Language Barrier

Well, later that night as a group we all had dinner in the Residence Candia. Erin and Sara made everyone bruschetta and spaghetti and green beans. It was a great dinner where I feel we all bonded as a group and the dynamic amongst all of us turned into a very positive one. The dinner was amazing and then we all hung out for a bit and decided to head out to Trastever to hopefully meet up with a friend of mine from SCL. However...

We ended up getting off at maybe the wrong spot.. Its really hard to organize a group of 16 of us and for one person to pick the directions... Regardless, we kept walking and walking just hoping someone knew where we were headed... I kept trying to call my friend so many times that my phone ran out of money, although I'm pretty sure that there wasn't as much on there as the people at the store said, because, honestly, how could I have used up 200 minutes in one night?

So, we walked. Then we walked some more... oh... then we continued to walk. Finally most of the group got tired and sick of looking for a pub and decided to head back. 7 of us decided though that we had walked this far already we might as well keep looking, and we did so successfully. I decided we were going into the first bar we saw. We went upstairs, sat down, the waitress came over and Brian... oh Brian... Brian was very generous with us and our drinks. After hanging out there for a while and bonding some more we decided to walk home around 2:30-3:00 am. Here we started having some pretty intense conversations which are always great when meeting new people. Luke and I decided that we HAD to cross the river because the other side was so evidently the right side to be on. We mocked the others talking about how they were going to feel so stupid after they realized we were right... In the end though we were the ones feeling pretty stupid as we had traversed to the wrong side... Finally we got home around 4:00 am with class starting at 8:15 the next morning when I learned just how good I am at rallying and recovering.

The next day we headed to a museum with many amazing statues including statues of Caesar and ancient mosaics. On the top floor there were many statues of the gods as well as what remains from a scene that was once on a temple of athena with two fights on either side of her. Behind that there were giant GIANT pieces of another statue of a female fate or muse, exactly what is escaping me at the moment. I regretably didn't bring a notebook on this trip.

After this I did something very American... but I'm so happy I did. Burger King. Megatron burger. Fries. Coke. Heaven. The BK didn't take credit cards though... which I thought was weird being such a big chain, but whatever, it hit the spot.

After that I crashed. Hard. I had to recover from just being constantly on the run while being in Europe for two weeks as well as catch up on sleep missed from the night before...

5 hours later...

I woke up much later than anticipated, but was still able to finish the Livy homework we had and then began preparing for the next step of the night... The party with Swiss Guards and Dean from Gilmore Girls.

Most of us went down around 9:30 after the party had started at 8:30. We thought we didn't know anyone there besides ourselves... However most of the girls happened to know someone who I only know through my friends at home, Jared Padalecki, or Dean from the Gilmore Girls who is also on Supernatural now. I'm just glad it wasn't someone I knew, or I would have been that little girl in the corner giggling at the famous person, luckily, I kept my cool even after I bumped into him.

So, the party wasn't the greatest. As one of my professors mentioned it would have been better with dimmer lights and alcohol, instead of bright lights and juice. Sara and I decided to follow the guys who we would later find out to be Swiss Guards. Good choice on her part. We followed them to this karaoke bar across the street which we hadn't seen before. For how small it was it was pretty strict. We had to have our IDs and fill out a small sheet before we could go in. The bar was filled with locals and surprisingly I started talking to one almost instantly. I heard a voice behind me ask where I was from, I told him, he got up and sang some karaoke and we continued to talk.. well... talk is probably being generous. He spoke broken English, I speak... well I know some Italian words and can sometimes put them together to form an incoherent sentence. I don't know how many Americans he had met before, but he had some very weird topics that he wanted to talk about including my thoughts on Area 51, and I'm not sure but something else that had to do with 9/11 and Israel... this is where the barrier thickened and I started to fade mentally. I was already growing tired trying to think in two different languages. The whole situation seemed a bit more sketch after we talked about places to go in Rome to dance and he said that he was going to a disco and that I could come with in his car... Now, keep in mind I have no idea if he's hitting on me or just being friendly because the barrier has really blocked any solid communication, I mostly kept talking because I wanted to practice Italian. So when offered I wasn't sure if he was in fact hitting on me or just being nice... and maybe Italians are like that? But really all I could think about was the movie Saw, so I decided to head back across the street at 1:15 am.

I slept so well.

I woke up for the first time in Europe feelign completley refreshed and ready to go! We got on a bus at 9:20, a nice bus, not a city bus, and headed towards the Via Appia. We started at the catacombs and took a 20 minute tour. It was so weird being surrounded by dead bodies and graves. Our tour guide was funny and made jokes about losing people on the tour, which I could see happening as the place was a labyrinth. After that we sat down on some steps and two of the girls presented on the Via Appia and roads in general. We proceeded to walk down the ancient path and took many pictures. After that on the walk back I was talking to Crispin, one of the professors and she told me about a summer program for high school students that she's starting in Rome this summer. We talked and I offered to spread the word at the national convention this summer. This only made me like her that much more.

Now I made some boiled eggs, for the first time in my life and am off to the supermarket and bancomat!