Thursday, Thwarted Plans, and T.S. Eliot

Thursdays are my beautiful and happy class-free days set between my two painfully long days. Today has been a bit unusually busy, however.

Thwarted Plan Number One. I attempted for the millionth time to go to English confessions today but seeing as my options are St. Peter's...or really just St. Peter's, I was unable to go. I guess the thing to do is wake up extra early and get to the piazza at 7:30 to beat the line. I still have yet to see the entrance line be anything shorter than wrapping around and across St. Peter's Square. There are still tourists galore here too. It's a very frustrating process trying to find confession times because they aren't posted online and in many places aren't posted on the church either. When we went to the NAC at the beginning of the year the priest told us they had English confessions on Tuesdays and mentioned the time but I didn't have anywhere to write it down and evidently this isn't publicized information because I haven't heard anything about it or them since and nothing is listed online including the address.

Thwarted Plan Number Two. Our awesome, cat-lady, super nerd, classics geek professor has offered to create a knitting club and teach or refresh people on the basics. A friend and I set out for the yarn stores but one didn't have a good selection and by the time we got to the other one it was closing. The knitting club is meeting today at 3:00 and the store is reopening at 3:45. So.

Thwarted Plan Number Three. People are playing soccer somewhere today. Due to a combination of problems (current lack of shoes, current lack of energy and health, current lack of time between soccer and knitting) I will not be joining today.

The best part of today so far was stopping in a proper bookstore/record shop. On the way back from the unsuccessful St. Peter's venture I decided my exploring for the day would be in the large bookstore on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II that just looked neat. When I walked in there were vintage prints and posters and rosaries for sale, when I went further there were delightful tons of used LPs and 45s, old and new books lining all the walls, old photographs and Italian newspapers, and a little bar serving coffee, biscotti, and "fresh squeezed orange juice". The whole place had a fresh coziness about it and they had tables and chairs and a leather couch with a coffee table facing the sunny street. They played American crooner music through the speaker system and vinyl 45s and architectural prints hung from the ceiling. The English books were an odd selection. They had quite a lot of baby books and completely uninteresting looking novels and thrillers. You sure can find Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling everywhere though; I have yet to find a bookstore with English books without the complete series of Harry Potter. They had English books mixed in with the Italian books in other parts of the store, however. Passing the poetry section I saw and picked up "Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot" and it didn't leave my hand until I had to put it back before leaving the store. I think they like to push that they have English books because the man working addressed people in English first. When I experienced this I thought it was because I just looked extra American today wearing my Mumford & Sons shirt but he did the same for every Italian who walked in. I ordered a cappuccino, sat down on the couch, read Eliot, and was content. The first stanza of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (the first one in the book) brought me back to high school English class. I smiled since I was in the process of drinking down the beautiful caffeine when I reached the part:

For I have know them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,  

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;   

It's nice to know that I can go somewhere in Rome where a cappuccino and copy of Eliot are waiting for me to pick them up. I suppose friends who have lived in Rome before me probably know about this place but I enjoy finding things by surprise instead of recommendation all the time. If any friends get a chance to visit town I will take you to this place and you can try the hot chocolate or espresso and flip through history in musty, speckled pages, or dog-eared paper LP sleeves, or photographs with cryptic descriptions scribbled in pencil on the back. It's as fun as it sounds.