My five years of French were actually good for something!

It's been a very long day. I'm tired. But, today was actually relatively interesting so I figured I'd blog about it before I forgot everything that happened!

It started off bright and early (8:30 meeting time...) so we could tour a Roman mosque. To get to said mosque, we had to walk to Piazza del Popolo (about a 30 minute walk from the Campo) and then take a train. It was an adventure. After walking, we got to the incredibly sketchy train station with the most rickety unsafe seeming trains EVER and get on for a short ride to the mosque. However, the train has two different types of stops--ones written in black that the train actually stops at and ones written in blue that you have to request, like if you're on a bus. Did we know that? No. So, first time around, we missed our stop because it's a "request only" stop. We headed over to the other side of the platform to get back on the train and get to our stop. We pressed the button this time but come to realize the stop we want is under construction and thus out of order. So, we cross to the other side of the platform again to just get off at the stop right after the one we were supposed to use. Italians do not post signs about stops being closed or under construction and I feel like that should be mandatory but apparently not.

Anyways, three train rides later, we got off and walked a short distance to the mosque where they instantly force all the girls to cover their shoulders and heads. Luckily, we had been warned and brought our scarves but it was entirely too hot a day to have your head wrapped up. I don't care what religion you are, I would just like not to be forced to wrap a scarf around my head. The mosque itself was large and had lots of Arabic writing but really wasn't super exciting.

After that experience, the few people who are volunteering at the refugee center for their class project (I'm included in this group) had to rush to center before it closed for the day because this was our last day to volunteer. We had to take the train and then the metro to get to Termini and then had about a 15 minute walk to get to the center so it was more time wasted on traveling. Also, thank goodness I was there because no one could seem to figure out how to read the metro map. Anyways, we got to the center and basically I just wandered around talking to the people there, helping them with their English and listening to their life stories. I met a guy from Somalia who completely hates Italy and a 14 year old from Afghanistan. Also, I met a guy from the Cote d'Ivoire and he has only been in Italy since April so speaks no English or Italian but IL PARLE FRANCAIS! Alors, j'ai utlisie mes etudes francaises! Tres bon.

It was a bit difficult to understand everything he was saying because (a) it's been like a year since I've spoken French and (b) he was speaking a not France-French dialect. But I got the gist of it! He was a florist in the Cote d'Ivoire. I think I would hate being a florist. Plants and I aren't friends.

After a few hours there, it was already almost 2:30 and we hadn't eaten since 7:30 so were all getting a bit grumpy. And the buses we were supposed to take back from the center were so packed that we couldn't get on them so we had to walk back to the Rome Center to meet for our next class, giving us approximately 5 minutes to grab some food and maybe go to the bathroom before our 3:00 meeting.

3:00 brought our first art history class of the week where we toured some churches that had massively gilded ceilings that were so heavy that they had to reinforce the church walls and add some buttresses and all that just so the ceilings would stay up. It was more ridiculous, gaudy Baroque. Enough gold leaf was in those to churches to bedazzle probably all of UW. Then, we trekked up to the Aqua Paola, this massive water fountain/pool thing that a pope built a while ago. It was very pretty and the sky had been thundering earlier in the day but had fabulously cleared up when we were sitting by the fountain.

Getting home after class was slightly unfortunate because it meant I had massive amounts of reading to do. I've since discovered how GREAT of a skimmer I can be. But really, we're reading about Sultans now and they just had this obsession with harems and conquering Hungary. That's about all I got out of those 70ish pages.

After reading and a quick dinner, we went out to watch the soccer game! We found this bar very close to our apartment that was serving liters of sangria and wasn't crowded at all so we decided it was a good choice. Partway through the game, this group of German kids (probably about our age) stormed in and were singing and chanting and made it really, really fun. We found out that the only English words they knew were "Oh, shit" and "What the fuck?" Quality cursing, America. Way to spread that around the world. The game was really fun though and it was very depressing when Germany lost because the kids in the bar were so sad.

The game ended and we came home and I decided to blog. And that basically sums up my day.