Life in Roma

It’s about 3:30 PM on Wednesday and the past couple of days have been rough. I am trying to get a lot of work done because of traveling to Paris and then London with Ashley here is Rome in between next week but for some reason the time is just passing and no work is actually getting done. I know that a lot of students have this disease… but anyway, on Monday and Tuesday I came to the school pretty early to use the computer and do stuff but I ended up getting bogged down by Prague stuff and travel arrangements. But, everything is almost figured out for Paris this weekend. Prague is a whole different story. I can’t believe how difficult it is to get stuff done. I think that most things are working out now though…I have most of the information I need to book my flight, I have emailed appropriate people with my questions, and I am trying to register for classes as I write this. I hope that everything will work out seeing as I am ignoring the whole student visa thing and just going in as a tourist…I think that it should be fine though. I already spoke with an NYU chica about it and she said it would work out. I will be so glad though when it is all over. I don’t want to have to worry about it anymore.

So, I just registered and it was soooo easy! I got into all of the classes that I wanted and they had some different management classes so I signed up for some. I just have to make sure that my school will give me credit for them now. I am glad now that something actually worked out well.

So this weekend I am going to Paris…what I didn’t realize was that my friends are not going to be arriving until Saturday early morning but I am getting there on Friday at about noonish. So I am going to have fun adventures in the city of lights by myself. I figure that I will just go to one of the four million photo exhibitions that my photo teacher told me about when he heard that I was going. Some of them seem pretty interesting anyway. I will really only have the late afternoon and evening to do stuff until exhaustion overtakes my body and I go to sleep. The hostel that I am staying in is the same one that we are staying in the rest of the weekend so I figure that the ladies will just come and wake me up when they get in on Saturday around 9AM. I am pretty excited. Then Ashely and I are going back to Roma on Monday till Thursday morning and then we all reconvene in London to celebrate Thanksgiving. Then as you all know because you are counting down the days I will only have 3 weeks left until I once again grace the shores of the United States.
So that is it for now. I am going to be working on my gelato paper tonight so hopefully that will include consuming a lot.

Of course, yesterday was my father's birthday and Jennie Mayer's 21st birthday so happy birthday to both of them and I am sure they celebrated in very different ways. Yay for birthdays!

Love you all. Ciao.

This weekend Rachel and I went on our trip to Florence. It was a pretty fun-filled weekend. We got to Florence at about 1 on Friday and booked into our hostel. It was called Emerald Fields and it was all right. It had a funky smell but was clean and everything like that. That afternoon we walked a round and found the Academia gallery and the Uffizi Gallery. Both had absolutely no lines and so we didn’t have to wait at all. We saw Michaelangelo’s David and the Prisoners. David is cool but let me just tell you that he does have a mullet. Also I noticed that his hands are extraordinarily large, although somebody told me that that was done on purpose. I did note that his second toe was longer than his big toe if anybody cares about that. Other than that he is pretty awesome. The Prisoners were really cool. They are a collection of four sculptures that are not completed. So you can see these guys that are coming out of this big block of marble. It is really interesting. People don’t know if he meant to leave it like that to symbolize the mind being trapped in a mortal body or if he just ran out of time. After that we went to the Uffizi gallery which has a lot of paintings. The highlight is the Birth of Venus which is a very beautiful painting. Rachel and I hovered near a tour group to hear the guide talk about the painting. Other than that, we were disturbed by all of the pictures of babies that look like little adults. We kept on seeing them over and over again. So…after the galleries we went back to the hostel to get our coats. Florence is not too big; I don’t think that there is a metro system, only buses. So the point is that we could walk to our hostel no problem from wherever. We went to dinner just to get some pizza and talked a bit. Then we went back to the hostel and talked with other people there until we went to bed. The next day we woke up and walked to the opposite side of Florence across the Ponte Vecchio where all of the jewelry stores are. We also did some shopping at the market on the way there. Then we went into the Gardens of Boboli (or something like that). They were really nice and a great place to escape. You can check out the pictures…it is basically all these paths and fountains leading up a big hill where there are great views. So we walked around for a couple of hours and took pictures. Then we wandered around some more and shopped. We were trying to figure out where we wanted to go on Sunday because we wanted to do a day trip. We decided to take a really early train to Venice and spend some time there. So we got some soup and spring rolls at a Chinese restaurant (the first time I had Chinese in Italy…it was okay) and then went to bed pretty early.

