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| architecture of the vittoriano with colloseum behind |
- woke up at 7:30 and headed off to class with caryn... as usual, the trams were ridiculously crowded so we had to miss one before we could get on and were a couple minutes late for class, oh well
- hung out with Tobin Craig and the boys for about half an hour after class
- went to the Irish pub just off piazza dell'orologio with caryn, kari, david, brandon, joe, and dylan. it felt kind of lame to go to an english place in the middle of rome, but i'm getting sick of pasta and it was so wonderful to eat my first proper english meal in a year and a half! it made me so happy :) we also got super girly drinks, which was fun: caryn got a mud slide, kari got a cosmo, i got a prickly pear
- headed down to the typewriter/wedding cake (it's actually a monument to the first king of unified italy, called the vittoriano) the crazy thing about it is that it serves absolutely no purpose, it's just an enormous white monument... like, bigger than the white house. it reminds me of the ancient roman temples. our guide on wednesday taught us that Roman temples were built to honor the gods, but no one was allowed to enter them. Similarly, while there are parts of the vittoriano that hold all the flags of italy and it is possible to go to the top by an elevator, you can't actually get inside the majority of the massive white monument. it's crazy to imagine what the city would have been like full of similar temples
- traveled up to top of the vittoriano to look across the rooftops of rome... we had to get out our maps to orient ourselves. the two horse statues that sit on top of the vittoriano were even more impressive up close - they are huge!
- wandered back down towards the forum and took lots of people pictures with our group. the goal was to make it all the way down to the colloseum, but it was getting towards rain o'clock and the clouds were looking rather ominous so we headed back and decided to leave that to another week- grocery shopping and a reading siesta with caryn. after 30 pages of livy i stopped to make dinner for us, then i cleaned the stove (mama elli was out in full force). after another 30 pages of livy, it was time to go out!
- caryn, kari, david, dylan, brad, amanda, and i all wandered down our street to a series of cobbled piazzas by the river. there was people everywhere hanging out outside of all the different bars and cafes. in one of the bigger piazzas, there was a street performer whose antics were strangely funny. a few of us got "take away" drinks from a bar and wandered around soaking up the atmosphere, it was possibly the most perfect moment of the trip thus far. then we got gelato :)
- as soon as we got home i fell into bed and went to sleep, bracing myself for another early morning for class!
