Posts by Berck

I just figured out how to switch a French keyboard to an English one, which works just fine as long as I don’t look down, which I don’t do anyway…

This is necessary because, unlike an Italian keyboard which merely has the symbols in strange places, a French keyboard has all the letters in the wrong place. I have no idea where the french keyboard layout came from, but it seems even less intuitive than Qwerty, which I never thought possible.

So, now, I suppose, I can actually compose something. It sucks, because I just spent 45 minutes reading e-mail and composing a few sentences to you guys on the French keyboard before Robin was nice enough to come over and tell me that some of the computers have switchable keyboards. The computer I was at didn’t.

Since I’m using a French keyboard, I suppose it you’ve gathered by now that I’m in France. Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they used French keyboards in Tunisia, and I could be writing from there.

The possibility of my sending email from Tunisia is not necessarily as far fetched as it may sound. I spent our 5-day break in Sardenia, and I’ve not gotten to a keyboard to write you guys about it. I went by myself to Sardegna, and discovered that I was quite lonely all by myself in a place where NO ONE spoke ANY English, and there weren’t even any fellow travelers. It seems that most Sardenian tourists are German, and they only travel in July-Aug. At the end of March, I was the only tourist I came across. (Even if calling myself a tourist sends chills down my spine…) Anyway, I was traveling by myself in Sardegna, and got quite lonely, and began thinking that my plan of heading to Sicily and then Tunisia all by myself for 10day break was stupid. I tried to think of other places to go that I wouldn’t later travel to with a Eurail pass, thus defeating the purpose of waiting to buy a pass until after the semester.

I was running out of options when, on the night before break, I tagged along with other UD students to The Old Pub across the street for some beer. This was exciting for some, because the Old Pub, a three minutes walk from campus, had closed shortly after our arrival in Due Santi.

(Random note, I’m hurried, and quite annoyed this e-mail is of inferior quality as compared to previous e-mails you’ve gotten from me. Sorry.)

So, I was sitting next to Robin Kniskern who, though she’s not a smoker, asked me for a light. I carry around a lighter, even though I don’t smoke. This has something to do with the fact I really like to be able to make fire at will. I lit her cigarette (is that spelled right?) and informed her she was going to hell for smoking. This is a fun thing to tell the average UD student, because they occasionally believe me. “If I knew WHERE I was going it would be much better,” she muttered. “You don’t know where you’re going for ten day?” I asked in astonishment. “Nope.” I was shocked. Every UD student has been planning since arrival in Rome, or before, where he would go on our ten day vacation in early April. Except me. I figured I’d figure it out even though I still hadn’t a clue, and the stein of not-so-good but really cheap Italian beer wasn’t helping any. So, I found myself quite surprised that Robin didn’t know either. “I HAD plans until yesterday,” she said, which made things make a bit more sense. The people she was traveling with had plans to stay with friends who didn’t have enough room for her. “Want to go to Tunisia with me?” I inquired with little aspiration toward a positive answer on her part.
“What’s in Tunisia?” she asked.
“Carthage.”
“Yeah, what else?”
“I dunno, you wanna find out?”
“Maybe, I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

I was astonished. _I_ might have someone to travel with? Wow. What a thought. The night progressed with much merriment which progressed with the very cheap and increasingly enjoyable Italian beer. (By cheap, I mean a litre for $5. Which is, well, cheap. Especially for Europe.)

The morning found much excitement and hustling and bustling of people preparing to go places. I found, in my mail box, a little slip of paper with some of the most exciting words I’d seen all semester. “You have a package in the office, pay �4.000 to pick it up.” The package contained a pair of black army pants and some socks my mommy sent me, just in time to head out for ten day, perfect timing. This was good, because it was a bit chilly to be running about campus in my bathing suit, which is basically my only choice when I decide to wash my two pairs of pants. I didn’t intentionally take a bathing suit to Europe, it happened quite by accident, but I’m glad I did, because otherwise I’d be doing laundry in my boxers, which might upset the campus a bit. They tend to get worried enough about my bathing suit.

I went to lunch, still in my bathing suit, and downed the compulsory pasta and potatoes when Robin showed up at my table. “Okay, fine, I’ll go,” she says. “Really?” “Yup.” We decided that we’d be ready in an hour or so to head to the train station. I retrieved my laundry from the dryer which is as lazy as everything else Italian and packed them in my bag still damp. I closed the shutters, tossed my stolen cafeteria items into the dorm lounge in case they did room inspection, and locked the door.

Robin and I then checked the time table for the Ferry from Trapani (Sicily) to Tunis. In 1999, they left and returned on Mondays only. Which sucked, because it was Thursday, and we had to be back not on the next Monday, but the Monday ten days following. We were unsure about additional ferries, but decided to head to Sicily, and find out there.

