una settimana bianca

tonight we had our closing banquet. mmmmm... (from the menu):

~rice timbales w/ porcini mushrooms

~home-made ravioli stuffed with fresh ricotta cheese and spinach, in Pachino tomato sauce

~Roast of rolled turkey breast stuffed with chestnuts and herbs

~buttered Brussel sprouts

~Baked potatoes with home-made creamy dressing

~Assorted bread and fresh creamery butter

~Tiramisu

The Christmas banquet was quite the little affair, complete with candlelit tables, fresh flowers and pine branches, our decorated little xmas tree with secret santa presents under it, and most all the teachers, seminarians, and students. we sung two christmas carols before the meal began. kind of weird. but better than when at the thanksgiving banquet where we had to sing the national anthems of the US and of Italia. Our philosophy teacher fr. dugan suddenly came up from the basement office during dessert dressed as santa :) He read a little and then asked for some elves to hand out the secret santa gifts. hten of course everyone went into a picture-taking frenzy because it was the last time all of us (except 4 who left early) would be together. two of the girls surprised all of us by having prepared a little song in memory of the fall semester rome group, "for good" from wicked. then we all sung along to a particular original Roma '08 song courtesy of Kelly, fondly known as "The Fr. Mark Song"... unfortunately our favorite teacher wasn't there to hear it :(

Tommorrow most of the girls are leaving at 6:30am for the airport. The ones staying a little later are planning to hang out at Pascuccis all day. at night me, brett, anne, and mt leave on a 12 hr train (!) overnight to austria. we're skiing and hanging out there for the week with other smc and nd study abroad students. im so excited! after that im taking the train back to rome to meet my mom, dad, and scott to explore rome and florence for the week. then... who knows where ill go! i have about a week before classes start again where im gonna travel by myself. any suggestions? i'll figure something out. i love not having plans!   :)

Maybe like a month ago Anne, Ashley and I got up early one Sunday and took the train to Florence for the day. It was awesome. I forgot my camera, which is always a bummer, but I just stole Anne's and Ashley's. We got to the see the Duomo from the outside when it wasn't that crowded. You can't go up into the dome on Sundays, but everything else was wonderfully uncrowded because it was a Sunday. We walked right into the Academia to go see David. He was sweet. I sneakily took pictures of him from all sides, hiding from the guards, because he was so cool. Then we wandered through some pretty piazzas that were bigger than the ones in Rome, and got to the Uffizi gallery-- a museum full of awesome paintings. Unfortunately, I didn't dare sneak pictures here, but I bought a bunch of postcards of the works I liked. Highlights: all the Botticellis (Primavera, The Birth of Venus), seeing how Michaelangelo paints (I don't like it nearly as much as his sculptures), and, of course, seeing a bunch of Caravaggios!! Anne and I have a count of the Caravaggio's we have seen, its currently at 9 I think.

favorite painter: Caravaggio

favorite sculptors/architects: Bernini and Michaelangelo

cheekiest artist award: Bernini

Then we walked to the Ponte Vecchio to look at all the silver and gold shops in which everything cost an arm and a leg. since we weren't ready to give up our legs yet, as we still had lots of walking to do, we got gelato instead. Then we took a bus to Fiesole, a little town above Firenze. Anne's boyfriend Rick Steves reccomended we go there. We arrived riiiiight at sunset, and it was just perfect. We got to sit and watch the sunset over the Duomo, the Po, and the rest of Florence together. Anne and Rick also got to share the moment together, as she held him tenderly in her hands. We hopped on the train straight back to Rome and attempted to study on the 4 hour ride back. While Anne went off into another set of seats to concentrate (get some quiet) to study (sleep), Ashley and I had a wonderful intellectual conversation about Mythology for two hours! It was glorious. She had just bought a book earlier that day, ingeniously entitled "Mythology," containing pictures and short facts/stories about the gods and goddesses and such. So we pooled our knowledge, hers from her mythology and art history classes, and mine from my archaeology class and tours, and were able to put together all different myths. Taking turns sharing what we knew, we came to the conclusion that myths are basically soap operas, made up of incest, cheating, killing, and bambini-eating.

Last night a HUGE thunderstorm crashed its way through Rome. It rains every other day here in the winter, but we don't really have thunderstorms. This one was one of the loudest I've ever heard, complete with huge sheets of rain, hail (normal), and at least 3 bouts of enormously loud thunder right above the hotel. At 1:30 am.

Today was the last day of classes! YAY! Now we have finals starting this Saturday. The other week we had a huge Thanksgiving banquet, and a long weekend break-- more about that later. The Christmas season has started here, and it' sso wonderful!! We're doing a secret santa gift exchange and the other night we decorated the Christmas trees in the hotel lobby and our dining room. Lights are going up all over the city. There's a Christmas market in Piazza Navona, complete with..... finally after two years, Bernini's fountain of the four rivers senza construction. It's an awesome fountain.

