Our Dumb Blog

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…..

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.