Sorry it has been so long

The internet here sucks and I'm always busy, so it has been tough to blog. But here's what's been going on for the last couple weeks.
The weekend before last the school took us to Assisi and to Subiaco. We got on the bus early Friday morning and drove through the country and up some beautiful mountains to Subiaco. This is where St Benedict lived in a cave for three years. There is a monetary built into the mountain over the cave. The view is beautiful and we got to tour the monetary and the cave. After that we went to lunch in a restaurant in Subiaco and had three courses of pasta, which was just the beginning of the massive amounts of pasta we were to consume that weekend.
After Subiaco we got back into the bus and drove to Assisi. Assisi is possibly the most peaceful and beautiful place I have ever been. It is the off season, so the first night all the students wandered the streets and we were the only ones there. We had dinner at the hotel and had two more courses of pasta. On Saturday we got up early, had breakfast, and went to the Basilica of St Francis. We had five mini lectures, one from each of our professors, in the basement classroom of the church. They each talked about the importants of St Francis and Assisi. Then we toured the basilica, which was lovely. After that, Alexandra and I wandered around the town and did a little shopping. We skipped lunch and just had pizza, which was good because apparently lunch was just more pasta. After dinner that evening Monsignor did a wine tasting for all of us at the hotel. It was lovely, but the wines were all reds and I didn't like them as much as the last wine tasting. On Sunday we got up for an optional tour of the basilica of St Clare and San Dominano, the church which Francis lived for a while. It is a long walk down the mountain to see it, and an even longer walk back, but the church was lovely and the view was beautiful. After that we had lunch, pasta again, and then piled back into the buses. We stopped about 15 minutes out of Assisi to see the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, or something like that, which is built on top of the portciuncala, where Francis first had a vision of Christ speaking to him from the cross. After that we got back on the buses and went back to campus to do some homework.

Last weekend Alexandra, Candice (our roommate), Andy, Spencer, Jarvis, and I went to Naples. It was a spur of the moment idea, but Andy found a hostel and train tickets, I booked them, and we headed off. We were a fairly difficult group to keep together. Trying to move around with a total of six 19-21 year olds is very challenging, especially when they all want to go off and do their own thing. So the weekend was a little stressful, but it was fun. Our hostel was nice and was south of downtown Naples, in a really nice little area. We got there Friday night so we couldn't do much then, but Saturday morning we wandered down our street because there was some sort of an outdoor market. We had a lot of fun looking around and talking to people. We were the only Americans around, so people wanted to talk to us and ask us questions. That afternoon we went downtown, and that was scary. Naples is like the worst part of any city I've seen, but scarier. Apparently there was a garbage strike going on, so that contributed to the problem. But eventually we found pizza and chatted with a couple people, so it worked out fine. We didn't stay downtown for long, we went back to the part of town we felt comfortable with. We met about 6 little boys (9-12 yrs old) who were playing soccer in the ally next to our hostel, so we played with them. That was a lot of fun. The next day I went to Mass and then we kind of just hung around and went to the train station. We got back to Rome, and ran into about 30 of our classmates at the Anagnina bus station, all coming back from different places around Europe.
I missed classes the day after Naples because I was sick, but the rest of the week was fine. We had been planning on going to Austria (me, Alex, and Spencer) but then somehow we suddenly didn't have plane tickets. I don't know how that happened. But I was glad because I had so much homework and that just sounded so stressful. So we just stayed in Rome. On Friday we went to go find this pub that Phil had said we should go to, but we never found it. We went to the Fiddler’s Elbow instead. It is apparently the first Irish pub in Rome. I have yet to see an Italian pub, they are all either Irish or American. We ended up staying too late to make it to Anagnina by the 11:15 bus, but we found a cab, so that all worked out.
Yesterday (Saturday), Alex and Andy and I spent all day in Rome wandering around. We got off at the Barbarini stop, which is near the Trevi fountain, and walked all the way down to the Via Victorio Emmanuele II, walked along that until we hit the Tiber, walked north along the Tiber until we got to the Piazza del Populo, where we watched the Michael Jackson impersonator, and then walked to the Spanish steps to meet our friends at 7. We got to the steps too early, though, so Andy made us walk to the top of the steps to watch the sun set over Rome. It was very lovely.
Once we'd met up with our friends we tried to find this club which is apparently a Catholic club in a church somewhere. We circumnavigated the church and could not find it, so we went to The Drunken Ship, which is a very American pub (it has a beer pong table), and hung out there. There were a lot of Americans there to chat with, so that was fun. We always have to leave on the early side to catch the bus, so we were not there long, but we did actually manage to catch the bus back to school.
Today I have to write a Lit Trad paper on Antigone and do a bunch of other stuff. We leave for ten days in Greece next Friday!

I'm still having trouble with the camera, but I will keep working on it and try to get pictures up before Greece.