Ten Day continued...

When we last left off I was about to head out to the alternative tour of Berlin. I did do that, and it was very cool. We saw a lot of street art, which was very cool. You could tell certain artists apart because they did specific things. One guy, for instance, always draws a girl called Little Lucy, and in every piece Lucy is killing her cat in some way or another. Another guy just draws this one cartoon fist, and another one just draws the number 6 all over the place for no reason anyone can tell.

The Berliners seem to be proud of their street art. The Berlin Wall is actually a street art gallery.

This one is from the East Side Gallery on the wall.














The evening after that tour we met up with some friends from school and hung out at their hostel. The next day was beautiful and we went to the zoo. Later on we tried to meet up with our friends again, but we couldn't find them, so we went to bed because we had to get up at 4am for our flight.

We got up bright (well, not really) and early the next day and left for Amsterdam. We got there, got settled in, walked around, found food, found Jarvis, and promptly took a nap. The getting up at four after walking around all day is very tiring. After our nap we wandered around the city for a while and then went to a pub for a drink and then went to bed.

On Thursday we went to this big park in up town. It was a beautiful day and there were tons of people in the park. Later on we met up with some kids from school and wandered around with them for a while and got dinner. After that we just went back to our hostel to hang out.

Friday morning was very hectic because we had only booked our hostel for two nights. But I was responsible and got up early when they start giving away beds and managed to get a bed. However, when I went back at check in time the bed had suddenly disappeared. The guy at the desk was very apologetic and called up the hostels other location and said he found us two beds over there. So Alex and I dragged all of our belongings across town to the other hostel. Once there we are told that the girl there had made a mistake and they only have one bed. But that is OK because they can pull out an extra mattress. As all of this is being sorted out, the girl gets a call from the guy at the first hostel saying he found the beds he had originally booked for us. At this point we were so tired we did not want to go all the way back, so we took the mattress. It was pretty ridiculous. Alexandra pointed out that the reason why weed is illegal in most places might simply be for convenience’s sake...

In that whole process we managed to completely lose all of our classmates who are in this city, so we're back down to just me and Alex. Today is our last full day of Ten Day. Tomorrow we flight back to Rome. It has been fun, but I'm ready to go back. Hostels are a little awkward and I have no clean clothes left.

Days 0 through 3 of 10 Day.

So, on Thursday we had classes and lunch on campus. After lunch I bought plane tickets for the third travel weekend to go to Ireland with Ann and Phil. After that I packed and called a cab. It turned out that to get to the airport there were two options: 1) Take the bus to the metro, the metro to Termini station, and the train to Fuimucino Airport. This costs 14,40. Or 2) take a cab, which costs 88 for 6-8 people. There were seven of us trying to get on this flight, and with the use of arithmetic we figured out that 88/7 is 12,50ish, which is less than 14,40. So that worked out well.

The flight was fine, and we had no problem finding Florian, our Austrian friend, at the Vienna airport. He drove me and Alex and our friend Devon, who was staying in the same hostel as us, to our hostel. After we got settled in we hung out with the UD boys who had been on our flight. We went to the bar in our hostel and had green beer because it was St Patrick’s day. When they closed we went around the corner to a restaurant/bar that was still opened. There was a man there who asked us about our trip and then wrote a poem for it. I took pictures with my Polaroid, which fascinated everyone there.

The next day was rainy and cold, but we set out anyway. We saw St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the Belvadere (palace/museum), and went to das Haus der Musik (a sound/music museum). It was fun. That night Florian picked me and Alex up from our hostel and we took the metro and tram to his dorm where we drank and chatted with his friends. Then two of his friends and we went to this club called Prater Dome. It is the biggest club in Vienna. It has three clubs inside it. One plays kind of country/ho-down type music, which was odd. One plays hip-hop, and the biggest one plays techno/house. That one is already the size of a really large club. It has a massive dance floor, seating and bars along the sides, and a balcony above. It was pretty cool.

