Our Dumb Blog

Well, not really. The pope addresses the population on Wednesdays every couple of weeks or so. This morning I woke up at the ridiculous hour of 6am (after not really sleeping at all because I’ve got an awful cough), got “breakfast” (a measly pastry and cold coffee.. Same, every morning…. Gotta love that it.), and climbed onto the bus Marcello was driving. UD has a deal with a travel company that provides typically the same 3 buses for all 112 of us every we go somewhere as a class. Marcello’s bus is my favorite because of, well, Marcello. Many people think that the biggest heroes of Rome are the bus drivers. Marcello speaks very little English, but usually Jon Bird rides Marcello’s bus as well. Bird’s a UD graduate working here as a “Rome Assistant” for the time being. The kind of thing one can do with an art degree from UD.

The bus trip was quite rough. We left at 7:30am, and the Rome rush hour traffic was awful. I tried to sleep, but Marcello would periodically wake me up by honking the horn at some obnoxious driver while screaming at them in Italian. At one point I woke up to see him throw something at a car that wouldn’t let him by. The Italians are great. Slept some more until about 9:15am when Marcello halted the bus quite rapidly, and stops within inches of hitting a car in front of us. The car behind us didn’t do so hot and hit the bus. Marcello stormed out of the bus in a fit of rage, spouting what must have peen profanity in the direction of whomever hit us. I couldn’t see much else from our vantage point. The Polizia stopped a few minutes later to yell at Marcello for blocking traffic, at least as far as I could gather from the wild gesturing. Marcello simply kept yelling at the Polizia who got back in their car. (They drive Alfa Romeo’s here, cool, eh?) We got to St. Peter’s square where we exited the bus illegally at an ATAC (public transportation) stop. Hundreds of romans and “Pilgrims” (erhm, tourists) were in St. Peter’s square to see him. He rode up in his little pope-mobile, waving and looking very old. They drove him up the steps of St. Peter’s where a chair awaited him. He spoke in Latin, French, German, English, and Italian, at least as far as I could tell, there might have been more. Overall, I would describe the event as an enormous Papal pep rally. The crowd had banners and yelled and screamed and waved and screamed… He thanked various groups for coming, among the group he mentioned was The University of Dallas Students, who were bound and determined to yell and scream the loudest and probably succeeded. Luckily, it was only an hour long, since I don’t think I could have sat there much longer listening to mostly foreign languages of which I could grasp very little. The best part was probably seeing the Swiss guard in person. They really are just goofy looking. I got this enormous urge to just point and laugh, but refrained. I find it difficult to take someone seriously who’s wearing something that resembles a Mardi Gras outfit and a big floppy beret. It doesn’t matter who designed the outfits– they still look silly.

So, that ended at 11:30, or so. I found a pizza place that actually warmed my piece of pizza in an oven. Most of them use microwaves now, so its better to get it cold. Only I don’t know how to say cold, so I say, “Non Calda”, which I eventually learned means ?Not Hot?. On many occaisions in the past they’d ask “Calda?”, to which I’d reply “Si”, and then they’d go and heat it anyway. ?Calda? sure sounds like ?cold? to me! The word froid remained something of a mystery for some time.

I’ve got until 2:30 to meet the UD’ers back at Piazza di Spagna for a walk to Villa Borghese which contains four of Bernini’s sculptures, which some argue are his best work. I’ll write about them after I see them. They gave us a 3 hour lecture on sculpture, the Baroque, and Bernini last night, so I’m all ready to go see it.

Oh, I saw this HUGE billboard of a guy with a mustache and DALI printed across him. Turns out there was a really big Dali exhibit that was here until 9 Jan. So, I just missed it. However, billboards have been popping up all over for the past week for a Roy Lichtenstein exhibit, which I’d really like to see. After seeing lots of his stuff in the contemporary art museum in Chicago, it’d be neat to see whatever’s here. I asked Jon Bird (UD Art graduate) if he knew anything about it. He said he didn’t, but loved Lichtenstein (no way I’m ever gonna spell that right) and would find out, and he and I could go together. So, that would be cool. It would have to be neat to see it with someone who knows something about art.

I’ve got a horrible cough, and I hope I don’t have to go see an Italian doctor. On top of that, we’re going to Monte Casino all day Saturday. Tomorrow I’ve got a theology exam. A philosophy paper is due Friday. And a Literature paper is due Monday. So, I’m busy. It’s quite tough to balance running around and seeing Rome while working on a tough semester, traveling all over the place, and coughing my head off. We leave for Florence, Venice and Assisi on Tuesday and return in a week, I believe.

I’m going to go grab some Gelati before I head over to Villa Borghese…

Well,this hasn’t been a terribly exciting week. I’ve mostly been staying on campus, trying to study. Place the emphasis on the trying.

Wednesday was an art and architecture trip to Hadrian’s Villa. I liked it a lot, but I fear I’m not clever enough to say much about it. Its amazingly intact for its age–though, like all old roman buildings, it’s been stripped of all the marble for new buildings… Hadrian’s Villa is big stuff to architects. They’ve been coming to Rome to look at it for centuries. It is one of the earliest examples of non city architecture that’s left in the area. The city is very rigidly constructed (though it may not seem like it at first), but this villa is where Hadrian would go to relax. It makes use of monstrous concrete vaults, like he later used in the Pantheon to create the dome. There are pools of water, streams, fountains, baths. It is spread out over a huge amount of land, and has a seemingly random layout. What’s left of it is only a very small part of what was originally there. There are also endless underground passageways, some lit from above, some not. I’d love to go back with a hard hat and flashlight and climb through them.. Some of them aren’t excavated in their entirety, and lots are closed off. This is similar to what Nero did in his Domus Aurea, of which there is very little left. I hear that whats left is worth seeing, but you have to reserve a spot to get in and they only let a few people in every 15 minutes. It’s underground because the Romans buried it because they hated Nero so much. As a result, there are real humidity problems– bad because of all the paintings that are still down there.