While waiting for the bus to Rome, the first of which didn’t stop, someone mentioned that I’d locked my roommate out of the room. To begin with, he should have his key. In addition, I thought he was on his way to wherever. Regardless, no one with a master key could be located, and so I had to let him in. Sure enough, as I start walking back toward campus, the bus pulls up. “Meet you in Termini?” I ask Robin. “At the McDonald’s. Downstairs.” There are three McDonald’s in Termini, quite disgusting really. I let my roommate in, caught the next bus to Termini, and found Robin standing in line at McDonald’s. By this point, it’s at least 6 in the evening. Robin has a Eurail pass, which means she doesn’t need tickets, but still has to get reservations for trains with compulsory reservations. Turns out the train from Rome to Palermo, Sicily was one such train. No problem, we take a number, and talk to a ticket person. Problem. You have to make reservations 5 hours in advance in Italy. And the train leaves at 8pm, in less than two. So, not wanting to spend another night at campus, we think of other options. We tried renting a car, but they won’t rent to anyone under 21. Robin just turned 20, and I’m 19. So, for the hell of it, we decided just to head north. I bought an overnight train ticket for Milan.

It’s midnight in Paris, and the metro stops running at 0030, so I’ve got head back to the hostel. More to follow. Sorry for the rushed composition.

I’m headed to Luxembourg city tomorrow morning, I’ll send more later…

Ciao!

Nothing too exciting happened in Athens that I haven’t mentioned. From Athens, we headed to Nafplion, a small beach town. Here many UD’ers felt compelled to swim in the Aegean regardless of the fact that the water was quite cold. I happen to know what cold water feels like, and wasn’t persuaded to jump in just because it was Greece. (I didn’t stick more than my feet in Lake Superior either when I was there this summer.) We were all warned upon entering Nafplion that the rocky ocean bottom was covered in Sea Urchins… This didn’t stop at least 5 swimmers from stepping on them, which led to Joe Weinpel, the student life coordinator, spending the better part of an evening and night with a needle, a magnifying glass, and my flashlight with me holding it. Two of the victims were my roomates, so I had the choice of trying to sleep with the sounds of “YOW!” as Joe poked around with his needle, or assist by holding the flashlight. In addition, another girl got out of the water, said something about the fact that she was freezing, and proceeded to pass out on the rocks shivering. She ended up being just fine, in spite of the Greeks saying “This is not America, the water is still very cold even though the air is warm.” They were a helpful lot anyway, and I believe they assisted in transporting the hypothermic girl back to the hotel.

In addition to Nafplion we also stopped at Corinth and Mycenae to look at a whole bunch of old rocks which I had a hard time finding too fascinating, even if I managed to grasp the importance of some of them.

We also made a stop in Epidaraus where I got to read in the enormous theatre on the site. It was an amazing feeling to stand on the “alter” in the middle of the orchestra and read the part of Pentheus in the Bachae while a classmate read Dionysus. With the theatre mostly empty, its natural amplification due to its shape was phenomenal. Standing the center, it felt like I was talking with a microphone. It’s no where near as lound in the audience, but even at the very top of the top section, one could still here quite clearly. I really wonder what its like when the theatre is full. The reading was only a few minutes, but still, it was in incredible experience.

Our last stop was Olympia where we toured the original Olympic site and those athletic ran the length of the stadium. The professors competed in a relay event and managed to win through a clever bit of cheating–all in the original Greek spirit, they claimed. The UD’ers have a knack for finding a disco club wherever they go, and somehow they managed to convince several of the professors to join them. I didn’t attend, but heard it was quite a sight.

During our last meal together in Greece, Lunch in Olympia, Joe Weinpel presented the award for the most Gyros eaten in Greece. There were two awards, one for the girls and one for the guys. He had all the girls stand up and sit down when the number of Gyros they’d eaten was surpassed by the number Joe called out. By the time he hit 14 or so, Claire Nerbun was the only one left standing. For the guys, he started at ten, and at 24, Brian Potts, Jon Bird, and myself were left standing. Potts sat down at 25. Joe called out numbers with a look of disbelief until I finally sat down at number 36. Bird managed 38. However, the contest was officially between the students, so I won the prize: a box of Tums wrapped in what should have been laurel leaves. It was quite an accomplishment, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily something to be proud of :)

The bus ride to Patros and the subsequent return on the Superfast ferry, specifically the “Superfast II”, was rather uneventful. Dustin decided he didn’t want his couchette because he planned to stay awake all night for some reason, so he gave it to me. (Dustin, my first roommate at UD, stayed up many nights, whereas I only attempted that feat once and failed miserably.) I, once again, slept quite well.

In the evening, as the ferry was just pulling off, there was quite a strong wind on the water. Once we started moving about 20 knots, the wind on deck was incredible. I stood on deck and could lean back into the wind and it supported me as if I were leaning on a wall. At one point though, it ripped my glasses from my face, and hurdled them at least 20 feet in the air, and I, with a feeling of horror, watched them land on the fan tail where someone, thankfully, stopped them from blowing off the boat entirely.