There was a audience with the Pope for all the students in Rome yesterday, but I didn't go to it. Today there is a papal mass for all the students, and the humongous tree in St. Peter's square gets lit over the weekend.

Here's some pictures from our last tour, of Ostia Antica, my visit with Anne to the Vatican Museums, and our Thanksgiving break trip to England to visit the Graham-Browns!

Che? Cosa? Dublino è verde!

so today i realized that i have been saying the wrong word for "what" the entire time... using "che" instead of "cosa" or "che cosa" ah. i was so embarassed for myself when i discovered this. o well! good thing im here for the next what, like 5 months, to make up for it. here are pictures for the southern italy trip i talked about last post: pompeii, almalfi coast + paestum, halloween, eatpraylove + capri. sorry to spring em on you all at the same time! well whoever reads this probably sees them on facebook mostly anyway....

ive been listening to david archuleta's song "crush" on repeat for the past couple hours. its addictive, even though its just a stupid sugary pop song. he does have a good voice though. haha. life has been great lately. at some point, i dont know when, all of us here stopped being tourists. im not sure when it was, but not only do we get annoyed by crowds of slow, badly dressed tourists, but all the things we walk by everyday we now take for granted. anne and i were talking about this yesterday... one of those first nights when 3 of us ventured out to find the vatican, it was all lit up at night and seemed so magical. everything in rome did. now, i cant count how many times i been to/around the vatican, and especially to the pantheon, which we walk by just about everyday. its hard to remember to appreciate all the amazing monuments around us when they have become normal. its been fun getting to know italians more, the guys at pascuccis, the hotel workers, etc. also, we have this thing called "God Squad" every monday night, where these 2 young american seminarians here in rome lead discussions... its awesome, we love getting to know them and the other deacons/seminarians involved in our campus ministry stuff. much better than the home campus.

ireland was a great trip with my roommates! maire's aunt and uncle were absolutely wonderful, they took us all around dublin and out to dinner and everything. it was great to stay with them! we flew out friday with a bunch of other smc girls and got to dublin around noon, it couldnt have been easier. we all got freaked out by driving when maire's uncle took that first windy turn on the wrong side of the street! so weird. we went downtown to do touristy stuff and eat lunch. in dublin they actually have food that is not just the native food- like in all of italy. ethnic food... yummy. i had chickepea and potato curry stew. it was so good.
of course, we cant escape italian wherever we happen to go! the people ordering in front of me were speaking in italian (you actually hear a lot of different languages in dublin), and most of us slipped up and said a couple "grazie"s and "ciao"s... it was so funny, but those two phrases are especially burned in our minds forever now. we went into st patricks cathedral, which is actually not catholic but of the church of ireland. the satirist jonathan swift is buried there we found out, which was so cool to see! Then we went to the guinness factory. it was interesting to learn how beer is made.... at the gravity bar on the top level you get an awesome view of the city and a guinness. it was beautiful all lit up at night, but i didnt like the guinness at all... surprise, surprise. [picture of Maire and I] then we met maires uncle and aunt at a beautiful bar/restaurant thing called Cafe En Seine, it was beautiful! i wish i had a picture of it. they had they wedding reception there, her uncle is works with a bunch of pubs in dublin. we then met up with maire's cousin/relation, who is the same age as us and goes to medical school at trinity college. we ended up going to this med student day talent show thingy, it was really confusing, but awesome to find ourselves randomly thrown into another, totally different college environment in another country. he pointed us in the right direction in downtown dublin for the night, and we had hamburgers for dinner :)
saturday we went shopping, and got taken all around the outskirts of dublin! robert and pamela live in raheny, where we stayed, and then we went to the beach (who knew there was beach in dublin?!) where people were windsurfing in the freezing cold. then we went to the top of howth hill, where it was so windy!! the creators of riverdance live around there. i loved the hill. [pic of the 4 of us] The we went to the harbor, tried to fit our feet in some irish king or prince's (i forget...) footsteps left in the pavement of the harbor [pic of me], saw a castle where some dracula films were made, and had drinks at a golf course pub. i tried irish cider, baulmer's, which is the closest thing i could come to liking beer/an irish drink. haha.
Robert and Pamela's kids- the dogs- were so funny! Finn is an Irish wolfhound, and maddie is much smaller. Finn might as well be a horse!! Now of course as everyone knows, I'm not very um... fond... of dogs, but they were fun to see [pic of me being scared of Finn- haha- mom are you freaked out??]. We went to church in Raheny, and then out to a yummy Thai place. their church is called the Mother of Sweet Divine! ok, well not exactly, but thats how robert told us he calls it.

