there, content with our day’s adventure, and bought our tickets for our train ride back to Rome.

                If you’ve ever been in marching band, I’d tell you I felt like I’d had a two-a-day practice and not been able to shower for an entire afternoon- which made it a little harder to fall asleep on the way home, but eventually the exhaustion set in, and we fell asleep in the same order that we did on the train into Naples: David, then myself, and Harvey stayed awake to write some postcards. [I know that I’ve written sentences with what seems like 5 independent clauses strung together, so accept my sincerest grammatical apologies] I woke back up about 45 minutes before getting into the Roma Termini stop, and Harvey and I just chatted about things to finish off our train ride. I have to add, I’m absolutely amazed by David’s ability to sleep continuously on a train- it’s like his head is magically magnetized to the seat and he just goes into hibernation.

                We finally made it back into Rome and power walked it from the train platform downstairs to catch the very last Metro from Termini back to Barberini [because the last Metro leaves from each end at 11:30pm, and our train reached Rome around 11:20pm]. In dire need of water, the first thing we did was seek out an SPQR fountain near our apartments, fill up our water bottle, and go home to shower and think about how awesome of a day we had.

                I know we made it home around midnight, and after showering and unpacking the handful of things that I stuffed into my backpack, I went upstairs to catch the boys- and basically, between my apartment and the boys’, we were the only three there [since Alex was next door at the other girls’ apartment]. When I retreated back to my bed, I uploaded photos and started rotating them, but I definitely didn’t get through that many of the 374 photos from the day before I crashed around 2:40am.

6/20 Saturday – Down a notch

                Because my body wakes up on its own after about 8 hours of sleep, I woke up around 10:40am, and I started off my morning with a little bit of internet outside and talking with the girls who’ve moved into an apartment down the hall [their program is 7 weeks long and more archaeologically based]. I went upstairs to catch the boys, said good morning to them [they had planned to go to the Vatican nice and early, but around 11am they were just waking up], snacked on leftover pizza from Naples, checked my email, and then got ready to take care of some academic business. The weather was definitely a bit overcast too, so the day was just a 180 from Friday.

                Spent the afternoon doing rewrites, enjoying the peace of there being only 5 of our 15 group in town [not that I didn’t miss everyone, but the serenity was quite nice], and hanging out with Harvey and David upstairs. I updated my finances from Friday’s adventure, finished rotating all of my pictures, and began to write this massive entry after having pasta [made by Alex, thanks R4L!] for dinner.

                I had the best time just splaying my stuff all over the table in the ‘living room’ of the boys apartment, sharing it with Harvey and David [who have already written so many more postcards than I have… I promise I’m going to get them all done in the next 24 hours!], and just reveling in the glory of the silence- counting down the minutes until the Venice group returned.

                And, to just nutshell their return- we definitely heard them barreling up the stairs and thanks to the dinner they had, the three of us [who were quite content with the silence and peaceful atmosphere that we’d created for writing postcards/journaling] were treated to a 5-person fanatical echo about the highlights from their Venice trip.

                Once they all calmed down and the tiredness set in for the Venice group, Harvey, David, and I were treated to a quiet atmosphere again, and I wrote this entry all the way through Thursday before making plans with Harvey to go running at 8am and calling it a night [only after some more wonderful girl talk with the R4L].

Since it’s mid-afternoon on Sunday right now, I’ll leave today to write about in my next entry, but it’s already been a great day.

If you actually read all 6800+ words of this entry, I applaud you and hope you understand just how much I love this country. Being here in Rome, in Italy- it’s allowed me to truly live, and for that I am so incredibly grateful to no end. The adventures, the freedom to explore, the chance to let go of a lot of what I think holds me back when I’m in Austin, and just carpe diem.

Time to go write some postcards and papers--

Ciao ciao!