Adventured Out.

Once again, I am dead tired but I suppose I need to force myself to write before time goes by too quickly and everything blurs together. I can assure you that these posts will not be as frequent for the rest of the year because then I will have studio work and less time for adventuring. It feels like such a chore to even rack my brain for the events of yesterday and today. I will try to make this the abridged version as much as possible.

Saturday morning my two roommates and I ate breakfast at a sidewalk cafe. While we were sipping cappuccinos and eating croissants a man holding a newspaper came out of the building and called to someone across the street "Salvatore! Salvatore! Salvatore!". I found this to be amusing for some reason.

I also was amused by some of the situation of buying a cellphone. There was a young Italian man who spoke English quite well and an old Italian man who spoke very little. The computers were so slow that at one point the young man exclaimed "Mamma Mia!" and pretended to shoot it machine gun style. The old man said something to one of the customers behind me and the gist of what I caught was that he was joking the computers work every day of the week except Saturday. Also, he didn't know how to tell me there were earbuds included in the package so he gestured with his fingers to his ears and sort of made random sounds.

We went on a walking tour that day after meeting the faculty and we walked all over the place. We literally ran past Trevi Fountain because our teacher was walking at super human speeds. She led us to the Pontifical North American College at the end of the afternoon where we attended Mass and were given a tour.

A side altar at the NAC.

Five of us went out to dinner that night and ate pizza and split a bottle of red wine at a local place that was playing Elvis. The young woman there was extremely nice and it was fun talking to her. We said "buona notte!" as we left and she called us back in for free limoncello.

A bunch of us watched half of the Notre Dame v. Michigan game that night. Let's not talk about that.

Today I ate lunch with one of my roommates at a pizzeria by Sant'Eustachio and Sant'Ivo. We returned to the hotel and I set about to leave and do my own thing. Not everyone has phones yet and it's very hard to coordinate with people so I was unaware of what 98% of my classmates were doing. Since I didn't know of anyone interested in joining me (or couldn't at all contact those who may have been) I walked around by myself. Saying that will probably scare a number of people but I'm alive. I did this because I wanted to go to St. Peter's and the few people I could contact were not interested. You can't really get lost trying to find St. Peter's so that was easy enough. I did not go in today because I didn't want to stand in the line by myself; it was long. After that I walked around Castel Sant'Angelo because, you know, it's there.

All of that didn't take nearly as long as you might think but it was afterwards that was the tricky part. My intention was to church hop but most of the churches I passed were closed at the time. I pretty much wandered and got a little lost and stumbled upon things along the way. Like this:

What the how did this get here?

And this:

 And this:

That supposedly contains the grill that St. Lawrence was famously martyred on. I believe I have been here before.

And this:

Trajan's column anyone?

I am all adventured out and studio starts tomorrow. Ciao for now.