That's the four of us, Maire, me, Ashley, and Anne in front over Pamela and Robert's lovely house! Robert, who is also a writer, gave us each a copy of his book If Walls Could Talk, a kind of historical fiction book imagining what the walls of several Irish castles would say if they could talk! I'm exicted to read it... Dad, I know you'll love it too! It was such a fun trip. We felt to much more at home and comfortable in the country of Ireland... speaking English really did make a difference! and it was green there... always a plus when you live in the middle of a city all the time. It was the first time on a trip that we wished we could stay instead of going home to the hotel, which of course we also love.

happy halloween? candy- no, pizza- yes

2 blog entries in 1 day... sweet! thats me on an ancient crosswalk of pompeii.

Last week we had our big class trip to southern italy. we came back from cinque terre on sunday, had class monday, and were off again on tuesday morning at the lovely hour of 6 in the morning. it only took about 3 1/2 hours to get to Pompeii, our first stop on the southern italy tour. it was SO neat. i loved it. it wasnt what i was expecting at all though. my friend allie and i talked about how we thought it was going to be a kind of somber place, with tons of those plaster-cast bodies of the people of pompeii everywhere, because thats what we had seen on the history channel, etc, and what everyone talks about pompeii for. well, not everyone, because pompeii has a wealth of archaeological info. i had no clue it was so well preserved!! i was so impressed. my part of the alphabet had the visiting professor, Dr. Hansen, lead us around. as usual, she made it interesting. everyday of the trip people had oral presentations for their various classes, there were a lot in pompeii. that night when we got to naples, none of us liked it very much. in fact, we were assigned an oral presentation in italian comparing roma e napoli, and what we thought of napoli.... it was so funny, everyone was so extrememely down on naples that our teacher made us promise we'd go back at another time in our lives. it's way dirtier, and so much darker, even during the day, than rome. i tried a piece of corn pizza for dinner, which was interesting. it was pretty good.

wednesday we had to get up early again and head out on our 2 buses for the amalfi coast drive. it was beautiful!!! it took probably like 4 hours. we stopped in amalfi. when we passed positano, all i could think of was diane lane in her awesome white dress in Under the Tuscan Sun. i could have sworn i saw the dock thing she stood out on as we passed. maybe. haha. we all loved it. it was scary at points because of how windy, steep, and narrow the roads were, esp. with our huge tour bus! then we went to Paestum (Poseidonia) for the afternoon. I had my oral presentation for archaeology there, on two temples: the temple of Hera I/The Basilica and the temple of Hera II/Neptune/Poseidon/Apollo/Zeus.... it was so confusing researching them cause they have so many different names. paestum was abosolutely gorgeous and peaceful. i thought my temples were awesome. the first was in the arcaic doric style and the second in the classical doric style, and was a contemporary of the parthenon in greece, which is awesome. some of the same visual tricks the greeks used were employed in the apollo/zeus temple, which is cool cause i dont know if ill ever get to see the parthenon. i learned some cool architecure language.

dancers in italy! (Christina and I)

thursday we went to the Archaeological Museum of Naples... i liked it a lot. then we went to Cuma (Cumae), and the cave of the sybil there. interesting stories and beautiful, beautiful look out onto the ocean. friday we went to the famous Capodimonte museum. the paintings were beautiful but it was not as interesting as the archaeological museo. then we were set free in naples for the day. we ate pizza, talked with the cool waiter, walked around, some people bought incredibly cheap purses from the street vendors, and got gelato, which was actually really hard to find in naples compared to the gelato shops every block in roma. oh! friday was halloween. it was so weird, it didnt feel like it at all. we saw nothing indicating it was. but my 3 naples roommates and i dressed up as each other, which was hilarious. it made the day.

then... drum roll please..... guess where i ate dinner?? the AMAZING pizza place-- Da Michele-- Liz Gilbert writes about in her memoir Eat, Pray, Love. i was SO excited to go. she wrote about how crowded it was, and i heard from other girls there were lines out the door when they went, but it was really slow when we went in, which was nice. they only serve 2 types of pizza: margherita and marinara. we tried both. we loved it, but the canadian men next to us were like-- uh do you guys like this? wheres the meat?? and we told them that italian pizza was just not like that. they were stupid.

emily as me, me as emily, brett as anne, anne as brett :)

saturday we went to capri. getting there was almost as much of an adventure as exploring it. we had to take a hydrofoil from the port of naples, for an 1 ride. 1 hour too long, thats for sure.... half the girls got sick. ughhhh. it was gross. i was able to keep a steady stomach and luckily maire, who sat next to me, was too. the 2 people behind and in front of us werent. it was hard though. i guess the hydrofoil like hovers somewhat over the water or something? i dont know, but it was interesting. the waves were really high and awful, and we werent right on them, but still felt lots of it, hence why everyone got sick. yuck. Capri was beautiful. i got some cool gifts. the highlight of it was going up to the top- Anacapri. we took a chairlift to the top of anacapri. it was AWESOME. it might just be what heaven looks like. you couldnt tell where the massive sea ended and the beautiful cloudy sky began. it was breathtaking. would endure another awful hydrofoil ride to back to it. we actually met some SMC girls up there who studied on the program 4 years ago and are now at grad school in rome. what a coincidence! after a much better hydrofoil ride back to naples talking to some soccer players, we headed back to rome. thank god! we were all so tired of naples, and missed rome, pascuccis, and the wonderful tiziano. we cheered when we saw the hotel :)
off to go get some sleep before leaving tommorrow at 6:30 for DUBLIN!!

