Paris!

This is an overdue post, but I have a good reason for not getting around to it yet...I was actually (gasp!) doing schoolwork pretty much straight from the time I got back from France on Monday morning through Thursday night. We had two projects due that night, one for studio and one for urbanism. It's nice to have them both turned in and have a relatively work-free weekend ahead of me (or at least a chance to catch up on some non studio work--I have a marker drawing for watercolor and a few churches to visit and analyze for urbanism, but both of those should be pretty enjoyable, actually).

Anyway, my trip is more interesting to read about than my homework schedule...so, I left last Wednesday morning for Paris. It was actually more like the middle of the night, though, because I had to get to the train station in time to take the 4:30 bus to the airport for my 7:30 flight. For some reason traveling cheaply usually seems to involves lots of legs in the journey. All of that went smoothly and I landed in Paris and took yet another bus from that airport to the city. The drive was about an hour long, and if I didn't know better I'd have thought we were driving through the midwest--we even passed cornfields. The bus dropped us off right by a metro station, and I successfully navigated my way to THE Notre Dame cathedral, where I had arranged to meet my friend Julie. I also successfully bought a metro ticket from a machine that was in French, without knowing a word of French. I was proud of myself until I found out later that I COULD have just changed the language setting to English. Then I just felt silly for not realizing that. Ah well. I got to Notre Dame about an hour before Julie and I were meeting, but mass was starting right as I walked in, so I was unexpectedly able to hit up daily mass! (That's happened to me fairly frequently, actually, and I suspect that He Himself may have a hand in arranging that:-) ).


Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame! :-)

When Julie came, she took me to her favorite panini place (based on quality and on price) for lunch. Unfortunately, though, Wednesday turns out to be the day that she has class for about 12 hours (I'm only exaggerating slightly), so we couldn't hang out in the afternoon. She suggested that I go to the Louvre, though, which seemed like a good idea, especially because it was raining. I got in for free thanks to being a student residing in Europe, and spent all afternoon wandering around in the midst of amazing artwork. The Louvre is HUGE. Even with all the time I spent there, I still didn't see everything. But I did see some pretty cool stuff--including the Mona Lisa, of course...but to be honest it didn't seem that much different or better than Da Vinci's other pieces. I also saw a lot of things that I had learned about last year in Architectural History and seen lots of pictures of, so it was cool to see them in person. And I didn't remember that most of those things were in the Louvre, so every time I came across something that I recognized it was a cool little "Oh! I know what that is!" moment. Here's one of those such things:


Note the size of the doorway compared to the size of this guy.

By the time I left, it was getting dark. The glass pyramid thing at the entrance looked really awesome all lit up, so I have a fairly hilarious series of pictures of me attempting to take one of myself with the museum in the background. Here's one of the better ones:


By "better" I mean "better of me". It doesn't quite capture the stuff behind me, though, so here's a good one of that.


One of these days I'll master that self-photography thing...and have pictures like this AND with me in them.

After my mini photo shoot, I met up with Julie and our other friend Meghan who's also studying in Paris, and we went back to their dorm--I guess that's the best word for it. A bunch of university students live there, anyway, but in singles, and they each have their own bathroom, and there's a kitchen on every floor. So a pretty fancy dorm.

On Thursday, we were all able to spend the whole day seeing the sights of Paris together, because Meghan doesn't have class on Thursdays and Julie has one from 8-10am. Nice for them, and lucky for me too. We started at Sacre Coeur, an impressive looking church built high up on a hill. It's fairly recent, built around the beginning of the 20th century, I think. (In America, that would be a really old church...but here it's practically new). It's built in a classical style, and I liked it alot. It also has perpetual adoration in the main part of the church, which is pretty cool. Here's the view as you approach it:



From there we wandered around the neighborhood near the church, and got paninis again for lunch. We spent the afternoon walking around, too. Here's a picture of a random sign we saw:


It says "I was in Paris". Pretty accurate.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant with authentic French food. I had French onion soup with French bread, and steak and French fries (apparantly that's a common combination). It was pretty good, but I think I like Italian food better, to be honest. I also tried one of Julie's escargot, but didn't really like it. It was too much work to get it out of the shell in the first place, and too squishy. But I'm glad I tried it.

That week also happened to be fall break for the ND students studying in London, and another one of our friends from there was getting in to Paris Thursday night with a few other Londoners, so we went and met them by the Eiffel Tower after dinner. It's really pretty at night--all lit up, and it sparkles for 5 minutes on the hour every hour.


Walsh reunion in Paris! From left: me, Julie, Tina, and Meghan

The next day, Friday, Julie and Meghan both didn't have class, so they did the tourist thing with me again. We saw two main things: the Shrine of the Miraculous Medal where Mary appeared to St. Catherine Laboure, and we actually went up the Eiffel Tower. Both were awesome. Here's the shrine:


St. Catherine's incorrupt body is preserved to the left of the altar.

And here's a shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower!


This is the Seine river. I had to look up how to spell that, because like most French words, how it's written and how it's pronounced don't necessarily have a direct correlation.

After that, we got a quick dinner and went back to the Louvre, because Tina and her London friends hadn't been there yet. Before I knew it it was time to head to the train station for my overnight trip to Lourdes! Julie, Meghan, and Jim (another ND student in Paris) very kindly escorted me to the station to make sure I got there alright, and after killing time browsing the teeny English section in a few bookstores, I boarded the train!

I think I'm going to pull another "to be contined" on this one...so stay tuned for my weekend in Lourdes!