The bus ride wasn’t really too eventful either, save the fact that I was actually awake for a good bit of the trip having slept the night before. The Italian Autostrade was fascinating. The buses cruised at fairly slow 100 km/hr, while I witnessed motorcycles and fast cars fly by at what had to be their top speed. Three lanes per side of a fast divided highway, and I never saw an Italian have to pass ANYONE on the right side. They all stay to the right except to pass. Furthermore, its not like there isn’t a wide variety of speed, there are little scooters that can’t be traveling faster than 50 km/hr, to cars and motorcycles traveling 200 km/hr or faster. And somehow it all seemed to work. They all use their turn indicators to change lanes as well, but they’re used in a manner completely different from how I’m accustomed. To pass someone in front of you, you turn on your left turn signal, pull into left lane, leaving your left turn signal on, then pull back into the right lane, all the time with the left turn signal on. [It’s starting to warm up in Italy, and Italians don’t seem to shower. Ever. Ugh.] Furthermore, if you’re in the left lane and want the person in front of you to let you by, you just flip on your left turn signal. There are all sorts of other times they use the turn signals as well, but those are the only two uses I’ve managed to decode. The Italians get really scared when they drive in the US, because of all the passing on the right and unpredictability of American drivers.

I’ve got two more midterms on Tuesday, Philosophy and Literature. I tried reading on the metro on the way over here. It seems to require a skill I don’t have. You’ve got to make sure no one is trying to do something to you (i.e. pickpocket you, etc.), make sure you don’t miss your stop, keep from being thrown about, and READ at the same time? Maybe I’ll get it down eventually.

Anyway, I’m hungry and am going to go find a nice Pizza Rustica (It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve had Pizza!) and head back to campus and study, perhaps paint as well.

Until next time.

Europeans have really got to figure out that a fast connection does not entail a 14.4 modem line. (Actually, I have no idea what it is, but it isn’t fast. In spite of the fact that its advertised as being such.) Luckily, a Greek keyboard seems to consist of an American keyboard with Greek superimposed on top and a method of toggling between characters. So, I can type. I’m in Athens at the moment…. My feet were REALLY hurting when I came across this net cafe… So, instead of stopping for a beer as I was thinking about doing, I stopped to e-mail.

Last Tuesday was “Greek day” on campus. Greek olympics with bedsheet-togas ended up being more enjoyable than it might sound. I think I won style points for a full backwards somersault during the backwards race and simply picking up my partner in the 3-legged race. The night before we left we built a fire out in the vineyard and those with talent played guitar for the rest of us. A fun night.

The trip over here was a bit rough: an all-day bus ride followed by a 15 hour boat ride. The “Superfast Ferry” was, however, rather comfortable. I was one of those lucky enough to get a couchette instead of an airline seat and got some sleep. The couchettes are basically catacombs, but they are (usually) horizontal. The Greeks on the ship spoke English for the most part, but it sounded as if they learned from some television show full of idiomatic speech which they haven’t quite grasped, making things quite humorous. For instance, a waiter said to me in reference to my empty plate, “Hey, my man, you finished?” “Yes.” “Very good, I take it now, so far so good, I catch you later, my man.”

We arrived in Patros (I’d try to type the Greek stuff in Greek, but it probably wouldn’t wind up right on your screen) a small port in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday. We boarded two double-decker Greek buses for our ride to Delphi, the navel of the world. The Greek bus drivers supposedly smoke twice as much as the Italians and drive twice as fast. Ours simply smoked twice as much and drove half as slow. So slow, in fact, I thought we were going to have to get out and push. Delphi was good, I had my first 5 Gyros at at a Taverna… It was a good night, we sat in this Taverna from 5pm to 1am (there just isn’t that much to do in Delphi when you’ve got the sanctuary of Apollo and the sanctuary of Athena down… Plus the really boring archaeological museum…) Anyway, we drank about as many Amstels as we ate Gyros — and they’re about the same price. In just about all of Greece, beer comes in three flavors, Amstel, Heineken and Mythos. Mythos is actually a Greek beer. It’s also really nasty and smells something like a cross between a skunk, a latrine, and sulfur dioxide. The Greeks generally drink Ouzo, which is this hell-liquor that is similar to Sambuca, but quite a bit stronger. No American I’ve talked to, even those who like Sambuca, are too thrilled with Ouzo. Its usually consumed at a Kafeneneo or something like that, only written in Greek, and I can’t remember what the last half is. This institution is funny in that it hasn’t faded in the least with the advent of feminism. No women are alowed inside. Men go in, sip Ouzo, and smoke these water pipe things. I’ve not yet gone in one myself as they look rather scary. Anyway, Saturday morning we left for Athens, land of the best Gyros in Greece. (Gyro is a fun word. I just can’t get it quite right. The pronunciation is the middle ground between Hero and Euro.) Jon Bird is captain of the Gyro brigade, of which I seem to be a member. Its our mission to eat more of them in Athens than the record last semester, which is 24. So far I’ve eaten 19, and I’ve got tonight left. It’s gonna be tough. For those of oyu that don’t know, Gyros are pita bread (freshly made and then dropped onto a skillet to make them hot) with some sort of meat (Lamb, Beef, Chicken, Pork. Pork and Lamb are the most popular.) The meat is roasted on a rotisserie devicer, and they shave off the outside bit and put it in your Gyro. Then comes onions and tomatoes (I’m not much of a tomato fan). On top are chips (french fries) and a yogurt-cucumber sauce. Then they sprinkle this really good seasoning on top, wrap it up and stick it in a little paper wrapper. All of this takes about 14 seconds. They cost 400 Drachma pretty much everywhere. Its funny that while Gyros have a set price, beer ranges from 200-1400 drachma for .5 liter. It’s nuts.

