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.