Classes are going okay, Western Theological Tradition bites, but that has something to do with the fact that the professor reads from his notes and doesn’t have anything to say. My Philosophy professor’s theories are far-fetched and he’s condescending on top of that. Dr. Crider, our literature professor, is amazing… Most of what we’re studying is Greek Tragedy, though he opened class with a study of the fall of man in Genesis, the story of Job, and the crucifixion of Jesus in order to start asking questions about why man suffers and dies… Which ties in nicely with Philosophy of Man, and the never-ending stream of Christian martyrs we’re studying in theology.

My Western Civ. professor is fascinating as well. He has a wonderfully European sense of humor, and makes good use of it in class… This is good, because the early greek city-states are less than fascinating to me. Art and Architecture is taught by a Dr. Flusche who lives in the city and knows it like the back of her hand.

Signs for Toy Story 2 are all over the Metro, it apparently opens here 11 Feb. I wonder if watching it in Italian would be fun.

I think I’m going ice skating for the second time in my life tonight… I have no idea where, I guess I’ll find out.

I’m getting to know people, which I guess is good… There are only 112 of us on a very small campus, so its hard not to get to know people.. After we’d been sitting around drinking Chianti for a few hours the other night while avoiding our books and listening to music in the Capp Bar, a game of “hackey sack baseball” broke out and went on for a few hours.. I’d try to explain it, but I don’t think there’s an explanation. It was fun anyway…

Anyway, I’ve been here for almost an hour now, so more next week or so.

My second weekend in Roma… I finally gave in and bought a 10 hour net account from this place on Cavour south of Termini (for those of you that know Rome). It’s easier to get to than the other place… Well, it requires less walking. It does require switching metro lines which is time consuming….

This morning started FAR too early for me at about 7:00…. The water this morning in the shower was actually hot, which is a nice change. Only, there wasn’t much of it at all. Just as little trickle. So, it was still COLD as heck in the shower… On to a good European breakfast of a measly little pastry, super-strong-super-burned-super-cold coffee (I’m not sure how they manage it, but as the the kitchen staff speaks exclusively Italian, I don’t think I’ll ever find out), decent milk, and stuff that looks like orange juice but isn’t. On to a bus with the rest of the class for the Mandatory tour of the the Forum Romanum. James Joyce described his experience at the forum as “so exciting it put me to sleep”, and I agree whole-heartedly. I did learn a lot, but there is so little left in the form area that it really isn’t much to look at. Just a bunch of column stumps. Hover, if you hike up the Capitoline Hill and look back down on it, you can tell where Caesar’s Basilica Julia was, there are some columns left of the temple to Saturn, the Curia is still standing, though I doubt it much resembles that of ancient times. Further up the Capitoline, and down into the saddle is piazza that was completely reshaped by Michael Angelo with a bronze statue of the Marcus Aurelias in the center. (Actually, it’s a copy of the original statue, which is in the building next to it. It still exists because the Christians didn’t smash/melt/pillage it with the rest of the old statues… Why? Because they thought it was a statue of Constantine, but it’s not. Whoops.) The piazza is really neat because the pavement has been done in such a way that it LOOKS round, but it’s really elliptical, and the buildings around it appear deceptively rectangular, when in truth they’re trapezoidal. After the mandatory tours ended, I wondered into a pizzaria for lunch where, to my horror, an Italian microwaved an Italian pizza for me in order to reheat it. It was still good, just the crust was soggy. Italian Pizza is so much better than american pizza. It has real flavor. And the gelati. Man. I had coffee flavoured ice cream today, and it was very good. On top of that, it was served with real, whole, coffee beans on top.

Classes are tough, but I’m learning. And I’ve got a job… I’m the official Rome campus librarian. The Rome Library, however, is very very small.. But, its also a disaster, and its my job to fix it. Still min. wage, but I should be able to make $200 or so in the course of the semester…. working a few hours a week.

I went to the Piazza Spagna in spite of various recommendations about how pointless it is, but I needed to see it anyway. I didn’t bother climb the steps. The whole area is just a big junk of tourism. There is, however, the largest, most grandeous McDonald’s in the world completely outfitted in marble, inside and out. Quite a spectacle. It’s also PACKED. And HUGE. A monstrosity. The McDonald’s here serve McBeer–which I hear is quite nasty, but still amusing…

Last night the student life people showed Casablanca, which was neat, I’d never seen it. I can understand why its so popular.

The water on campus is nasty, it’s treated with sulfur based stuff as opposed to american water which is usually treated with chlorine… However, there are fountains all over Rome with REALLY good groundwater, so I tend to carry a bottle to Rome and fill it up when I’m here.

My feet are constantly tired, I’ll probably loose a good bit of weight with all this walking I’m doing…. Anyway, that’s the update for now, I’ll probably write more next week.