Sunday we got to Venice at about 10 and had a lot of trouble finding a train back to Rome. The only one that was available was a slow train leaving at 1:30. So we only had limited time in Venice. We ran around seeing everything and taking pictures of the canals and such. Also, we were on a hunt for certain items for ourselves and others and so we did some shopping. We kind of got lost wandering in the alleys and such. It was a very nice place and I feel like I could have spent more time there…but probably no more than a day and a night. There didn’t seem to be much to do besides walk around, shop and eat dinner. Also, it does smell weird, kind of like vinegar or something like that. We couldn’t really figure it out. So needless to say the train ride back to Rome was long and awful. By the time we got back we decided what we needed was food, Friends and gelato. So we ate dinner while watching Friends and then we got gelato. I had:

Soy vanilla: the reason that I like the soy flavors is because they are much lighter and refreshing than the regular without being fruity. I think that the vanilla was pretty good but the chocolate would have been better…2/5
Zuppa inglese (trans. English Soup…don’t as me why): I wasn’t really sure what this was when I ordered it. Apparently it is some sort of Italian dessert with cream, sponge cake, marmalade, and either orange or cherry liqueur. It kind of had a funky taste and it wasn’t my favorite… .5/5

Okay so what have I done since Monday??? I have been doing a lot of work. I have tried to spend some time in the darkroom to start printing final pictures for Photography but it seems like it takes me forever and I can never get a final product. It is frustrating only because it takes up a lot of time. I printed some of the pictures that I took of Momo in London. It was funny because I have about ten 8 X 10 pictures of her face now in various shades of grey. Anyway…so that is what I did basically all of Monday. I have also been able to sleep in lately; it’s amazing. I actually have to set an alarm now if I want to wake up before 10 AM. I am really happy about that. Really I have had a very uneventful week. I booked my flight to London over Thanksgiving. I am also going to Paris the weekend before but I haven’t booked the flight yet because it is pretty expensive and I am just putting it off. I made plans to go to Florence this weekend with Rachel. We already booked our hostel and will be leaving early tomorrow morning. Hopefully I will have a lot of fun stories when I get back. Other than that…I only have 4 weeks of classes left!! And only 5 weeks till I come home!! 38 days to be exact.

I know that I haven’t posted anything in so long. First of all, London was amazing and super fun. I loved the city and being there with Mom, Momo, and Kirk was just what I needed. Unfortunately, it would take me over twenty pages to write about all that we did so you are just going to have to wait for Christmas to hear all about it from me in person. I put pictures from the trip up though.

So I will start up again with this past week. Mon and Tues were blah school days-nothing exciting happened. On Wednesday, Simmons and Sophie and some other people from Bucknell came to visit. It was a lot of fun to see them again. I hadn’t seen either of them in 6 months which is a ridiculously long time to be with Simmons and Soph. Anyway, the first day I finally went into the Coliseum and the Forum. It was cool to see everything. I can’t believe that I waited this long! It was very difficult in the forum to figure out what everything was. I think that I will go back by myself and spend some more time there. We walked around and talked and it was just so great to be with people who know me. They are having a great time in France too so I was excited to hear about there host families and all that jazz. I had a class but we met up for dinner. Seriously, talking and hanging out with friends is something that I really really miss. Not that I don’t have friends here, but it is different being with people that have lived through things with you. I guess that is what I am doing with my friends here is Rome right now…Lets see, on Thursday all of the sexy ladies from France came with me and my film class to cinecitta. It is the really famous Roman film studio. It was pretty interesting to see all of it and only student groups can get in so we were pretty lucky. Dante, our tour guide, let us sneak some pictures when no one was looking. We went into the U571 submarine and onto the HBO Rome set. We also went into the area where they make and store all of the props which was pretty cool. I took a picture of the armchair from The Godfather, which is currently being utilized as a dog’s bed.

After that I had classes till 6 PM. I met them all for dinner and then out for gelato. I didn’t get any because my stomach kind of hurt but I will have to go back because I think that it is the oldest gelateria in Rome. Anyway, the next morning I met them all in line for the Vatican Museums. It was pretty early for a Friday morning and it was the first day that it got really cold here. It was really chilly. It is really unfortunate because I have been spoiled so far with the weather. The warmth is one of the best aspects of Rome. Anyway, the Vatican Museums were pretty good. They were huge and a lot of the stuff started to look the same after a bit. I finally saw the Sistine Chapel. It was okay. I mean it was nice to see and I am glad that I did, but it wasn’t as impressive as I thought that it was going to be. I thought that there were other frescoes that were more beautiful in the Raphael rooms. Next we went to St. Peter’s Basilica. It was beautiful and large, but I didn’t like it as much as Santa Maria Maggiore. I think that it was also because there were so many tourists there that it made it difficult to enjoy it. Then we went out for lunch and got gelato at my local place, Millenium Gelato. I realized that I have had over half of the flavors that they have there. I need to start going other places because I am going to run out of flavors to get there. Anyway I had:

