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Published: September 6th 2010
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Haha...
Italian drag queen. Be cool about it. Ciao!
I'm having a love affair with this city right now, just so everyone knows. I may never come home. 😊 We've had a great couple of days, though I'm completely exhausted right now. On Friday we stopped at a little cafe (or as we've learned they are often called, a bar. Bar's as we know them are always called pubs) for breakfast. It was suuuuper good! After that we had a 3 hour lesson in basic Italian to help get us through the weekend. It was really good stuff to learn and seemed easy at the time. I, of course, remember none of it. 😊 There are definate flash cards in my future. But after that we all took a bus closer to the center of Rome and met one of the profs for a really cool walking tour.
On the walking tour we got to see some really cool places. We started at Piazza Navona where the Four Rivers Fountain is. A Piazza is basically like a town square and they are kind of the places everything is centered around in Rome. Good places to go to find things you are looking for. After the Piazza we
Church
A gorgeous old church we visited on our walking tour. walked around and saw some really cool old churches as well as just some beautiful Italian buildings. Our next stop was the Pantheon, which was inSANE. It was massive and just so humbling to stand inside of. My understanding is that it used to be a temple for the Gods but now there's a lot more Christian influenced art and so forth inside, along with the tombs of King Hambert I, Queen Margherita Savoia and Raphael. SO cool! We also saw a couple more Piazzas and a church where apparently the first act of the opera Tosca takes place.
I think my favorite stop on the tour though was the Theatre of Pompey, the site of Caesar's assassination! It was just really cool to stand where something so historic happened. It’s also really interesting because all around the city the ruins are all down below the street level so you look down at them over a fence. Over the centuries Rome has built up on itself and I just think it’s so cool to think about the city beneath the city. After our tour a big group of us stopped at a place called PizzaRe and had the most
Walking Tour
Four Rivers Fountain. delicious Italian pizza. My favorite part was ordering water because if you want still water you have to ask for it with “no gas”. I giggle a little every time. 😊
Saturday we took a small tour of the area around our building so we would know where things are. After that the boys downstairs (Sam and Jordan made us a nice pasta dinner, complete with candles, wine and fresh bread. It was nice to sit down and have a meal with some of the people in our building. After dinner about 23 of us all went on a pub crawl near the Colosseum which was SO much fun! We went to 3 pubs and there were tasty new drinks, dancing and general merriment. 😊 It was a super fun way to get to know everyone a little better, and we all got to see how great our guys are about keeping tabs on and protecting us girls while we’re out and about. Gotta love those Johnnies!
Sunday we had a chill day at a beach on the Tyrrhenian Sea a little ways outside of Rome. It was kind of a haul to get there; we walked to
Walking Tour
The Italian senate building! the bus stop, took a bus to school, walked to Piazza Bologna to the metro (subway) station, road the metro to the train station, took a train and then walked to the beach. We were so hungry by the end we had to make a Burger King run. It was kind of cool to see the similarities and differences between BK here and back home. They had a lot of the same food, but they also had things like donuts and chicken wings, and it was all a lot less greasy then back home. It was all worth it when we got to the beach though. Can you say gorgeous! It was a perfect day for the beach. We all floated in the water and people watched (holy Speedos Batman…) and then napped in the warm sand and sun. It was super relaxing!
Today we started school and I’m super pumped about it. I’m so excited to learn about this amazing city on site. And it sounds like there will be lots of papers, which we all know I have an unhealthy fondness for, so it’ll be good. 😊 After class we went to an open air market at
Walking tour
Piazza by the Pantheon. Oh Italia, how I love you! Campo De Fiore which was so cool. We bought some fresh food and I got some super cute shoes and I even bartered something down to half of what the guy wanted for it. Woot! Tonight we made Jordan and Sam dinner to pay them back for Saturday. We had chicken gnocchi which was SO good! I’m going to have to get the recipe from Kelsey, because I think I’m dying from deliciousness right now. Yum! That’s about it for now. We’re planning on heading to Venice this weekend which I’m absolutely stoked for! I’ll try and keep you all updated on our many adventures as often as possible! I miss you all!
Buonanotte!
~Aimee
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Aimeehein22
Aimee
I would just like to take this moment to say the order of the pictures is not the order I put them in. I had no intention of starting this blog with the super classy drag queen pick. Just to clarify...