So, I meant to post my last blog last night but our internet decided to die right as I clicked "publish" so it was basically an epic failure. I had to wait until this morning when we had internet again.
Life is so disconnected without the internet. I missed it.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
My sun hat has finally made an appearance!
Today, I swam in the Mediterranean. As I have been told, my life is epic.
But, let's backtrack to yesterday so I can fill you all in on the epic-ness. Friday started off slowly (cappuccino, anyone?) with the knowledge that we'd be having TWO art history classes, instead of just one. In the morning, we finished up our discussion of
Ancient Rome with a trip to Trajan's column/forum/market which we had seen a few days before. Trajan's market, still mostly intact, was the world's first shopping mall! It's basically a massive brick building, multiple stories in height, with about 80 bazillion shops inside. Way to go, Trajan. You were kind of fantastic.
After that, we trekked back over to the Colosseum to see the Arch of Constantine. Basically, Constantine stole a bunch of cool stuff Trajan and Hadrian and Augustus made, scratched out their faces, and put his in. This seems completely unnecessary but hey, he was the emperor so whatever he did was totally fine. I want to be an emperor! Anyways, this took a few hours of the morning so we went back to the Campo for lunch (pizza today) and hung out there until our next class. I learned that tetris IS NOT THAT COOL waiting around for class to start.
For art history lesson number two, we just skipped forward in time and started talking about popes. Emperors are way cooler than popes. They have wars and statues of themselves and are super cool while popes (back in the day) had relations with small boys and hired all their family members. I would much rather be an emperor than a pope.
Regardless, there is a super cool store by the Pantheon that sells pope clothes!
Well, at least they sell all the clothes that high-up important religious people wear. Except apparently you can't go in there if you're not a high-up important religious person and I really don't fit those specifications. I might have already mentioned this, but it's still cool.
Anyways, back to class! We learned about popes and their crazy Latin inscriptions on everything saying how fantastic and amazing they are. And how they just really liked art. Enter Michelangelo. We walked another very long distance to the church San Pietro in Vincoli, or Saint Peter in Chains. They have the chains that were supposedly used to bind him in prison at the church and an entire set of matched columns stolen from Ancient Roman architecture. It's a pretty cool church overall but most importantly, they have Michelangelo's Moses, a piece considered by many to be his best work. And Freud really liked it, too, even though he was crazy. He psychoanalyzed the statue. Personally, this seems like a waste of time, but I think Freud really liked wasting time, so it's alright. It's a cool sculpture and you can definitely see that Michelangelo had skills.
Then we wandered back across Rome (with a class gelato stop, obviously necessary, where I got NUTELLA GELATO. Why this had yet to enter my life, I don't know.) to see Michelangelo's suckiest sculpture that's still 12000 times better than I could make. We saw his sculpture of the Risen Christ, ridiculed for its proportions and large butt. But, like I said, it's way better than I could do and when you look at it from the "right
" direction, it looks totally legit! So those critics should probably just be quiet and less jealous that they aren't as cool as Michelangelo.
We didn't get home from these escapades until about 6 and then I had to work on my paper and then I tried to blog but couldn't think of much to say. So I skipped that and left it for today and went out and enjoyed our Roma Friday night.
I woke up Saturday morning (this morning) to our sixth day of class this week. After grabbing some fruit at the market (7 nectarines and an apple for like 2 or 3 euros.... legit), we went to our cafe and found out the Brazilian cappuccino maker is actually a student here in Italy studying economics. Hopefully they'll start to give us discounts soon since we are basically all friends now. After meeting up with the rest of the group, we took the train to Ostia Antica, the ruins of an ancient port town. It's still very intact and it's completely fantastic because you can TOUCH everything! You can climb up all the steps of the ruins of the buildings! You can climb on the buildings! We even took a sketchy staircase down below the ruins of the bathhouses and explored the underground passageways. It's really, really cool. And not many people know about Ostia so it's not crowded at all and we could literally just run around the ruins. It was a good class.
