Beach, Aperitivo, Food!

A brief recap of the week! (minus the 4th of July)

We had a fun girl's night last Thursday! The Campo apartment and the other girls apartment met up for an aperitivo across the river. This basically means you buy a cocktail and then you get to go to an all you can eat appetizer buffet. They had some tasty food and for 8 euro it was a pretty good deal (even though we did have to eat it outside on a dirty staircase :)
After that we wandered around Rome for a while, met up with some of the guys, and wandered some more. Some of the wandering included checking out a nightly carnival-type-thing by the Tiber river. There were lots of restaurants, bars, and carnival games, and little lights strung across the walkways. It would be a good place for a romantic dinner, if you didn't mind eating right next to one of the smelliest most polluted rivers ever!

There were also cool food items on display, such as entire dead, glazed pigs holding apples in their mouths, and this watermelon Colosseum..

The river looks pretty from this view, but if you pointed the camera straight down you would see a bunch of trash, including tires, milk gallons, and other assorted disgusting-ness swirling around in the water below. Yuck!

Sperlonga!

On Sunday, we took the train to Sperlonga, a gorgeous beach about an hour away from Rome. It was so much fun! We caught the train bright and early at Termini station and headed out of Rome for the first time since arriving. I enjoyed getting out of the city and seeing more of Italy. The train ride took us through lots of farmland, hills, and little Italian towns with orange tile-roof houses stacked and built into hilltops. It was lovely. My midterm was the next day, so I TRIED to study on the train, but the view outside was just too distracting!

Arriving at the beach

The town of Sperlonga, up on a hill!

Being at the beach was so relaxing. We spent the entire day there, either laying on towels in the sand or swimming in the sea. :) Mona let us borrow a volleyball so we tossed it around in the water for a while. The water was unbelievably clear and cool but not too cold. It was wonderful! Basically...floating on your back in the Mediterranean, watching clouds drift toward the mountains, letting the waves gently push and pull you closer, further, and not having a care in the world for just one afternoon = the best thing ever.

However, we all paid dearly for it with massive, red, painful sunburns (some of us, anyway..)

the waves...they gradually got more intense as the afternoon went on!

Jump!!

And then it was back to reality (which luckily just meant 'back to Rome') to study study study for Mona's test! It was pretty much an hour and a half of solid writing, but not too bad.

On Monday night we had a cooking class from one of Mona's friends who cooks in Rome for several of the embassies. We all learned some good techniques for preparing food, and the best places to buy ingredients around here.. He showed us how to prepare the food, and then we all got to eat it! So now I have a couple of tasty Italian recipes I'll have to try out when I get back home. ;)

I'm in Florence right now, so I'll probably write about that in a couple days, after returning to Rome!