Where I've Been

I have pictures from yesterday, as promised!

This was our assigned obelisk to find and report on. It's in a little park near the main train station, near the Baths of Diocletian (which I unfortunately don't have a very good picture of--I'll try to get a better one later). As far as obelisks go, it's quite small--only about 6 and a half meters high. It's been incorporated into a war memorial for the Italian soldiers killed at Dogali, in a war with Ethiopia in the late 1800s. All in all, an interesting project, a neat little site to visit, but the obelisk unfortunately was one of the more obscure ones, so our oral report was a little on the slim side--and we never did find out what the hieroglyphs said.

This was our second obelisk, where we just had to see it and get some sort of proof that we actually went there. Hence the picture of me and one of my teammates standing in front of it. It's not a great picture, but the obelisk is very tall, so it's hard to get a good shot of it while still keeping us in the picture. Now, if any of you are saying "hmm, that looks a little familiar..." I think the next picture will help you out with that.

Yep, the second obelisk we had to see was in Saint Peter's Square. It's an especially lovely place to just hang out and people watch, so we ate our lunch in between some of the columns around the outside. We watchecd the crowds of tourists go by, felt sorry for the people waiting in line to get into the basilica (I think the wait time was approximately 3 hours), and I fed the pigeons, as I have a tendency to do. We went up the street from the square a bit, found the San Pietro train stop, and hopped on to head back to the Centro to give our presentations. The rest of the night was a blur of reading historical sources, translating Latin, and doing Italian--and I'm not kidding about the blur, I had to check my schedule to make sure I didn't have a class last night that I was forgetting about.

Today was a purely academic day--I had Ancient City lectures from 9 to 11, lunch at 1, Latin from 2-3:30, and Italian from 4-5:30. Pretty much every minute that I wasn't in class, I was doing the homework I hadn't had time to finish the night before. I still can't believe I've only had three days of school here! Fortunately I have less homework tonight, as I got to experience actually falling asleep at my computer for the first time ever this afternoon, and I have no intentions of repeating the experience.

It rained this evening while I was in Italian, and I took my camera with me on my way to dinner to see if I could get a shot of the sunset from the roof after the rain--alas, dinner happens a little too early for sunset, and a little too late to be able to get the picture after dinner. However, that meant that I had my camera with me for dinner, so I had to get a picture of the delicious apple tart that we had for dessert so that I could brag as an example of the kind of food we're eating. They really do feed us outstandingly well here, saying that since it's such an intensive program, they have to make sure we have the energy to keep up! I'm sure at some point I'll do a post on Italian cuisine, as it's quite wonderful and not at all like the pseudo-Italian that you can find in the US.

Yum! Every person I've talked to about this program mentions how wonderful it is academically, what a great opportunity it is--but all of that pales in comparison to their glowing praise of the food served here. And they are absolutely right :)