Kinder: vanilla gelato with large chunks of German chocolate it in. I think that this is a pretty delicious flavor. I give it a 3/5

Bacio (Soft Chocolate): this was pretty good. it was a bit like soft serve and not as chocolatey as the regular flavor…2/5

Friday night all of my friends spent the night in the airport and so they had to leave at about 11PM. But Simmons and Sophie separated from the other kiddos and came over to my apartment to just hang out. We made delicious banana pancakes. They were a taste of home because you can’t get pancakes here and my Mom sent them to me with the best syrup ever. It was great. Anyway, we had a little dance party with Rachel and Elisa. IT was really fun. Then Rachel and I went back with them to there hostel to drink some wine and chill until they had to leave. Once they left, the real adventures began…Rachel and I had to take the bus back because the train was shut down for the night. So first we got on the wrong bus that just randomly stopped. We were really confused about where we were so we just got on the bus that had the most people on it. That was kind of a mistake because we ended leaving the area of Rome that we recognized and going out to a sketchy place. But finally when that bus stopped running we recognized a bus that would eventually get us back home. It was so fun after that because we were able to laugh about it but at the time I was really nervous about getting lost because it was pretty late at night. But it ended up being okay and Rachel and I were fine.

An amazing thing happened this weekend- Rachel and I were able to sleep in!! It was really great. Also, I requested another blanket from the porter and so now I have three on my bed and it is delicious and warm. This weekend I basically just did some work, slept, blah blah blah. It was so cold here this weekend- I mean, its not that bad compared to all you poor freezing people at home but it was really cold for Rome and the heat in our apartment isn’t exactly on all of the time. O-well. This week I am going to be really busy trying to get a lot of work done because I am going to be really busy pretty much ever weekend. Next weekend Rachel and I are going to Florence, then I am off to Paris to meet up with people and Ash is coming back to Rome with me and then Thanksgiving weekend it is back to London. I am so excited!! Then I think there are only 2 or 3 weekends left and I still have Venice left. Yay!!

Hello everyone...I am here in London with Mom, Moira, and Kirk and we are having a great time. I'll just update you really quick...

Last Wednesday and Thursday I was basically studying all day and my midterms were alright. My stupid design midterm was crazy. She said that we should "look over the readings", but what she should have said was "say a prayer because you are never going to find the random pointless facts I am going to pull from the readings and ask you about." So that was interesting. My Italian midterm was pretty easy so no worries there. Then I took a shuttle to the airport. It was a bit awkward because no one spoke. It was the driver, me, and three Spanish priests. I had to wait a bit in the airport because I got through security so quickly. I was, literally, the only one in line. It was strange. But the flight and everything was fine. Then when I got to Heathrow, I was in this really small terminal but there were a bunch of people there just sleeping and so I joined them. It was really weird. I slept on the floor and it was freezing. But I had my little pillow and eye mask and a sweater, sweatshirt, and my jacket on and so I was okay. I slept on and off till 5:30AM and then I went to figure out where my Mom's flight was coming in. I went to a totally different terminal which was much sweeter and waited there for them. I was so nervous waiting for them...and it was so awesome seeing them again. I was so happy!!!

We took a car to the apartment, which was about an hour with traffic and such. The apartment is really really nice. It is so much better than staying in a hotel. It is three floors and the middle floor is a dining room/kitchen and living room. Plus, we get internet!! Momo and Kirk fell asleep almost as soon as we got here, but Mom and I walked around a bit. We are a two minute walk from Waterloo station, and we went and visited the Thames and stuff like that. Then, Mom Moira and I went for a longer walk and we saw the Palace of Westminster, the London Eye, the Globe Theater and some other random art galleries and such. It was a nice walk along the Thames. Then we came back and went out for dinner at a local Thai place. It was really good and the service was quick, which was great because we were all starving!! Then at around 8:30/9 we all went to sleep.

