Week 2 in Roma!

After a pretty slow, reading-intensive weekend, it looks like this will be another busy week!

The past few nights have been fairly adventuresome, more often than not. Rome is just really cool at night, and we've been going on night-time gelato runs a lot recently. :) There is a place near the Pantheon that has the best gelato, AND you get three flavors, AND fresh whipped cream on top of it. My favorites so far are pine nut and dark chocolate. Mmmm!

The good thing about getting gelato at night is that you sometimes get lost and stumble upon really cool places, like this gorgeous view of St Peters at night!
Also, the street performers have been exceptionally good lately! Mariachi bands, mimes, opera singers, magicians, live statues, it's all here.

On Sunday most of the group went to the Porta Porgese flea market across the river. It was quite an adventure! It seemed to go on forever.. where we entered the market, it was mostly touristy, street vendor stuff...knockoff handbags, cheap jewelry, souveniers, etc. There was also a ton of cheap clothing just stacked in huge piles on tables, usually everything was only 1 euro but most of it was pretty awful thrift store stuff. Also, lots of granny underwear, which was...disturbing. I got a nice skirt for 3 euro though, hooray! Didn't have much patience to rifle around those piles for too long.. As we got further into the market, it turned into more of what I'd been expecting from the flea market: lots of completely random antique stuff, there were chandeliers, old furniture, silver jewelry, little antique toys and knick-knacks, and all kinds of cool stuff. I got a good chunk of gift-shopping taken care of there :) Here's a chandelier place:


Yesterday we all went to the Vatican Museums and Lisa gave us a great tour (she actually used to be a tour guide there so she knows all sorts of cool facts about the art there!) They have a great collection of art, from medieval to modern, including paintings, sculptures, tapestries, frescos, etc. The Renaissance and Baroque collections in particularly were amazing! I saw quite a few paintings that I recognized from Art History...it was so cool seeing them in real life!! When I saw Raphael's School of Athens, I couldn't stop grinning and bouncing around for a while, haha. And of course, there was the Sistine Chapel! So, so amazing!

SCHOOL OF ATHENS!!

Raphael's AssumptionHall of maps!

That being said...parts of the experience (except the art) were a bit unpleasant. The bus ride was hot and crowded, the museum was packed the entire way through with sweaty, smelly groups, and all the museum staff were really impatient and snippy. And apparently we weren't supposed to talk at ALL in the Sistine Chapel, but I forgot (!) and asked Lisa a question about the Last Judgement pretty loudly, and got shushed by the guards and a bunch of the other people there. Oops :/ So, seeing everything was totally worthwhile, but it was a relief to finally get out of there too. Here I am outside St Peters:

And today was quite busy also! We had Mona's class from 9:30 to 3-ish (although that time did include a couple of food and coffee breaks, and the movie The Merchant of Venice :)
(Coffee breaks generally mean delicious and beautiful cappuccinos from assorted nearby cafes)..
Then Lisa's class at 4 pm, where we learned more about the Farnese family and old popes and all that, and then we headed over to Castel San Angelo for Peter's presentation. It is across the river, and we were standing on the bridge for a while while he talked about the castle's history and stuff.

It was SO HOT AND MUGGY, and everyone was sweating like crazy just standing there in the sun. But in the distance, down the river, there were these wonderfully dark storm clouds...

Angel against the darkening sky....

They kept getting closer and closer til they FINALLY covered the sun, and then it got all cool and windy, and was thunder and lightning-ing like crazy...then we went into the castle, walked around for a while, past underground dungeon prisons, into the papal apartments, and UP to the top, and right when we got up there it started pouring! It was SO cool. Up at the top it was quite windy, and add that to extremely close lightning, deafening thunderclaps, and being on top of a freakin CASTLE and looking out over all of Rome, and you get a pretty amazing moment!

We ran around in the pouring rain taking photos and then dashed down various staircases and corridors trying to find a quick way out. While on the way out 4 of us happened upon this bust that looked JUST like Voldemort!!

Yikes!!After that we went back to the Campo area for our wine tasting at 6 pm! It was still pouring and none of us had umbrellas (because it had been so hot earlier) so by the time we got to the wine shop we were all absolutely soaking wet. Massimo (the owner of the wine shop) was cool with it though. He had set up 3 wine glasses for each of us and set out baskets of bread at all the tables. It was really nice. As the rest of our group straggled in, dripping with rain, he started telling us about the three varieties of wine we were tasting, how to gauge its alcohol content, color, smell, etc. It was all very interesting...I have trouble with the smell, though; it all pretty much smells like wine to me!

Anyway, I am definitely liking wine more now--when I first got here I could barely swallow a tiny sip without gagging and now I actually like it. And the wine tasting was supposed to cost 14 euro but ended up being free, so I bought a nice 15 euro wine with that money instead. Yay! It's going to be weird going back to the US and not being able to buy my own wine anymore, haha..

Alright, time to work on my Merchant of Venice presentation! YES!