On to more educational things in Athens. There is, of course, the Acropolis, or as my art and arch professor refers to it, Athena-land. Wow. I wasn’t really impressed with it from pictures, but it becomes obvious why Athena belongs there once you see it looming over the city. The Parthenon itself isn’t that exciting, but it looks really neat from Lekapito (something like that) a pointy mountain-hill right next to it, from which you can actually look down on the Parthenon and see across the water to the Mountains on the Peloponese. Most of yesterday was spent on the Acropolis and then down in the Agora where we soaked up all sorts of fun stuff. Our professors aren’t licensed tour guides, so they get harassed by people occasionally–usually in Greek. Such an occurrence is usually great fodder for amusement on our part, especially since Dr. Hatlie, our Western Civ professor, is fluent in Modern Greek and yells back at them.

Last night and the night before held an unprecedented sort of amusement no one was prepared for. We were (un?)lucky, and managed to catch Carnevale twice. In Italy, it’s celebrated on Mardi Gras and the week or so before. People dress up like Halloween and go into the streets and throw confetti and drink. The Greek Orthodox calender is different, and they celebrated Carnevale yesterday and the week or so before. Today is the first day of their lenten season. So, we left Italy on Wednesday, and get to greece in time for more celebration. The Athenians celebrate Carnevale much in the same way, only on a much larger scale with one addition. They not only throw confetti and streamers and things around, they also purchase plastic clubs and club people. They mull about the Plaka and just pummel each other with these plastic clubs. It doesn’t really hurt for the most part, although some blows smart a bit. Well, you can imagine that this cause much confusion amongst an unsuspecting group of Americans. So what did we do? Bought a bunch of clubs and whacked ’em right back. It’s really pretty fun when you think about it, you walk by and just whack random strangers. In the states I’m sure it would turn into deadly gang wars instantly. They’re pretty good about it here, though some of the groups get together and fight each other pretty viciously. They line up on each side of the street then charge at each other, and whoever gives up first loses. I wonder if anyone ends up seriously hurt or not, I didn’t see anything worse than the occasional bloody nose. For the casual clubbist, its not much of a problem, you just don’t take on vicious groups. Anyway, after two nights of that mania, the city is pretty much dead today, save the tourists. In fact, I was quite surprised to find this place open.

After climbing the hill this afternoon, I stopped to rest on the steps of some important looking building when a guy with an uzzi in his hand comes out and starts talking to me in Greek. I naturally get up and start walking the other direction but he says “No, no, please, please,” and points to the steps. So I set back down, he smiles, jabbers some more in greek and walks off. I’ve never been accosted by anyone with an automatic weapon before–I suppose there’s a first time for everything. The police all carry them, and you get used to people carrying large firearms, but I’ve never had anyone say anything to me. I’ve wanted to take a picture of one of them, but they really don’t look too thrilled about that idea, so I haven’t tried.

Tomorrow morning, its on to Corinth and Mycinae and the Nafplion where we spend a day or so. The beaches are supposedly nice.

So far, I really like Greece. Athens is big, noisy, dirty, and not as easy-going as Rome. Otherwise, I really like the country I’ve seen so far. The land is just amazing. It seems to be almost entirely mountains with the sea surrounding it. Where else can you get so much sea and so many mountains? My two favorite places…

The weather is spring. I’ve never really been in a place with much of a spring before. Greece is much hotter than Rome was when we left it, it’s about 75-80 here in the afternoon, whereas greece was about 70. I have a feeling that once May rolls around I’m really going to want to be headed North.

One last interesting event:

After acquiring some gyros, a small group of us were looking for a curb to sit on and eat them when some old fat greeks, 3 guys and one woman, motion us into this alleyway where they’ve got a table set up that has some extra chairs. It looked like it was sort of their yard they were eating in. We decided to be daring and join them, but none of us knew any Greek and they knew no English. Actually, Mark knows classical Greek, but it doesn’t help him with spoken, modern Greek at all. He can read most of the signs though which is more than the rest of us can manage. So they sit us down and offer us some wine-looking stuff out of a Fanta bottle. After a couple others try it and don’t die, I have a little cup. WHOA. I don’t know what it was, it tasted like homemade wine with some really hard alcohol mixed in. We sat around and drank with them for a good hour. They fed us octopus and stinky cheese and olives and other unidentifiable stuff. They seemed to just really enjoy having us to laugh at. We were able to make minimal conversation, and overall, there was something fun about mingling with the locals. After we thanked them and were walking down the street, a couple of the guys who’d had a bit more of the wine concoction than others noted that they were feeling quite tipsy and muttered something about hoping it wasn’t laced with anything too bad. I was just fine, having had no more than my little plastic cupful.

