Every New Beginning...

I don’t know if Blogs are meant to have endings, but I seem to find myself at one.

Here I am once more, 30,000 in the air, on the return path of my flight 112 days ago.  So, what did I do?

I survived.

I survived living in a different country with a different language and a very different culture.  I survived jet lag and traveling almost every other weekend.  I survived very different classes and professors with limited English vocabularies.  I survived a rumored earthquake that was supposed to level half of the city on May 11^th.  But I did a lot more than that.

I ate incredible food, half of which I still don’t know exactly what I was eating.  I saw amazing views, beautiful works of art, and miraculous architecture.  And I made some unbelievably great friends to share it all with.

I lived.

Last night was my dear friend and roommate Dorothy’s 21^st Birthday and our last night in Rome.  I woke up at 7:00am Friday morning and have been laughing, crying, and hugging ever since.  Apparently, sleep did not fit into our busy schedule for our last 24 hours.  We finished our exams, got dressed up, and had one last dinner in Trastevere.  There were countless toasts, a few tears, and summer and fall reunion planning.

It was an incredible semester.  Thank you to all of my family and friends from home who sent their love half way around the world.  Thank you to all of my readers, I hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing.  Thank you to all of my friends in Rome, you did the impossible and made the semester even better than I could ever imagine.  And, as always, thank you Mom and Dad for this incredible opportunity and your unconditional love and support.

Goodbye for now, my Italy.

Wrapping It Up

In six hours, I will be leaving Italia.

Since I can't deal with the emotional magnitude of that statement just quite yet, I am going to summarize what I've been doing for my last few weeks in Rome.

Way back in the beginning of the semester, I believe I said something about weekly blogging about onsite classes.  It turned out those blogs were few and far between.  Even though I took my last exam this afternoon, here is an update:

Art History

"If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it!" As the cheesy music T-Shirt slogan goes.  The last half of my on-site art history class dove into the world of Baroque.  Notable Sites: Il Gesu was the model for pretty much all of the churches after the 1500s.  The ceiling of Il Gesu was painted by Gaulli in the late 1500s and represents the merging of the art forms.  It's hard to tell where the architecture, sculpture, and painting start and stop.  The rest of the semester was filled with even more beautiful churches, incredible works of art, and an awkwardly dramatic documentary series on Carvagio and Bernini, one of those that has an art expert with a British accent narrating the timeline while semi-famous actors that are in a rut do dramatic walking scenes with very little actual acting.  Informative and slightly hilarious, but beautiful.

Sociology

So, it has become clear that my Sociology professor is...interesting.  After the Midterm, he told us he does not believe in Passports, he thinks anyone should be able to live and travel where they want, and he firmly argues there is no such thing as "preserved nature."

The second to last week of class, he took us to the Mouth of the Tiber river.  Literally.  We took a tram to a bus to a train all the way to the end, then we took a bus to the pier and walked to the very entrance of the river.  The lecture was only 20 minutes long before we had to start the trek back.



The week before that, he took us to meet his friends.  His friends are gypsies, most of them without papers, living in illegal housing on the outskirts of the city.  While it was fascinating to see how these people live, it was difficult to communicate.  I felt guilty because they made us lunch and everything.  "Hi, I'm really interested in why you had to leave your own country and come to Italy, but I'm just going to sit here and eat your food because you can't understand me. :\ Two hours after we left, there was a police raid of the camp.

Finally, my very last Rome activity, Vatican Museums Under the Stars.

While most visitors pack into the museums and spend hours being shuffled along by tour guides, I had the entire museum almost completely by myself, with galleries lit by candles and moonlight.

What an amazing way to end the semester!

A Weekend in Paradise (The Amalfi Coast) Day 3: Pompeii

Day 3: Pompeii

We woke up to the breakfast bell of 7Hostel on our last day in the beautiful Amalfi Coast.  After scrambling to pack and locating all of the key cards for check out, we grabbed a pastry and walked to the buses.  After an hour of playing I Spy, I'm Going on a Picnic, and other fun car-ride games from our childhood, we arrived in Pompeii.

There is not much to Pompei (The current Italian city).   The Bus2Alps guides pointed out a pizza place where we had lunch, and then we wandered around the piazza at the entrance to the ruins.  There were a few rows of tents where vendors were selling souvenirs.  We walked by one very Italian looking old woman who had a large display of coral necklaces.

I must have lingered because within seconds she was telling me about her jewelry and pushing a small photo of the Virgin Mary into my hand.  "Yes, you are so beautiful, let's find a necklace for your beautiful mother!" Well, mom would actually probably like one of these, I thought to myself.  She picked one out for me, we bargained the 40-euro price down to 20, and I handed her a 50-euro bill, the only thing I had on me.  Oops.  She looked at the bill, looked me and said, "I have just the necklace for you, you need a beautiful necklace too because you are so nice, so beautiful." Before I could blink, I was down to 15 euro and two coral necklaces.  Oh well. When in Rome, or, Pompeii. And they are very pretty necklaces.

In 79AD, Mount Vesuvius violently erupted, spewing poisonous gases into the air for 4 days.  When the volcano finally calmed, Pompeii, a port town at the base of the volcano, was deserted.  Most inhabitants had fled, but about 4,000 had remained and died of poisons.  The city was buried by landslides and earthquakes in the years that followed.

Since 1400, excavations have cleared about 3/5 of the city.  During one particular dig, an archeologist found a hollow space surrounding human bone.  He discovered the space was left by decayed flesh and by injecting plaster, he could make molds of the bodies of the victims.  These molds are so detailed, some even show the pained expressions on the victims faces from their final moments.

Our tour guide was Antonio, a 60-something Italian man who grew up in the area.  His tour was informative and thorough, and he made sure we understood his English.  We saw the markets, the forum, the baths, and the red light district, which was the aspect of the ruins that most of the sketchy street vendors seemed to focus on.


It was a beautiful, informative, and fun weekend.  I got home and saw "11 Days Left in Roma" on my computer.  I can't believe it's almost over, but I can't wait for my last few days in this incredible city with my amazing friends.  It's going to be epic!

See photos of the entire weekend HERE!