Cinque Terre e Pisa

So 2 weekends ago a bunch of us went to Cinque Terre which is on the n. western coast of italy. its five (cinque) townc, connected by hiking trails, which is why people go to it. our group of 7 took the train together, but another big group of girls was on it too... that often happens, that a lot of girls will be heading to the same place, but in multiple groups. this weekend the main places people are visiting and dublin, london, and venice. my roommates and i are heading to dublin and staying with maire's uncle who lives there. im so exicted!! i think im going love ireland!

anyway, back to cinque... here are the first half of the pictures i took there. we left on a midnight train friday night, it took 4 hours to get there and half of us were able to get sleep. can you guess which half i was in? haha. i only slept for maybe 20 minutes i think. 5 of us were in a car with some italian man, he was nice but we didnt really talk, just laughed about our sleeping situation... we pulled the chairs out so we could basically make one giant bed, all our legs were all over each other it was hilarious. i had to keep opening up the window cause it got really stuffy. it was also raining, and i couldnt stand up to open/close it because we were laying all over each other... so i pulled a little nice dance technique out and kicked my leg up high every time we need some air. haha. when we got to the first town, riomaggiore, there was NO ONE there. no one else got off the train with us, no one was working at the station there, the town was pitch black and still asleep... it was 4 am. we poked around a bit and found our way to a rock and decided to get some sleep. so we slept for about 2 hours and woke up freezing of course because the sea was right up next to us. then we hiked between the towns all day, stopping to go to the beach, eat, and see every town. for having basically no sleep for 2 nights previous, i felt pretty good. it was absolutely beautiful and really refreshing to not hear sirens every 5 seconds like in rome, see trees again, and breathe clean air!

on sunday we went to the beach again-- completely clear water!! it was AMAZING. that was one of my lifetime dreams- to swim in completely clear water. i was so happy. we stopped in Pisa on the way back to rome. had a little trouble catching the train back to rome, but we got back at a decent time anyway. i wanted to go up the tower, but we didnt have time. Papa (my dads dad) told me that he carved his name in the floor at the top, so i really, really wanted to try and find it!! but there's always next semester. the leaning tower was actually cooler than i thought to see- it really was amazingly crooked.

ciao! i might try to blog again tonight about our class trip last week to southern italy.

"be brilliant and make your mothers proud"

It's hard to catch up and write about things I havent had time to write of yet that were so amazing. Like going to the vatican for mass, seeing st. peters inside for the first time. so i think ill just recap on some of the highlights from the past two weeks when ive been slacking on this blog.

First of all, none of us can believe weve been in italy for almost a month! its still so surreal. is that allowed? I do have a lot of pictures, but i really dont bring my camera out with me all the time because 1) its freaking huge, 2) i feel like a tourist... which im not anymore!, and 3) i can absorb the sights and feel the city's vibe more if im not constantly looking through my camera lens. im so proud of myself though, because i think im actually caught up on journaling in my personal journal thing. for a person who usually writes maybe 3 times a year in a journal, im already halfway through the one i brought! i know im going to want to remember everything here.

(2 weekends ago) St. Peter's basilica was so beautiful.... I especially loved Bernini's colonnade and his baldacchino. you can see pics of the basilica and the angelus blessing the pope gave.

last weekend we had a lectures and tours trip to Villa Gulia on friday and Tarquinia and Cerveteri on saturday. the villa gulia is a beautiful renaissance (i think) villa restored and made into an Etruscan museum. all we hear about these days are those etruscans (at least in archaeology)... theyre not as much of a mystery as they used to be... archaeologists and historians know much more about them now from the past 15 years of work. they were a very advanced italian race/society. anyway, the museum was pretty boring... it was awfully hot. bonus: we got to walk through piazza del popolo... huge! on the way walking back from the museum a group of us had a nice little adventure:
rushing off the streets of rome into a big church off of via del corso, it was an immediate escape from the typical crowded roman street full of: tourists, buses, cars, tacky beach bicycle things (?? odd), and of course vespas. mostly pedestrians though-- men leering at you, crowds, the usual. only in rome can you jump out of all that into one of the thousand churches on every street and be guaranteed it will be beautiful. after listening to some cool organ music, on the way out of the church one of girls thought they recognized this one man. When I saw him, i looked at my friend Brett, and was kind of like hmmm... is he an actor or something? he looks familiar... So the next thing we know, Emily, my very outgoing friend went up to him and asked him "are you the guy from spiderman 2?" Haha. But he said yes, he was! It turns out it was Alfred Molina, seen most recently in spiderman playing Octavius, the bad guy in spiderman 2... how cool is that?! He introduced himself and his wife... she looked way older than him (we looked them up later, and it turns out shes 71... like 16 years older than him or something). He asked us if we were just travelling, we said know were studying, he asked us where, and who was staying for the year... he was so nice and made a genuinely nice conversation with us for a couple minutes. Of couse we had to get a picture. So i find myself standing next to one of spiderman's archnemises Octavian/the greedy french priest from Chocolat/Richard Gere's right hand man in The Hoax/ just a really nice British (who knew??) man that was willing to stop and talk. it was so cool!

