Day 38 (7/12/11): We had a couple new people in class today! It seems like such a rare thing these past few weeks, when it was so common my first few weeks here. We spent the class reviewing homework, then did group activities for a while. At intensive, I was the only one there for the first 10 minutes! It was weird, but kind of nice to have so much talking time with AnneMarie. Eventually a few more people showed up, and we listened to an audio conversation...

Day 37 (7/11/11): I had a great walk to school today! It's so wonderful that I'm here in Rome and able to experience all it has to offer! What a great city :o) At class today, we started Level 3!!! We mostly did a review of passato prossimo and all the exceptions/changes to the form. We also reviewed some other things we had learned from Level 2, but I'm hoping that means we will be learning something new tomorrow. At intensive we separated into pairs to t...

Day 36 (7/10/11): Today's plan was to go to mass at Santa Maria Maggiore and tour that church a bit, then head to the catacombs in the afternoon. I woke up this morning, looked up the info for both places, and headed out to attend the 12:15 p.m. mass. I love the story behind Santa Maria Maggiore. Mary appeared to someone in a dream and told them she wanted a church to be built in her name, and that she would be in touch about the location. Later that year, o...

Day 35 (7/9/11): Andrew and I met up to go to Tivoli for the day today! We arrived at the train station and had no problem buying our tickets… but then we couldn't find our train! We only had a few minutes, so we went with my gut feeling on the train and luckily hopped on the right one. We didn't realize we had to switch trains at a different station, though, and were very lucky to sit with some off-duty train workers who helped us out! Eventually, we arri...

Day 34 (7/8/11): We took our test today, and I was a little disappointed in my performance. I made a few silly mistakes on it, and if I had paused for a second while taking it I would have written the right answer! Oh well, I still did okay. After the exam, we learned about common Italian hand gestures. It was interesting in class to hear everyone talk about what the same hand gesture means in their countries. In intensive, we had a group activity of openin...