On Saturday, Florian picked us up at 10am and took us sight-seeing. We saw the parliament building and a bunch of other things in Vienna. We got sausages at the train station and then went out to the huge Hapsburg palace that begins with the letter S… That was very cool. We took a tour. After that Florian took us to his farm. It is so pretty! His parents are adorable. His mother kept feeding us delicious food. We got to meet his niece and nephews who were super cute and loud. We also got to meet the cows and see them getting milked, which was awesome. We also saw the stills and such for the most (a kind of wine-like drink) and schnapps. We got to taste the schnapps. Florian said he was apricot, but we could not taste that at all. Apparently there is an art to schnapps tasting. Florian is taking a class about it. We went to Mass Saturday night. The church was beautiful and cold. It was very confusing because they sat and stood and knelt in weird places.

That night we went to this big 4H party in the country. Apparently there were around 10,000 people there, but I would have pegged it at more like 5,000. Either way, it was an awfully big party. It was a lot of 16-22 year old kids, with a smattering of old people. Everyone was very, very drunk. Also a lot of people were wearing lederhosen, so that was very funny. I had my Polaroid camera with me, and some drunk kid who looked about as hipstery as you can get saw me taking pictures. He asked if I could take his picture, he even offered to pay me for it. I took his picture, and not his money, and he got really excited. He had never seen such a think before. I was very proud to have taken this hipster’s first Polaroid.

On Sunday we went to the airport and came to Berlin, where we are now. Our hostel is lovely, and Berlin seems lovely too, from what we have seen. We had Vietnamese food for dinner, in order to have the true German experience.

In a little while, after we bother to get dressed, we will head out to the Alexanderplatz Starbucks to meet up with an alternative walking tour of the city. Apparently they will show us cool graffiti and bizarre shops and local art and such. It sounds like a lot of fun. At some point we will also go to the zoo, even though the polar bear died the other day.

Pictures

This is in Assisi.

This is from early in the semester. We are on the Via Appia Antigua. Im in the front of the group there.

Wine tasting from the first weekend. From left to right, Me, Patrick, Nicole, Andy, Alexandra.

Lunch in Assisi. That is Jarvis on the left.

This is Hermes holding baby Dionysus in Olympia.

Three of my classmates on the Areopagus (sp?) preforming part of the Eunemides (sp).

The arch leading onto the Olympic stadium in Olympia.

This is San Pietro.

Me on a bridge over the Tiber.

Tiber again.

My art teacher told me to go pose under the Lion's Gate because she thought it looked cool with my pink umbrella. This is at Mycenea.

The "cast" of our performance of The Bacchea. Delphi.

Delphi.

A church in Patras.

Olympia.

Delphi.

The view from the Ferry. Greece is so beautiful.

Bridge from the Peloponese (sp?) to the main land.

This is my friend Deandra performing in Delphi. She is holding the head of her son who she has just killed. But she thinks it's a goat.

The Acropolis in Athens. That's the Parthenon there.

Jon Polce, one of our awesome RAs.

Our class takes up a whole restaurant when we eat. This is in Athens.

Our play in Delphi.

View from the Agora of some hill in Athens.

The Parthenon.

The church of St Patrick in Bari, Italy.

Our play again.

These all same Themystolces. There are only three or four different handwrittings. It was the first rigged vote to banish Themystocles from Athens. Pretty cool.

Athens is not very pretty. But it is very cold.

On the acropolis.

Our men running in the Olympic stadium.

The theater of Dionysus in Delphi.

The temple of the oracle of Delphi.

Greece: day four

I am currently sitting in an internet cafe in Delphi, Greece. I can look to my left and see a breathtaking view of this awesome valley. This place is beautiful, but it is difficult to get used to this keyboard.
We took the bus from campus to Bari, Italy on Friday, took the ferry over night, and got to Partas (?), Greece on Saturday. From there we drove for two hours to Olympia, stayed there Saturday night, toured it Sunday (I ran a race in the antient Olymic stadium), then drove to Delphi via Partas. We got to Delphi last night and toured it this morning. It is amazing. I got to perform in part of The Bacchae (sp?) on the mountain where Dionysus is said to have a cave, so that was neat. I'm not sure where we're going tomorrow, but I think it is going to be Athens.
I can't write much because I only paid for half an hour. But Greece is amazingly pretty.

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.

