When in Rome...

...don't stay in a hotel that is forever outside of the city, because the public transportation stinks! We stayed out in the suburbs of Rome, which was a good idea in theory, but because the public transportation was so unreliable, it made getting around pretty difficult. In retrospect, though, it was probably for the best, considering we had a final during our week in Rome. It made it a lot easier to be motivated to study when we couldn't go anywhere else!

The few times we did get out, however, we saw SO much every time. One day we went to St. Peter's, the Vatican Museums, the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, Trajan's Forum, and the Monument to Victor Emmanuel! Needless to say, it was a crazy day. I think my favorite part was the Colosseum, although St. Peter's was up there. The Colosseum is just SO big and SO old...I couldn't get my mind around it. Standing there I had one of the moments I've had from time to time this semester where I can't believe I'm actually where I am, doing what I'm doing. I kept saying..."it really happened here - gladiators fought here, people died here! Right here!" It was just really unbelievable. Anyways, it just blew my mind how old everything is, and that it is all still there. St. Peter's was really great, too. We got there pretty early in the morning, so it was glowing in the early morning light and it was really beautiful. Then we got to go inside, and Michelangelo's Pieta is in there, which is one of my favorite pieces of art. We also got to see the Sistine Chapel, which was every bit as cool as I imagined it to be.

We spent a lot of time in Rome studying and taking tests, and when we weren't doing that we were trying to figure out the public transportation!

Florence

Florence is a great city! Our hotel was right at the base of the Duomo (Florence's famous cathedral). Every time I walked out the door I passed about 17 gelato shops within 3 minutes...I think I gave in to the temptation about 2-3 times a day on average! Anyways, most of our time in Florence was focused on art - some of the most famous art out of the Reniassance is housed in Florence.

However, we still managed to do lots of other stuff during our time in Florence, too. Our first full day there, a big group of us got up super early and walked to the train station and then got on a train to Cinque Terre, which is this region on the West coast of Italy made up of 5 little towns. There are trails and train tracks between each of the towns so you can travel between them. We got off the train at the first town, Riomaffiore, and walked to the next town, Manarola. The walk was along the coast on these incredible Mediterranean cliffs - it was SO beautiful! Also, between those two towns is the "Via dell' Amore" - the tunnel of love. All along the tunnle people write their names and messages to their loved ones. Everyone with a boyfriend or girlfriend was writing their names, so those of us who are single wrote our names with a blank spot underneath to be filled in at a later time. We called it the Westmont Singles Wall :). After the tunnel we took a train to the thir town, Cornglia, and had lunch. The guys left us to hike to the 4th town and go swimming, but they missed out on some incredible spaghetti with pesto! After we ate we split up some more and a couple of us took the train to the fourth town, Vernazza, which happened to be my favorite of the five. It was tiny and cute with a little harbor. We walked around the corner at the harbor, and there were our guy friends jumping off a huge rock into the ocean. In November. We sat there watching them and enjoying the sun for a while before we got on the train to go to the final town, Monterosso. There we sat on the beach for a while and ate gelato (for something new and different!). I can't really explain how serene and beautiful Cinque Terre was - it was a great day!

Along with lots of museums and churches, climbing to the top of the Duomo, and our day at Cinque Terre, we also go to celebrate Thanksgiving in Florence. Due to availability of the church, we didn't get to celebrate until the day after Thanksgiving, but it didn't really matter, because they don't have Thanksgiving in Italy, so we just pretended :). In the morning we had "Eurobowl '07" aka Thanksgiving morning football game. We all walked over to a little park and had a great football game. I didn't play because I had to leave early to go pick up some pies for our dinner, but I watched everyone and took pictures and enjoyed the pretty park we were in. Then I left with Barb (our professor's wife and our replacement mom for the semester) to go pick up pumpkin pies for dinner. After that, we met everyone at the church we had rented out for the night, and we started cooking! Somehow, between us all, we managed to cook an AMAZING dinner for 47 people. We had tons of turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, fruit salad, green beans, yams, rolls, cranberry bread, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, apple crisp with ice cream, hot chocolate, and hot apple cider...it was a great meal! It was a great day with our Europe family. We all ate around one (REALLY big) table and I was completely content. It was truly a time to remember just how blessed we are!

overall a great, gelato-filled week with my Europe Semester family :)

Venice

Hello from Colorado! Yes, its true - I am home. I'm unbelievably exhausted, and really jet lagged, but so happy to be home! I am sorry, once again, for the delay in updating, but finals took precedence, so here come all of the updates! I'm going to do my best to finish updating about the end of my trip in the next couple of days.

So anyway, Venice. Venice was really cool. Somewhere along the line someone had tole me that Venice was overrated, so I really wasn't expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Something about the canals and the old buildings and the winding passages has this incredible, old-European feel to it that I just found very endearing. I spent a lot of my time in Venice just wandering around the city (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident!)and finding more and more beautiful canals.

Our time in Venice was very artistically focused - we had a lot of classes, and we saw a lot of different churches and examples of Italian Gothic architecture. We got to see Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (a famous altarpiece from the Venetian Reniassance) which was absolutely incredible. We also saw a performance of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Its such a beautiful piece of music, and hearing it in a big old church with incredible acoustics was great. We ended up getting an unexpected free day in Venice because one of our full day excursions got cancelled, but the conditions for our free day was that we had to do something "reimbursible" (meaning something possessing some sort of educational value), so I went to a couple more art museums. One I went to had a whole room of Jackson Pollock paintings, which are so interesting to look at. I also went to an exhibit all about Leonardo da Vinci - someone took his drawings of machines and actually built them and they were all on display. The night of our free day, a small group of us went to see a performance of La Boheme. It ended up being in this tiny little modern theater, and it was possibly the worst thing I have ever seen! I mean, it was actually so bad that it was good, just by sheer entertainment value. I love performances like that (especially since we got reimbursed for it!)

Apart from academic and artistic excursions, we didn't do a whole lot in Venice. We did, however, go to a little island just off of Venice called Murano. Its famous for its glass blowing (the home of Venetian Glass). We toured the factory and then went shopping :).

Overall, Venice was just a great, stereotypical European experience. We had lots of sunny days, blue skies, and pizza :).

more to come soon...