After class, we hopped the train again and went to the beach! It seems like it's the first free time we've had since we've been here. Some of the sand was black and I might have burned off the soles of my feet but it was completely worth it since I go
t to swim in the Mediterranean! And I got to wear my sun hat! And I have tan lines, which is pretty impressive. I'm starting to get freckles on my hands from all this sun! (This is big news for me--when I was in first grade, this horrible person told me I was an alien because I didn't have freckles and I started crying because everyone else had freckles and I just might have believed him. BUT Rome has given me enough vitamin D to bring out a few! SUCCESS!)
A few hours of sun later and a train ride back, we were home in our apartment, which is having some strange issues today. The water from our kitchen is backing up in to one of our bathrooms and we're not really sure why. It's not like we've put anything mysterious into the kitchen sink. But if you run the water in the kitchen, you see it gurgle up into the shower and then it gets all over the floor. Calling our landlord Enzo did not solve the problem, either, because this is Italy and they don't have emergency plumbers. Well, I'm not sure if they have those anywhere, but the moral of the story is that it's not going to be fixed until Monday. So basically we're just going to avoid the kitchen this weekend.
My roommates and I went out to dinner for the first time since we've been here because of our mysterious plumbing problems and it was delicious! We did the whole Italian courses thing and even got dessert (in my case, panna cotta with chocolate sauce, also delicious) and spent like two hours at the restaurant but it's all okay! Why? Because WE GET TO SLEEP IN TOMORROW. This is our first day of having nothing planned! I'm actually very excited. But, we have plenty of homework to keep us busy so I'm not sure how "free" of a day it will be. Example: I have to read Trickster's Travels, an incredibly slow book with entirely too many names to keep straight and a completely unnecessary amount of "maybes" and "perhapses" so you just can't keep anything straight, actually. Oh well! For now, I'm not going to think about that and will just enjoy the fact that I can sleep in past 7:40. Which is fantastic. Also, it will be a good thing to breathe before next week which is even more packed than this one.
Get excited world, I should have some epic blogs for to read in the near future!
But, let's backtrack to yesterday so I can fill you all in on the epic-ness. Friday started off slowly (cappuccino, anyone?) with the knowledge that we'd be having TWO art history classes, instead of just one. In the morning, we finished up our discussion of
Ancient Rome with a trip to Trajan's column/forum/market which we had seen a few days before. Trajan's market, still mostly intact, was the world's first shopping mall! It's basically a massive brick building, multiple stories in height, with about 80 bazillion shops inside. Way to go, Trajan. You were kind of fantastic.After that, we trekked back over to the Colosseum to see the Arch of Constantine. Basically, Constantine stole a bunch of cool stuff Trajan and Hadrian and Augustus made, scratched out their faces, and put his in. This seems completely unnecessary but hey, he was the emperor so whatever he did was totally fine. I want to be an emperor! Anyways, this took a few hours of the morning so we went back to the Campo for lunch (pizza today) and hung out there until our next class. I learned that tetris IS NOT THAT COOL waiting around for class to start.
For art history lesson number two, we just skipped forward in time and started talking about popes. Emperors are way cooler than popes. They have wars and statues of themselves and are super cool while popes (back in the day) had relations with small boys and hired all their family members. I would much rather be an emperor than a pope.
Regardless, there is a super cool store by the Pantheon that sells pope clothes!
Well, at least they sell all the clothes that high-up important religious people wear. Except apparently you can't go in there if you're not a high-up important religious person and I really don't fit those specifications. I might have already mentioned this, but it's still cool.Anyways, back to class! We learned about popes and their crazy Latin inscriptions on everything saying how fantastic and amazing they are. And how they just really liked art. Enter Michelangelo. We walked another very long distance to the church San Pietro in Vincoli, or Saint Peter in Chains. They have the chains that were supposedly used to bind him in prison at the church and an entire set of matched columns stolen from Ancient Roman architecture. It's a pretty cool church overall but most importantly, they have Michelangelo's Moses, a piece considered by many to be his best work. And Freud really liked it, too, even though he was crazy. He psychoanalyzed the statue. Personally, this seems like a waste of time, but I think Freud really liked wasting time, so it's alright. It's a cool sculpture and you can definitely see that Michelangelo had skills.