Those of you who wrote me, thanks a bunch for the e-mail, but I’m having difficulty with this Greek connection, so I don’t think I’ll be able to respond until I get to Rome…

Nothing new and terribly exciting is happening, at least not compared to the last letter. I’m doing my best to enjoy myself here and learn what I can.

I’m in Rome this afternoon because Professor Gish was giving a talk about Imperial Rome, its architecture, and so on. It wasn’t really a talk, more of a tour, but of places we’d already been. We were supposed to meet him at 3pm at the Colloseo metro stop, only I was running late because I was talking to the dean of the Rome program, Dr. Ambler, about a certain really frustrating Theology professor, so I got there at about 3:15. I managed to guess his route, and caught up with them at the Fora Imperiali. There were about 20 of us that decided to go (UD Romers don’t seem too thrilled about optional lectures in general) and along the way some guy with long curly hair just sort of started tagging along. Professor Gish handed him handouts as well, and he seemed thoroughly engrossed in what he had to say. Thinking about it, a university professor makes an excellent tour guide. Turns out the guy that joined us is an electrical engineer from Boulder Colorado. Lucky for him, he got a good tour. Even had intelligent questions to ask at the end, which is more than I can say for certain members of the UD group.

It’s 7pm, so I guess I won’t make it back in time for dinner at 7.30… Good, because I’m in the mood for some good food. There was a Chinese place with a menu outside that said �15.000 for a full meal, and a decent menu. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any Chinese…

A couple of days ago I was talking to Jon Bird while he was painting on some Shakespeare characters that he’s doing sort of mural style underneath the theatre in a little passageway between the Capp Bar and the dorm lounge. I asked him if he’d teach me to paint some day, and somehow I’ve gotten stuck with painting Cordelia from King Lear. (I haven’t read King Lear yet, but will in a couple of weeks.) He’s sketched all the characters quite roughly with charcoal, and I was fascinated with the way Bird had drawn a really deep expression on Cordelia’s face with just a few strokes of charcoal. So now I get to paint it. It’s all being done in greyscale which is appropriate for its location. Also makes it easier for me, since colors scare me. At first I refused to help him on the grounds that I liked her too much and didn’t want to mess her up. He promised I wouldn’t, and taught me how to paint her face. In just a little over four hours, I found myself looking at a face with real depth. that I’D given depth. Something VERY fascinating. Her lips weren’t really drawn, and I more or less did them myself. Bird remarked that they were some of the most kissable lips he’d ever seen. Yay! I’ve done her hair too, and that took forever. I think I painted it 3 times before I got it even close. Good thing about paint that I’d never really realized is that you can’t really mess up, you can always paint over it. I’m currently fighting with her clothes, which I can’t seem to make look ANYTHING like clothes. Oh well. I’ve got the rest of the semester….. It’s been a cool experience, I never thought painting was something I’d ever be able to do. I still don’t think I could without serious guidance, but its fun while it lasts.

The semester is really moving along. We’ve moved into Christian architecture in Art, finally gotten out of Greece in Western Civ, have gone absolutely nowhere in Theology, doing Augustine’s confessions in Philosophy (Augustine is frustrating), and are still doing endless Greek tragedies in “Roman and Greek Tragedy and Comedy”. After I thought it couldn’t get more tragic than Oedipus the King, we read Oedipus at Collonus and then Antigone for next class. Sophocles is amazing and wretched. Next comes the Bachae and Lysistrata–our first comedy. We’re supposed to get to Shakespeare eventually.

The Greece trip. Next Wednesday we pile into buses and head for Greece. (I’m assuming the buses don’t float, despite Marcello’s skill and that we’ll hop onto a boat sooner or later…)

On a less happy tone, I present the following series of events…

Dr. Crider, our literature professor, maintains that the theme behind our course work this semester is that we’re limited, we suffer, and we die. Nah, not depressing at all. In class on Friday, he was discussing Aristotle’s Poetics, specifically what the word Tragedy means in an Aristotilian sense. As in illustration, he mentioned a story about driving to the train station on the Via Appia Nuova, which is (and always has been) one of the major roads into Rome. He claims that the International Tribune called the Via Appia the most dangerous road in Europe. One out of every four collisions are fatal. This, I think, is more a testament to Italian driving than anything about the road itself. The road is straight, four lanes wide for the most part, and fast. I’ve never noticed anything particularly dangerous about it, especially compared to some really harry roads in the states. The Italians, it seems, don’t get into collisions very often, but when they do, there isn’t much left. They all drive little boxes here, (every time I see a Miata, I’m amazed at how big it looks here), and drive them very rapidly. Dr. Crider said he saw a wreck on the Appia that was particularly bad, and judging by the size of the cars left on the side of the road, not much left the wreck alive. This, he said, is shocking, but not tragic. Similarly, he said, if one of us were to step off the curb on the Appia and get hit by a car and paralyzed for life it wouldn’t be tragic, not in the Aristotelean sense.