the next day, we walked and walked and stood all day, as is usually the case on saturdays. we had a lectures and tours trip to Tarquinia and Cerveteri. In Tarquinia i had the woman whos not one of our professors for a tour guide... she was wonderful at leading our group around. she let us come to our own conclusions about the meanings of everything in the tombs and would slowly lead us there, saying in her particular danish/english accent, "yes, i think that too". in the museum (of etruscans, what else) she actually made it extremely interesting! she was perfect.
we stopped at the Tyherrenian Sea for lunch and to go in the water if we wanted for an hour or too before heading off to Cerveteri, to another etruscan necropolis. it was so much fun. my part of the alphabet had our archaeology professor as the guide. we were actually allowed to go in all the tombs (except for the tomb of the bas reliefs-- which i studied the week before-- cool to see it in person!) unlike in tarquinia where we had to look from behind glass. so we crawled all around and in those tombs, laying down in the burial places where bodies and sarcophagi would have been :) , climbed up to the top of a burial mound at my request, learned about the etruscans, and explored a new part of the necropolis that was recently opened. maybe its because he's a guy, or just the youngest professor, but the archaeology prof was the best to have for crawling around cerveteri! he was all up for going in random tombs and being wacky. it turned out to be a fabulous tour day!!
that night after we got home we went almost immediately to a free concert in piazza san giovanni in laterno... it was for the mtv europe music awards. they were having some italian bands (one that highly resembled nsync or bsb condensed into a duo), JOHN LEGEND, and the cure! so of course we had to go. it was packed but awesome and i cannot believe i brought my camera into that mess of people. it was worth going and standing packed in next to creepy italian men who tried to touch our butts though, because john legend played some great music. we booked it out of there (we were right up front) before the cure started playing because there we some hardcore fans decked out in all black, black eyeliner, flags, etc.

(this weekend) well its currently 2:10 in the morning, which normally wouldn't be that late on the weekends, but i am so tired! today was one of the most interesting and amazing days of my life... more later. goodnight!

the roman forum, palatine hill, colosseum

update: here are the pics from the forum, palatine hill, and colosseum. i put lots of info on them

Last weekend, the saturday 3rd of October, we spent the day at the roman forum, palatine hill, and colosseum. The art history professor, archaeology professor, and this awesome Danish woman who comes on all the tours with us, gave us the tours in groups of three. the weather was odd, it was sunny and beautiful one moment, and then the sky would get dark and it rained off and on, it even hailed a little while we were in the forum. i was thinking a lot about my friend kristin back home because she studied latin in high school and i know she would have loved it!! we learned a bunch of awesome stuff about everything we saw that day.

i have also been seeing the coolests rocks (mostly marble), which i know natalie would love! the marble used in all the churches are beautiful. most of us try to go into as many churches as we can here. i've been in so many already in rome. each one is kind of like a little treasure chest or jewel box, as you never know what you'll find in there. the best is when you randomly walk into a huge church and the organist is playing music. this happened when i went into the church at the end of our street for the first time, il Gesu. its actually what the notre dame basilica is modeled after, i just learned. anyway, i walked in with my friend caroline in the evening and it was beautiful. the organist was playing the absolute creepiest gothic church music, it was so awesome. its very very ornate inside, and pretty big. what ive been seeing lately in some churches, like in this one and the santa maria delle grazie in assisi, are that the figures on the ceilings, walls, and columns will have parts of them sticking over the moulding (molding?). like their legs or arms will be dangling out there, and i would have thought the artists would have wanted to be more conservative and "draw inside the lines." six of us went to mass there yesterday, on sunday... it was all in italian, but its exactly the same so we all knew what was going on. when we went to the vatican last sunday (ill post later about that) i was surprised that at the most formal, respected, and msot famous place for catholic mass, that it was exactly the same structure as at home. the only difference was that most of it was in latin. thats pretty cool though, i dont know how many other religions can say that the service will be exactly the same no matter where in the world you attend.
so im sitting here in the library working on not schoolwork, but trying to get pictures up and do this since im so behind! im listening to the boss, which of course makes me think of uncle tom and my family. i have to go to archaeology in a couple minutes, which i am starting to like more and more, now that we are actually visiting the stuff he lectures about in class. we just had lunch at the tiziano (cause its a monday), we had spaghetti, chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans with onions. and gelato! i had some blueberry and chocolate. speaking of gelato, its kind of a crime not to get it almost everyday. id say that i and everyone here has it at least every other day, if not more. the best place is Giolitti's, they have a ton of flavors. for 2 euro you they give you big globs of two flavors, and panna (whipped cream) if they like you. ive gotten cioccolato fondente (tastes like brownie batter! mmmm), blackberry, orange (tastes so real!), pink grapefruit (so real that its too sour for me just like the real thing), and other flavors im sure. yum. ps mom stop freaking out... were walking everywhere. i have walked so much, esp on the weekends its insane. saturdays i usually feel like my feet could just fall off by the end of the day. ill have to write about all the we did this weekend too! in the hotel, to get to my floor the "second" floor (really like 3 1/2) you have to go up about 6 1/2 flights of normal stairs.
....off to archaeology now byeeeee

