"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 :)