Friday afternoon I left with about 35 other guys to go on a “silent retreat”. This is apparently a common thing UDers do, they all get together and go off somewhere, don’t talk for a weekend and pray and listen to religious lectures and go to mass and so on. I wasn’t going to go, but Joe Weinpel talked me into it, promising good food and lots of sleep, and said he wouldn’t make me pay for it. It was relaxing, but the place was run by a bunch of nuns who, as Deacon Bill said, “Aren’t German, but they act like it.” That and we got to ask all sorts of fun questions at the end that the Catholics frequently couldn’t answer. It was worth going for the decent food anyway.

On Friday evening, they told us that two UD girls were crossing the Appia, and somehow didn’t see a motorcycle that was traveling very fast and hit them. One of them only had some cuts and bruises and was released from the hospital with a few stitches. The other is still in the Hospital, her 5th and 6th Vertebrae are fractured. They’ve got one of those fun halos on her and have her in traction, her parents have flown up from the states. They said she doesn’t have any spinal cord damage and the risk of paralysis is almost nonexistent. Coincidentally, another student’s father is a neurosurgeon and happened to be in town visiting and has been helping advise her and her parents. Italian medical care isn’t exactly the best, we hear. Latest is that instead of letting the doctor here operate on her, they’re going to put her in some sort of halo jacket and ship her back to the states for further evaluation and may or may not operate on her there. Needless to say, it had been rather glum about campus of late, but everyone seems to be getting over it. It seems to be a better realization of our own mortality than I think even Dr. Crider could have recognized, Aristotelean tragedy or not.

I hate to end a letter talking about such things, but I’m running out of things to talk about and my stomach is growling. I’ve got a midterm on Friday for Western Civ that’s going to kill me, and then a paper on Augustine’s confessions due on Monday. Tuesday is a day of festivities of some sort with Greek olympics and other things before we leave for Greece on Wednesday.

Here I am, back in my little net shack half a klick from the Colosseum. (which, by the way, was built by the Flavians in 9 years and finished in 80 AD… Maybe I should be a tour guide? Nah, I hate tourists too much.)

I took an Art and Architecture test earlier today which I didn’t study nearly enough for. Enough, however, to provide you with useless facts about most of the important architectural structures from Roman antiquity. Somehow, memorizing dates has never appealed to me. Being UD student, however, I didn’t a test on dates, I merely had to write essays in which being able to quote dates was important. Essays on things like the varying roles of Augustus as builder and ruler… And how Constantine helped to integrate Christianity with Rome through his architecture, and so on. It’s interesting, just not THAT interesting.

I was worried about making it to Rome this week, I’m so busy, but I found out that there is a Dali exhibit here that was leaving 29 Feb. So I hopped on a bus to come see it. It was okay, but not as exciting as I’d hoped. They did have his work portraying Dante’s Comedia which was neat after having read it last year as part of my UD education. I wasn’t at all familiar with any of his sculpture (I didn’t know he did any), but his portrayal of Venus with drawers was awesome.

Monday, as in Monday before last, I woke up to Jon Bird singing Rawhide over the telephone at all of us. We’ve got these nifty intercom-telephones not unlike those the Nachzen family kids were all too frequently woken up with. Someone a few weeks ago, asked if Bird would sing us awake in the future, rather than simply announce “WAKE UP” over the intercom. The general consensus after the fact is that this was a bad idea. Bird singing rawhide is not my favorite idea of wakeup music.

He then proceeded to give us all sorts of information we weren’t paying attention to during the meeting the night before. Things like what time breakfast was, when to get on the busses, what to bring, and so on. We certainly weren’t paying much more attention while groaning in our beds at being woken up before the sun was up.

Somehow, though, we managed to get breakfast which isn’t really breakfast, and hop onto a bus. We’d signed up for buses earlier. It’s nice, in middle school they were randomly assigned. Now we get to pick. Which is funny, because now we don’t care. Or at least I didn’t, save the fact that I wanted to be on Marcello’s bus. Only, there was no way of knowing which one was his, so I picked the one that was emptiest looking at the time. It was comforting then to see Marcello’s rosary hanging from the mirror of the bus with the list my name was on. At least, I thought so, but Bird jumped about with elation upon a similar discovery, and Jeff Mobus, the campus director, grinned at having picked the right bus as well. Bird, it seems, now has a beer waiting for him in a little compartment upon entering the bus at almost all times now, so his happiness was even more understandable.

The problem with being on a bus with Jeff Mobus is that his wife and 4 kids tend to be on the same bus. Emily age 7, Carrie age 5, Jim age 3 and John- 8 months. Marcello greeted them all by name, much to my amusement, kissed them all and said who knows what to them in Italian. Emily and Carrie fought about anything and everything, Jim ran off anywhere and everywhere, and John just screamed. It was a long trip to Florence.