Yesterday, we went to St.Paul's Cathedral, which was really cool. It is a beautiful church and you can climb up these really narrow stairs (I was a bit claustrophobic) to the top of the dome. I think that it was 512 steps. It was a long journey, but worth it. The views from the top were great. You could see everything, although I didn't know what a lot of it was. London is very different from Rome because it is a modern city as well as having a lot of history. Rome doesn't have any big skyscrapers or anything really that looks like a city. There are no grey office buildings or anything like that. I kind of like London better than Rome. Maybe it is just because I am on vacation here with the fam. I mean, Rome has a lot of interesting things, but I feel like it banks too much on its history. I don't think that I would want to live there. Anyway, after the cathedral we had lunch and then went to the Museum of London. It was cool because it traced the history of London from pre-Roman times to 1915. The ancient Roman stuff was the most interesting part to me. They had everything from statues, coins, models, blah blah blah. Anyway, it was awesome because the museum was free (as are all the national museums in London) and it was really nice. So by the time we got back to the apartment it was time for dinner. We took the tube (which was crazy!!) to Leicester Square and walked to Covent Garden for dinner. We ate at this little place called Porter's English restaurant. I had roast beef with yorkshire pudding and we got spotted dick for dessert. It was a very English meal for me. Anyway, then we walked to Trafalgar Square and then home. There were so many restaurants and people out and about. It was really interesting and lively. Okay..we are leaving now for Hyde Park and possibly Harrod's!! Cheers!

So...lets see. I am in the middle of midterms currently so I am kind of stressed out. I have already done two and I have three more. Luckily at the end of it all I am going to London!! yay.

On Sunday I did a lot of work. I had to write some papers and stuff like that. We went out to eat as a kind of break from studying and so that was nice. Oh, Rachel and I didn't end up going out to that jazz club because we were just too tired. Anyway, that was basically all that I did on Sunday. It was a really boring day.

Monday I had class really early and I had to give a presentation in Photography. Then we all did our "critiques." In reality though it wasn't even a critique. I mean we looked at pictures that we had printed and just talked about problems that we had had. I don't think anybody is going to get less than an A in that class. Also on Monday I locked myself in the library for many many hours to make a study guide for the midterm that I just took twenty minutes ago!!! I know...right now my life is really boring. Although...I did try some new gelato:

coffee mousse: the mousse variation of gelato is interesting and to be honest it is a bit too rich for my blood. I mean, it isn't cold and it has a fluffy consistency so that it almost tastes like frosting...1.5/5

chocolate with chili peppers: I know, it sounds weird...and it was! the taste wasn't bad per say but it did leave an awful taste in my mouth and it made my throat scratchy like after too many freeze pops...1/5

Today is Tuesday and I have been studying/in class taking midterms all day and as soon as I sign off I am going home to make a study guide for my midterm tomorrow night. Oh life...
So I think that that is it. The midterm that I just took wasn't hard but it wasn't fun either. Oh, I got a test back in Italian on Monday and I got an A so I was happy about that. Thats it for now, I will probably do one more post before I go to London baby yeah! and I am not sure if I will have access to the internet after Thursday night but we will see.

Ciao!

Oh yeah...I am missing two very important events this weekend...one is my family's early Thanksgiving activities at Nana and PopPops and the other is the Kayne West concert at Bucknell...believe me I will be both these places in spirit :)

So last night was a lot of fun. Rachel, Katy, and I went to this place called Fluid. It is a wine and cocktail bar. It was a very trendy place- the floor had a layer of fluid and so when you stepped it squished. Also there were rocks on some walls and some were covered with metal. So...it was pretty interesting to look at. So you have to pay for a drink which is 7 euros and then you can go to a free buffet. The buffet was great. It was all little sandwiches, couscous, pasta dishes, rice balls, and little desserts. We went up about 3 or 4 times. It was great. So we were able to eat dinner and get a drink for only 7 euro which is great. Then we walked home and we made it even though we didn't have a map. When we got home Rachel and I watched a bunch of episodes of Friends and then hit the hay.

Then this morning I woke up early of course. I tried to sleep in but I couldn't really. So I just putzed around for a bit and did some random stuff. Then when Rachel woke up we were in the mood to do something new...so we watched some episodes of Friends. Then we went out to see a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Piazza Navona. It was really interesting to see. He did a lot of portraits of really famous people like Dior, Martin Luther King Jr., and Marilyn Monroe. Then we had really great salads...mine was called Salchi Papa and it had hotdogsin it...but it was really good. Now I am at school just trying to do work and talking to Andrew. Thats it for now folks...I think that I am going to see a tribute to 20s jazz at this place called Micca Club. I am not sure though.