so much to do see and tell

Here are some photos of my first week in rome. reaed the captions for more info of what i found. i still have much more to put up from the weekend. today i got to talk to my parents on skype, which was great but i had to do it quietly cause i was in the library. last night i talked with aunt annie, aunt mary, and little kathleen on skype too! it was so great. kathleen got a kick out of me pretending to eat her through the camera. haha. it was great to hear her little laugh again! ill write more when i have time, right now ive got to do some archeology and philosophy! then some of us are going to a church in search of a cool Caravaggio painting :)

the rest of assisi, and finally rome. andiamo!

Assisi- we stayed in this religious retreat place, i was placed to room with Anne and another girl Katy who I had never met before she was really nice. It was weird because a political group was staying part of the time we were there-- and that mix of religion and politics wouldn't normally happen in the US. I got to know lots of new people and thankfully made friends. The only person I was friends with going into this was Anne, who lived across the hall from me last year. I put links to my friends rome blogs, you might want to check out anne's for videos, Brett's, and Allie's (also listed along the left side).

We also went to San Damiano... where st francis ran to to escape his father when he wanted to devote his life to God. He hid in a hole under their dining hall essentially. san damiano is also where God spoke to him from a special cross and said to him "rebuild my church". upstairs we saw where st clare died. it was just a plain corner, marked off with an old rope, with a lit candle. one woman took pictures of it, which was really disrespectful. in most of the churches you cant take pictures and have to be silent, but in saint clares tomb, people were talking so much!! it was awful. her body is so cool/freaky... her bones are prefectly preserved, so unlike st francis', hers is laid out in a glass case and they put clothes and a clay face and feet on her... but you can see her body shape!

One weird thing-- here in italy you often get fruit for dessert and you have to cut it with your silverware. even bananas! everything! its so funny. its taboo and in some places against the law to walk around the streets of a city just eating a cookie or whatever, shop keepers must give you a bag. but you will never see the italians walking and eating, especially biting into and an apple or taking a swig of water on the street. we were all so eager to get of assisi and get to rome, we had so much free time in assisi. but i was helpful to get adjusted time-wise and learn some italian customs before we were thrust into rome.

Here are 2 albums i put on facebook, which will work for people who don't have it too. you can see much more of what i did and saw, theres too much to write of here. i hope you guys like them! :
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012530&l=9488e&id=1571340282

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012551&l=63731&id=1571340282
i have yet to take a picture in rome (!! i know), because i wanted to give myself a couple days of just absorbing it all. im letting other people take the first pics, ill be here for a year! plus, i dont want it to get stolen.

ROME! we got here on sunday night. i caught a glimpse of the colosseum on the bus ride in. but at the first glimpse all of us got of an ancient ruin of rome all of us on the bus gasped. i dont even remember what it was. all of our jaws hung open for those first couple minutes and we all "yay!"ed when we saw the hotel. it is on the main street of rome. i had no idea, i was picturing it on a quieter street w/o traffic, kind of like our "campus" street, which is adjacent, with Pascucci's, the office, classroom, and library buildings, all inconspicuously scattered along the street. the hotel is so much nicer than i was expecting, at least the outside and lobby. our room is a quad (we were lucky enough to get one of the three available to us). im rooming with anne, maire (pronounced "mora'), and ashley. maire and ashley were friends before, like anne and i. the two pairs of us had never met, or even seen each other on the home campus though! funny, because its so small. they are all really nice and im so glad i got a quad-- its fun. we have 4 beds, but anne's is a cot, because i guess our room is normally meant for 3! its big enough though... at least for the amount of stuff that anne and i brought. we share on smaller closet, and the other two share a bigger closet that is stuffed to the brim. maire brought about 4 times the amount of clothing i did... which made me worry and her embarassed! lol.

