Other People's Pictures Post

Because alliteration always aids in amusement. As promised, here are some photos that my fellow Centristi took and were kind enough to put up on Facebook for me to nab and share here. These photos exist thanks to (in no particular order) Lauren Matera, Brittany Fox, Mary-Claire O'Donnell, Maggie Kurkowski, Alex Olsman, Elliot Piros, Joe Mazzariello, Sarah Murphy, Will Roundy, and Alex Mina.

From very early in the semester--actually, our first day of classes, when they dragged us out for our first field trip to get our bearings in Rome around us. These nifty little fountains are all over Rome--the end of the faucet is constantly running (boo, waste of water), which makes it really easy to fill your water bottle (or dunk your head under...it was really hot for a while!), and then there's a small hole higher up on the pipe. As you can see me doing, you plug the faucet hole with your fingers, and water jets out nicely as a drinking fountain.

More pictures from Cerveteri! I told you I really liked this place--I was very disappointed that my camera died on me! Here's a shot from the top of a tumulus...yes, you could climb up on top of them. This field trip was like a gymnast's dream come true.

Every once in a while there were even steps for us to get up on top of things, rather than having to climb. Here are (from left), Maggie, Alex, and (I think) Sarah.

The mysterious tomb that we naturally had to go into and check out. You can see my explanation of this one in the Making Like Lara Croft post. As you can see, it's a fairly small hole!

But not too small to get into! Here I am coming out of the tomb--it was very exciting to see inside it. In case you're curious, I'm standing on the highest step into and out of the tomb--past that step, you just had to haul yourself out. And yes, I do have legs--I'm just wearing black shorts and the inside of the tomb is obviously dark.

The inside of one of the tombs--not the one we all crawled into, sadly, but it was hard to get photos in there since it was pretty much pitch black and flashlights only do so much. As you can see, the "beds" are carved straight into the tufa.

Me (and Isabel) inside another one of the tombs--several of them had many chambers, and looked like underground houses, which was of course the idea.

The little passageway I also talked about in the aforementioned post, where it went in for a bit, curved, then opened onto an approximately five foot drop. Very narrow!

One of the tombs we didn't try to go into--well, at least the people I was generally around didn't attempt it. There were a lot of them that were really overgrown like this.

Here is the Bridge to Disappointment--we were all ridiculously excited to find this little bridge (obviously modern, but also the only one in the necropolis that we found), but as it turns out it only leads to a very little tomb with nothing of any particular interest in it. Yes, that's me at the end--I thought you all would appreciate a few (mostly) candid shots of me every once in a while. At some point you might even get one with me facing the camera :)

Jumping into a few weeks later--here's a half-group picture of us on the boat to Capri. Going around the table clockwise from the top left is Will, Mark, Maggie, Alex, me, and Joe. The tops of the heads at the bottom of the picture belong to Kimia and Christine. This isn't actually the first chronological picture from this trip, but that's because I didn't want to just jump to this one, taken on the train to Naples:

In case you didn't already know--don't ever hold up a camera and say "hey Katie, smile!" It will end up looking a lot like this--I don't like unexpected pictures, and I'm very fast. Alex is behind me pointing at the camera because she was trying to get my attention. After we'd all laughed like loons about this picture (I can't believe Brittney kept it), she took another shot when I was actually expecting the picture to be taken.

...I never said I was going to smile for the picture!

Another photo of the little bird at Tiberius' Villa, which I nabbed because it's a much closer shot than I got. It was really cute!

The last group of pictures requires some explanation--last weekend Maggie, Alex, Mark, and I all went out to find dinner (we're on our own for food on the weekends, which is frustratingly expensive, and very depressing after a week of amazing meals at the Centro). We found this really old restaurant that turned out to be very gimmicky (the ye olde tymes Italian costumes on the waiters was kinda a big hint), and the food was so-so but not good, but I was out with friends so it was all good. But the reason I'm mentioning this here, is because there were paper placemats, and Maggie is an artist who always carries a pen with her. She started out doodling a little frustrated face (because the food was taking forever to get to us, and we needed to be back at a certain time), and Alex asked if she could make it a picture of herself--which she did, in about a minute, with a few additional scribbles. Mark (who told me he wants to do something interesting enough to end up on my blog--so hello Mark!) then came up with the idea that she should doodle each of us. She agreed, as long as we chose an expression that wasn't something as boringly normal as "happy". She doodled me first, with Mark suggesting the expression "seeing a bear with a shotgun coming around the corner". As I'm sure you can guess, it was a pretty hilarious expression:

Oh no! A bear with a shotgun is coming around the corner toward me!

Alex was taking pictures of each of the doodles and then of us, so she'd know which picture corresponded to which person. Naturally, I had to try to recreate this epic face that Maggie had drawn:

Oh no! A bear with a shotgun is coming around the corner toward me!

I don't have pictures of each of the individual faces, but I do have the completed masterpiece:

Up at the top is Alex, who is seeing a car driving into the Tibur (and Maggie obligingly doodled the car driving into the river to the left of her. Right below the river is a little doodle of the bear with the shotgun...which Maggie has informed us she's been drawing pretty constantly since that night). The bottom row is the frustrated Maggie, me in the middle, and on the right is Mark, who is on a train (he's a big fan of trains) going through the Alps, hence the gleeful expression. And he wears a lot of soccer shirts. Once Alex put the photos up on Facebook we all put them up as our profile pictures for a little while, which was great for "WTF?" responses from our friends and family. It was a fun night!