"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!