Then we wandered back across Rome (with a class gelato stop, obviously necessary, where I got NUTELLA GELATO. Why this had yet to enter my life, I don't know.) to see Michelangelo's suckiest sculpture that's still 12000 times better than I could make. We saw his sculpture of the Risen Christ, ridiculed for its proportions and large butt. But, like I said, it's way better than I could do and when you look at it from the "right
" direction, it looks totally legit! So those critics should probably just be quiet and less jealous that they aren't as cool as Michelangelo.We didn't get home from these escapades until about 6 and then I had to work on my paper and then I tried to blog but couldn't think of much to say. So I skipped that and left it for today and went out and enjoyed our Roma Friday night.
I woke up Saturday morning (this morning) to our sixth day of class this week. After grabbing some fruit at the market (7 nectarines and an apple for like 2 or 3 euros.... legit), we went to our cafe and found out the Brazilian cappuccino maker is actually a student here in Italy studying economics. Hopefully they'll start to give us discounts soon since we are basically all friends now. After meeting up with the rest of the group, we took the train to Ostia Antica, the ruins of an ancient port town. It's still very intact and it's completely fantastic because you can TOUCH everything! You can climb up all the steps of the ruins of the buildings! You can climb on the buildings! We even took a sketchy staircase down below the ruins of the bathhouses and explored the underground passageways. It's really, really cool. And not many people know about Ostia so it's not crowded at all and we could literally just run around the ruins. It was a good class.
After class, we hopped the train again and went to the beach! It seems like it's the first free time we've had since we've been here. Some of the sand was black and I might have burned off the soles of my feet but it was completely worth it since I go
t to swim in the Mediterranean! And I got to wear my sun hat! And I have tan lines, which is pretty impressive. I'm starting to get freckles on my hands from all this sun! (This is big news for me--when I was in first grade, this horrible person told me I was an alien because I didn't have freckles and I started crying because everyone else had freckles and I just might have believed him. BUT Rome has given me enough vitamin D to bring out a few! SUCCESS!)A few hours of sun later and a train ride back, we were home in our apartment, which is having some strange issues today. The water from our kitchen is backing up in to one of our bathrooms and we're not really sure why. It's not like we've put anything mysterious into the kitchen sink. But if you run the water in the kitchen, you see it gurgle up into the shower and then it gets all over the floor. Calling our landlord Enzo did not solve the problem, either, because this is Italy and they don't have emergency plumbers. Well, I'm not sure if they have those anywhere, but the moral of the story is that it's not going to be fixed until Monday. So basically we're just going to avoid the kitchen this weekend.
My roommates and I went out to dinner for the first time since we've been here because of our mysterious plumbing problems and it was delicious! We did the whole Italian courses thing and even got dessert (in my case, panna cotta with chocolate sauce, also delicious) and spent like two hours at the restaurant but it's all okay! Why? Because WE GET TO SLEEP IN TOMORROW. This is our first day of having nothing planned! I'm actually very excited. But, we have plenty of homework to keep us busy so I'm not sure how "free" of a day it will be. Example: I have to read Trickster's Travels, an incredibly slow book with entirely too many names to keep straight and a completely unnecessary amount of "maybes" and "perhapses" so you just can't keep anything straight, actually. Oh well! For now, I'm not going to think about that and will just enjoy the fact that I can sleep in past 7:40. Which is fantastic. Also, it will be a good thing to breathe before next week which is even more packed than this one.
Get excited world, I should have some epic blogs for to read in the near future!
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