The past few days a Roma

Ok, so I can't find my little cord thing for my camera so I can't upload pictures. I know it's somewhere in my room... I will find it soon. But in the meantime, I will catch you up on what I've been doing.
On Friday we had classes and then we went to the catacombs of St Sebastian. That was pretty cool, but I have seen the replicas in DC so many times that it didn't seem new to me. It was hard to grasp the fact that I was in the real place, where there were actually martyrs buried, and where Christians had hidden and prayed almost two thousand years ago. There are seven miles of tunnels and three levels. Above the tunnels Constantine built and church and put St Sebastian in it, and so it is today. The whole thing is on the old Via Appia, where so many famous people in history and religion have walked. That evening the school took us all out to eat at a ristorante on lake Albano. The food was delicious, lots of antipasta and then pizza and dessert. After that about 30 or 35 of us went to Saints and Sinners and missed the bus back (actually the bus was just really really late, as it turned out) and we all had to walk 4k back to campus. Oh well.
Saturday was the scavenger hunt. We were broken up into teams, the school helped us take the bus and metro into Roma, we all met up in the Piazza del Populo, and we set off in search of things like a pigeon, a nun, people kissing, and the house of Keats and Shelly, to name a few. Every picture had to include at least six members of the group and a sign that said "we were here" but in Italian. If we got 15 we got metro and bus tickets, if we got 25 we got the tickets and cap bar cards, and if we won we got a free dinner. We definitely did not win, but we got about 25. They haven't yet told us who got what, so we'll see.
After the scavenger hunt, Alexandra and I walked over to San Pietro and sat outside of a bar/caffe thing, wrote postcards, ate peanuts, and thought about how cool it was that we could see the beautiful dome of St Peters over the cars and buses and graffitied walls.
We made it back to campus in time to change into nicer clothes and go to the wine tasting at 8:00. I have to say, I've never seen my classmates looking so classy as we did all standing around with our wine and cheese in our nice clothes. The meal and wine were great. Are you seeing a theme here? Italy has really good food. The wine tasting, that Monseigneur put on for us btw, lasted two or three hours and included antipasta, three kinds of pasta for the main course, two kinds of tarts for dessert, and four different wines. We had one sparkling, one other white, and two reds. The white was my favorite, but we were all pretty split on which was the best. Let is suffice to say that they were all very good and far more expensive than I am able to afford.
Sunday was a day of rest for me and Alex. We read Phaedo, went to the grocery store, went to dinner, and then read Oedipus Rex with the class.
Today we had three ninety minute classes back to back. That was tough, but the classes were good. Alexandra and I went into the city with Spencer and Andy. We walked around and ended up losing track of/ditching/being ditched by the boys. We wandered, ran across the Trevi fountain, and then ended up somewhere... we don't really know where. On the way we found a really nice old bookstore which was lovely. We had dinner at a little place in some piazza somewhere and sat outside. It was nice. We missed out Monday night meeting, though, which was not very good, but these things happen.

Post Script, the above is what I wrote last night before the internet decided it did not like me anymore. Now it is Tuesday morning, I don't have class til 9:45 and I am going to do a little reading.

Campus and Albano

So the last couple days have been spent mostly on campus. Yesterday we had all five of our classes back to back in the Aula Magna (our big classroom). It was tiring. After classes Alex and I went to DEM once again. Later in the afternoon we had a meeting about student life. I wasn't feeling well and it seemed to go on forever. We spent the evening hanging out on campus. Spencer and I watched Kill Bill. It was a very uneventful evening.
Today we didn't have classes until the afternoon. This morning we had room inventory and then Alexandra and I have to go do permisso at the post office. Permisso is getting all checked in with immigration. We opted not to take the ride back to campus and wandered around Albano after we finished at the post office. There was an open-air market thing where we found an alarm clock, a thing with shelves to hang in the closet, and a laundry hamper. We found our bus stop after asking a very nice Romanian lady who took us to it and explained how to find the right bus. After we were sure we knew how to get home we went to a bar by the bus stop for lunch. In Italy bars are not places where you go to drink in the evenings, they sell food and other things. Sometimes they have convenience store type things, like packaged snacks and bottled soda and beer. A lot also have espresso. A few have lottery tickets. They are all quite random. I had pizza (which they fold together like a sandwhich) and Alex had some sort of breaded/fried fish and veggie pastry....
We must now go to dinner. They we are off to Saints and Sinners tonight.... Tomorrow we are going to the catacombs.