sunday night, ms hoffman, the ra, showed us the campus street. then we went to get pizza- so delicious!! on the way to it, we ran into the pantheon because its on the same street as all our buildings. when we came upon the side of it, i wasnt sure what it was beacause it was so huge! i had no idea it would be so big. it was so amazing to see in person. i thought it would be a lot smaller and in a bigger space. nope! it was crammed into the middle of other buildings and streets, with a medium piazza in front of it, like everything else here in rome im learning-- the old and new together. some of us walked over several blocks to the trevi fountain which was... glorious. just beautiful at night. i went the next day and it just wasn't the same. we sat for a long time and just people watched and stared in awe at the fountain. we all decided to try and find another way back to the hotel, so we could get lost and see the city. it sure did take a long time, but it was worth it to be out and about in rome.

another culture note- if you are a woman, you cannot look men in the eyes when walking down the street. this is SO hard, especially for a person who likes to people watch. or a person who likes to be able to walk down a crowded street w/o bumping into people. but i think im getting the hang of it. you kind of half to walk down the street with your head pointed down, or look at people's stomachs. why, you ask? men take it a look in the eyes, especially suggestively, as an invitaion. well, walking home that night, one of my roommates accidentally looked at a man and turned back again, and he.... well... pretty much it was disgusting and im very glad that i knew what was going on so i could look away and runnn across the street. mind you, this was at a very crowded, well-lit intersection, not in some sketchy alley. dad- stop freaking out, we were all fine. although this was the extreme in cases of looking at men, it was pretty ridiculous that that happened our first night in Rome.

oh, also-- i wore my mom's boots that she got while she was in rome, which was so cool. i do need to get them repaired and given more of a sole though, because my feet hurt when we got back to the hotel!!

the next morning we went to pascuccis for the first time, where we get our other meals (1 at the hotel, and breakfast and either lunch or dinner at pascuccis during the week). very yummy. i got an amalfi frullato (smoothie), which was i guess a mixed fruit w/ lemon juice... it was good, but too apple-y, pineapple-y or something. the corneto da cioccolato (chocolate croissants) are really good. mom, where do you get ciambellos again?? speaking of, our director, who had my mom 30 years ago, said she remembers her very very well. she thinks we look nothing alike, which of course, having seen us both at 19 years old, we wouldn't really. she remembered she had "flaming red hair". when i told her how i cant picture my mom being the way she is now (cant stop talking), because she looks kind of shy in picture back then, she said "ohhhh no-- your mother was anything but shy!!" and laughed. i guess you havent changed much, mom :)

classes yesterday (monday): i had philosophy (with a priest that said our mass in assisi), it seems interesting, archeology (a younger-ish prof from new york), which is much more like art history than i thought, and moral theology (with the famous Father every talks about!), im so excited for that class. today i had italian, with a native italian woman teacher.

last night we had lunch (they call it dinner) at the hotel, which was SO GOOD. we got a ridiculous amount of food! it could have been 2 meals worth! we had a large heaping linguine with a delicious sauce w/ zucchini in it. the other plate was chicken with a side of really really good green beans. then there was bread, water, i got tea, and finally gelato!! ALL of this is stuff, and the food in assisi, is local, fresh, handpicked-- never canned. which is ridiculous. i mean how many restaurant can you go to in the US where you can get actual peas picked that day and not canned (like in assisi). all the sauces are homemade-- and you can tell. the pasta is just cooked perfectly, al dente, and is so much better than back home. even the gelato is made at the hotel itself-- amazing!! i tried fragole (strawberry), raspberry, frutta di bosco (mixed berry), and "surprise", which turned out to be watermelon.

last night anne, caroline, and i went out exploring again, in search of the vatican. we just had to walk down the main street. we turned a bit down one street b/c we saw something really beautiful and cool- which turned out to be castelo sant'angelo, when we looked in our guidebooks later. so cool!! we crossed a beautiful bridge over the tevere (tiber) river to get to it, and got a stunning view of the dome of st peters-- the largest dome in the world! we made our way leisurely to the vatican. wow i never thought id get to say that sentence. !! i have to say though,, coming right up to it, the actual basilica was smaller than i thought, probably because the row of semi-circled columns flanking it, over power it. i really liked the columns and the huge, empty piazza at night. from far away, the vatican looks huge though! it was such a wonderful night walk. when we got back "home" of coooourse i stayed up until 1 or 2ish reading about what i had seen that day and journaling. i was so tired, but what can i say, i must just be wired into me to stay up late, as everyone in my family knows :)

this afternoon, after my only class, italian from 9:30-11:30, brett and i explored the city in search of.... the colosseum! it was cool. i wish i knew more aobut it though, and the surrounding tons of ruins-- the roman forum?? ok, well the studying must begin! unfortunately. im going to go read for archeology and then get ready for another delicious dinner!! tonight anne and i will go off in search of the spanish steps. she went to piazza navona today. it is just so cool being able to day to people "oh, yeah i went to the vatican last night! where did you go?!" :)

