Today was the second day of class. Just had one today so it wasn’t too bad except for the fact it was a 9 am class. It is high renaissance art and we have a lot of on site learning so I’m really looking forward to getting everything started. Yesterday I sat through my other 3 main courses: classical mythology, the history of the Italian mafia, and religions and cults of the Roman Empire. All of them should be very interesting and provide some interesting field trips here in Rome. The religion class should be phenomenal since we get to go through some of the ruins and walk through the timeline of the development of roman religion and its transfer to Catholicism. As we learn of the history of the roman civilization and their systems of faith, I’ll be able to walk around the city and see the ruins of the ancient temples, churches, and still standing modern day cathedrals. I believe that I have finally officially settled into Rome as we’ve been here nearly 5 days and I finally have my bearings around central Rome. I took a tour or two the first few days we were here, one practical and the other an art tour and they’ve seemed to grant me a general idea of the location of most things.
Now, for today after class I wandered around town towards the Spanish Steps in search of the bookstore. It took me quite a while to find it since it’s on a small road that cuts through behind buildings and down an alley. Prior to getting there I had lunch with Michelle at a little pizzeria…BIG MISTAKE! It was a tourist trap and we should’ve seen it coming when they spoke decent broken English and didn’t have a menu. Needless to say, I had 2 pieces of pizza and a coke and she ate lasagna and had a coke as well…cost 42 euro!!! To put that into perspective, I ate 3 pieces the day before for 6.50…I GOT RIPPED OFF TODAY! Anyway, after I calmed down from that we met up with her roommate at the bookstore and got our books for class. Seems like the college life is inescapable as I still forked up big cash for a little book. We decided to split books to make things cheaper, so I just bought one book. We also have books in our apartments that others have left behind because you can’t sell them back over here. There is an extremely tiny library at school with a very limited amount of our textbooks available for checkout so I’ll probably be doing that if I need them really bad.
I’ve been sick for the past couple days, as has everyone else on this trip. The weather over here has been taking its toll on us all. It caught up to me today, as I returned to the apartment for a nap today after a quick run to the grocery store. I slept the afternoon away, but there is always tomorrow to run around and explore. This trip has been incredible every step of the way and doesn’t seem to be slowing down!