Our arrival in Florence was somewhat exciting, and I got to experience a European bathroom first hand. You get to sit on a toilet, shower and brush your teeth all at the same time. There’s just a normal itty bitty bathroom with a showerhead. No curtain or anything, just a drain on the floor. Not to mention a thing that is neither a toilet or a bidet, but looks somewhat like either. Its purpose, or so I sort of gathered from an Italian guy at the hotel, is to fill it with soapy water and use it like a wash basin or something. Apparently the sink is insufficient for this purpose. It made for fun discussions, anyway.

After getting settled in our hotels, we walked around Florence with some professors, and got a feel for the city. We visited the Uffizi which, like much of Florence is full of Renaissance art. I tend to get really tired of endless pictures entitled “Madonna col Bambino”. Furthermore, you can only paint Christ on a cross so many ways. I hate to admit it, but I really didn’t enjoy the Uffizi terribly much, save some sculpture and the occasional out of the ordinary painting.

After dinner in Florence, we all headed to an Irish pub. I wonder if there are more Irish pubs in Italy than in Ireland. I tend to enjoy them since they serve Guinness and Harp, and usually speak English. This was a “Fiddler’s Elbow” of which there are apparently three. Funny looking Fiddler I guess. There’s one in Florence, Venice and Rome. After a few beers I was convinced to head down to a Florentine Discotheque despite the fact that I can’t dance. Bird somehow got me in for free because I was complaining that there was no way I would pay to watch a bunch of people dance. What followed was an amusing night of watching Italian men all over UD girls, and UD guys getting trashed by Italian women. Italian men are not known for their politeness when it comes to women. A bit like Zeus, they just go for whatever they want. At some point I was assigned the ludicrous task of watching out for Dr. Ambler’s (the campus dean) 16 year old very blonde daughter who was along for the trip as well. Hah. 4 of us were required to keep the men off of her. It is, however, what you get for going to a discotheque. The disco wasn’t really my thing, but watching people make fools of themselves was funny.

The next day, after obligatory tours and a breakfast of Pizza and beer just because I could, I headed for the Baptistry because Kate told me to, only to discover they wanted �5.000 to go in. Annoyed, I paid anyway. It’s not very big, but the ceiling frescos are really impressive. After that I walked around to the east side to get a good look at “Dr. Crider’s Doors” which he’d given us a lecture about before we left for Florence. The doors are what Michelangelo called “The Gates of Paradise”. Done in gold by Ghiberti, only I don’t think I can spell his name either.

I walked across to THE Duomo. It’s the monster church of Florence, and mighty impressive at that. The dome on top was called the impossible dome because it’s enormous and has a HUGE hunk of marble on top of it. Brunelleschi was cool. I paid a bloody �10.000 to perform the masochistic ritual of climbing the stairs, but it was well worth it. The stairway is amazing. It’s also very small. When you get to the dome, it criss-crosses its way between the inner dome and the outer one. Climbing up you can see the wooden beams that hold the two domes in tension and keep it up. It’s really impressive. It’s also slowly cracking. I got to the top absolutely dead and was at first not that impressed by the view. It’s 400 feet above the ground, which is high, but nothing like the sears tower. But then I really started looking around and was just amazed. Florence just looked REALLY neat from up there. The wind was cold. I stayed up there for about 1.5 hours, determined to get my money’s worth. While up there, I saw, for the first and maybe last time in my life, both sides of a rainbow. Now that was neat. Then the moon came out, and the sun was setting, and I was just awe-stricken. I finally climbed down after I started getting pretty cold.

I did see, of course, Michelangelo’s David. I must say, that as impressive as it is, I was much more impressed by Bernini’s David in the Villa Borghese.

The next day, Wednesday, we set off for Venice. Venice is like the Disney World of Italy–I’m convinced there are more Americans than Italians there at any given point. It was really neat being in a city without any cars on the roads, but finding my way around was impossible. None of the streets were straight, and inevitably I’d be walking down a street and hit a canal with no way to cross it. Thursday morning was spent at the Academia. More renaissance stuff. The most interesting thing to me was this still life of a violin in the middle of one of the rooms, no label, no case, nothing. No one knew why it was there, and it certainly didn’t belong to the renaissance. Everyone I pointed it out to and asked about it looked very confused and amused at the painting. After the Academia, I passed on a tour of the Naval museum with Dr. Ambler that supposedly contained not much other than little wooden models of ships to go with Jon Bird to the Peggy Gugenhiem’s collection in Venice. Bird and I were talking about the fact that some modern art would be nice after a whole morning of renaissance, and so he offered to take me to there. It turns out he’d never been there himself. It was an AWESOME collection. Picasso, Dali, Calder, Max Ernst, Magrite, Jackson Pollock (why? oh right, she was sleeping with him) and many others. We had no idea it was such an impressive collection. It was small, but most everything in it was really worth spending time looking at. Jon Bird was enthralled at discovering one of his favorite sculptures there. Constantin Brancusi’s “Bird in Space”, but it looks more like a raindrop to me. Then Bird explained it to me, and I was a bit more impressed. It’s polished brass, so it does neat things with the light.