Hilly Assisi

Hello everyone!! Oh my gosh have done so much already I cant even say it all! I could write so much.
Assisi was cold cold cold beacuse it was a hill town, I got so see so much cool spiritual stuff, the basilicas of san francesco (st francis) and santa chiara (st claire)- which were beautiful! i was in san francesco 11 years to the day that part of the upper church collapsed and killed several people, kinda weird. His tomb was so moving-- it was dimly lit in the lower church, and had pews for people to pray in and look at his stone coffin. the fresco cycle let me learn much more about his life.... i def. dont know as much about saints as other people here do! o well, im learning! Well, were getting kicked out of the library, but i have so much more to tell later! ciao!

im in rome!!!!

im here, in the airport!! next stop, assisi for orientation! :)

trips and last minute things

Hello everyone! I'll be using this blog while I'm studying abroad this school year in Rome to stay in touch with all of you! Rather than trying to keep in touch and email everyone individually, I'll write on this about everything I'm doing. I would loooove if everyone commented on the entries every now and then so I know who's reading, what you think, and to stay in contact with you! You can comment on an entry by clicking the hyperlink at the end of an entry that says something like "0 comments" or "3 comments" or whatever. Type in the empty box and then select Name/URL for your "identity" and you can write your name. Of course, you guys can always email me at NightSparkle24@aol.com ( I'm not going to check my school email over there as much), I'll be on facebook every now and then, and use skype if you have it! It's free video chatting, you just have to have a webcam w/ a mic- download it off of skype.com and search my name.

These last couple weeks at home have been a mix of short trips and rushing around to make sure I have everything I need. In August, I visited Kristin at her school in PA- Susquehanna. we had a good time-- I'm glad I finally got to see where she lives and goes to school! I love you kj. Then I had my wisdom teeth taken out (YUCK) which was awful and sucked and was really stupid and I hate being drugged and am never going to be drugged again. Haha. But I'm glad I got them out and they healed in time for me to go to Rome and.... South Bend! I visited the weekend of the Michigan game, but didn't go. I had such a blast visiting all my smc and nd friends. It rained buckets the whole weekend, but it was fun anyway-- catching up with my (old?) roomie amelia, seeing tara all grown up as an RA, staying with annie, hanging out with my dad kyle (haha), chilling with hannah and katie, catching a glimpse of the smc dance classes I'll be missing while I'm gone, riding blinkie over to nd once again, to hang out w/ all the awesome alumni guys in the two quads, and going to alumni mass. Thank you so much to alex, molly, and alyssa for giving me some tips about going to rome-- I don't know what to expect yet, so I'm glad I got to talk to you guys. I'm really glad I visited school to see everyone before I left.

This past Friday my family and I drove down to Harrisonburg, picked up natalie, and headed to West Virginia to go whitewater rafting on Saturday. Uncle Tom took us down the Lower Gauley river- it was awesome!! We had 10 people plus him in the raft, pretty full. The two couples that came with us were real Virginians (aka they had strong accents, unlike the rest of us nova people), and were nice. Scott, chris, and I all "rode the bull" a couple times: you climb up front and sit on the top of the raft w/ your legs dangling over and hold onto a handle-thing, stick one arm in the air waving, and hold on for dear life while you go down a rapid-- SO FUN. After several weeks of being home with out all of my friends it was so good to see natalie! I also got to see her apartment... of course her room looks exactly like it does at home, for those of you who know what that means :) Tonight aunt mary, uncle al, peter (yes, baby peter kristin haha), and the little love of my life kathleen came over. I made dinner and it was good to have both our families around together before I left.

Right now I'm a little nervous because I haven't had time to think about leaving all that much and prepare myself.... I'm focusing on getting everything together. If I think about leaving my mom and family for so long too much, I think I'll get much more sad so I'm not letting myself get to that point. Saying goodbye to aunt mary, who was my second mom for half of the summer, was hard but I just tried not to think about it too much. I have so many groups I have to say goodbye to for the year: my family, all my awesome aunts, uncles, and cousins, my amazing friends here (well, scattered throughout the country these days), and of course school friends! :( I leave Tuesday night, and I'm pretty sure some other smc girls will connect from detroit to my flight, so I'll be the only one flying out of my area, but hopefully have some people to sit with! We'll all meet up in the airport in Rome and take a bus to Assisi for a 4-day orientation. Then classes start monday I think. It's crazy to think that in one week I'll 1) be in classes once again and 2) BE IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY.... crazy.