After that, I roamed around Venice by myself. I bought a day pass on the bus-boats, and road them around for a couple hours, a really peaceful quiet way to see Venice. And the pass was only �18.000, which was good. Course, it’s only relaxing when you get used to the rumble of the monster diesel engines and the fact that they just basically ram all the floating platforms they stop at.

There was a good bit I didn’t get to see in Venice, but I’ll probably make it back on my way out. We left Saturday afternoon for Assisi, got there that evening.

Assisi is not very touristy, at least compared to Venice, and very medieval. Three days before we got there the tower of the castle on the top of the hill collapsed because of an aftershock from the earthquake a couple years ago. So we didn’t get to go in the castle. The basilica of St. Francis had been repaired mostly, so we got to see it. On Sunday we hiked up to St. Francis’ hermitage. A 6 kilometer hike up a mountain road with nothing but mass at the top. There was something neat about seeing mass in the hermitage, anway. St. Francis built the hermitage with small 4 foot doorways to remind himself to be humble. The result is I don’t fit very well through them. After the hermitage, I just started hiking up the mountain more. All the trails were going down, but I decided I wanted to go to the top. Eventually, I got to a wall which seemed to be there to prevent erosion or something. After climbing this 8 foot wall, I discovered that a freaking road was on the other side. Funny enough, I was fuming about climbing for a good 15 minutes, scaling a wall, and finding a road, when Nathan Landry pops up over the wall as well with a similar expression. On the other side of the road, we find a small trail, and it goes up the mountain. A couple hours later the trail sort of disappeared, and about a half hour after that we got to the top. And it was the most satisfying feeling I’ve ever had. I could see four or five mountain ranges across the valley, and Assisi was just this itty bitty cluster on the side of a mountain down the way a bit. We looked down to lower peak across the way and saw where a bunch of UDers had kept going up the road to get to the top. It was quite cold up there. We were pretty high up and breathing wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The clouds were at our level, and we could almost look down on some of them. There was a 30 mile an hour wind or so that made it much colder. We saw some further peaks in that weren’t too far and a bit higher. After climbing another 4 peaks, we looked around and realized we were on the highest one. We sat in sort of a rocky cove and shielded or selves from the wind and sat and thought for a long time. We watched the sun set on the valley, and decided that we didn’t want to find our way back down in complete darkness so we shivered our way back down the mountain. Going down was trickier, but much faster. We got back to the hermitage in less than an hour, even though it took us several to get up there. By then it was dark, but there was a road. I wished I’d had my sleeping bag with me on the mountain, I’d have stayed up there that night.

Things I’ve neglected to mention:

We saw a really good performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Venice by a very talented group of musicians. We were so thrilled that enough cheering got them back to play another three pieces that were even more amazing, one of which was a cello piece that blew me away.

The Italian word of Florence is Firenze. One of these days I’m going to figure out how those are realted.

On the way back to campus on Monday, Jim Mobus, the 3 year old, took a huge liking to me for some reason. When we got off the bus back at campus his parents had to pry him off my leg. I have no idea why he liked me so much. They told me that he talked about me all night.

It was a good trip. And its 9pm here, and so I really need to make my way back to campus.

Oh, other questions people have asked in e-mail that I’ll answer here:

I’m feeling much better, mostly because I bought some Claratin here. Which, strangely, is called Claratyn here, but is much cheaper.

As for when I’ll check my e-mail, there isn’t any real schedule. I’m really busy, so I dunno when it will be again. I’ll try to check it at least once before my Greece trip in a couple weeks.

The food isn’t all that bad here, its much better than on the Irving campus. Its just that breakfast gets old because its nonexistent, save bad coffee and one pastry. They have a potato fetish, not a meal goes by without potatoes. They’re yellow potatoes. Not russet. Every meal also comes with moonrocks, rock hard rolls that are hollow inside. Soup is frequently good, as is the pasta, but its also frequently nasty. They like to serve fish on Fridays which is bad, seeing as how I don’t like fish. There’s fruit too, and a good Sicilian orange is so much better than ANY Florida orange I’ve ever had. But about half of them are blood oranges, and it’s impossible to tell them apart until you open them up.

I’ve not fallen in love with any Italian women.

Public transportation to Rome works like this for me: I wait for a bus about 150 meters from campus. Within 15 minutes on a work day, one comes along. I take the bus to Anagnina, the end of the Metro line, then take the metro wherever I want to go in Rome. Well, as close as I can get anyway.

I THINK that’s all the questions I was asked:)

I look forward to any mail from you guys, snail or e-mail… While real mail can take 7 days to get here, I sometimes go longer than that without checking e-mail, so…..