Field Trip (Part 3, aka Venice!)

So, I left off last time with our vaporetto ride to the hotel, which actually wasn't a hotel--it was a converted convent. I'm pretty sure a religious order or consecrated group of lay people of some sort still has some connection to it, but I'm not entirely sure what that is. But apparently they rent out rooms fairly cheaply to travelers, just like a hotel. The cool part is that the decoration scheme is left over from the convent days--there are statues of Mary everywhere, and crucifixes in every room. Anyway, the first thing on our minds when we got there was getting dinner. We ended up at a little pizza place that somebody's guidebook recommended that had amazing prices and giant pizzas, so Katie and Evan and I split a diavolo (pepperoni) for 10 euro (total, not each). Drinks were only a euro, and on the way back we spotted a gelato place with cones for a euro, so we had a very cheap full meal. And then we pretty much went to bed, because we were exhausted.

The next day, Friday, we had our usual tour in the morning and time to work on assignments in the afternoon. My tour group went to several churches in the morning, but none of the big name ones (aka none that I had heard of before). I also rode a gondola during a tour! It was only 50 cents! And it was only across the Grand Canal, but still...this is me on the gondola (I promise! Even though you can't see the gondola part...)

The boats above my head and to the left are what the one we're on looked like

For dinner on Friday, the professors suggested that we all go somewhere together and "have time to socialize", so we went to a restaurant right by where we were staying. I had lasagna, and it was quite delicious. None of the professors sat at our table, so it wasn't THAT different from a regular meal, but it was still neat being there with everyone else around, and definitely a good idea. We get to see a different side of the professors on field trips, and it makes them seem more like real people and not just like teachers.

Saturday's tour was just three churches: Il Redentore, San Giorgio Maggiore (both by Palladio, who also did La Rotonda), and Santo Spirito, a crazy looking church that I had to draw for my "watercolor" class. I really like Il Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore, both the exteriors and the interiors. (Actually, I like San Giorgio's exterior more, but Il Redentore's interior) Anyway, both are right along the Grand Canal, and are actually meant to be viewed from across the canal. Here's me with San Giorgio behind me!

and a random man walking by...oops

the second try was more successful

When the tour on Saturday was finished, we were basically done with class for the week. We just had to finish up our assignments in the afternoon, and then enjoy the city Saturday night and Sunday morning! And I actually got to do really cool things during both those times. Saturday night I went to a classical music concert that Aida, one of the coordinators of the architecture program, had told us about. It was a string group (a couple violins, maybe a viola, a cello, a bass, and a harpsichord), and they played a few different pieces, but the main one was Vivaldi's Four Seasons (aka Quattri Staggioni). It was incredible! I really love how stringed instruments sound in general, I think. And the Four Seasons is a fun piece of music. (The other people I was with, Evan and Tiffani, are both more knowledgeable about classical music than I am, and so would probably be able to use a better word than "fun" to describe it...)

On Sunday morning, I got to go to a high mass in the Basilica di San Marco. That was also pretty incredible. It was in a side chapel, not the main church, but the space was still huge. The walls and ceiling were covered in mosaics....just like the cathedral in St. Louis:-) Also, Venice has been more influenced by Eastern cultures than other parts of Italy, and the Byzantine-ish-ness definitely comes through (in the architecture, anyway. Not really the liturgy).

Here's a fun fact about Venice: it's sinking. I can't remember exactly why; I know we talked about it in my Italian class last year...but it's demonstrated in a very real way by the fact that the Piazza San Marco floods on a fairly regular basis. It was flooded on Sunday morning, in fact. They set up little elevated walkways everywhere so you can get around without getting wet, luckily. It reminds you that things aren't permanent, as some day Venice will most likely be underwater. But it also creates some sweet picture opportunities...

note the cool reflection in the water!

After mass, we wandered around for a little while and then headed to the train station. The ride back went smoothly, and we arrived back in Rome on Sunday evening! All in all, it was a fantastic trip.

Now we're on a week of break, so I'm actually typing this from my friend Julie's room in Paris. I got here yesterday and will leave tomorrow night for Lourdes! Paris has been awesome so far too. I'll have to expand more on it later, but for now I'll give a brief list of what I've seen so far--Notre Dame, the Louvre, Sacre Coure, the Pompidou Center, the Moulin Rouge, the Opera House, the Arc de Triumph...we're going to the Eiffel Tower and the Miraculous Medal shrine for sure tomorrow. Now we're off to eat authentic French food for dinner!

Field Trip! (Part 2)

To continue where I left off in the last post...we arrived in Verona on Tuesday night. My hotel room there was amazing--I was in a quad with 3 other girls, and we had a small kitchen, a small but nice dining room table, 2 big rooms, and a bathroom with a jacuzzi in it, no joke. After we got excited about it and had practically all of the other archies come in to see it, we went to find dinner. We went to a pretty typical on-the-cheap-side restaurant, and most of us got pizza. On the way, we saw a building lit up on a hill a little ways away, and I decided I would try to run there in the morning. I went the wrong way a few times, but eventually found my way up that hill in time to see the sunrise over the city...it was absolutely gorgeous. Verona has a river running through it and is surrounded by a few green hills with trees on them, so it is very beautiful, especially from up above. Also, when I got up the hill I learned that it wasn't just any building up there, it was a church dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. She has a special significance to me, because the grotto at Notre Dame is a small scale replica of the one at Lourdes (which I will be seeing this Saturday!!). At first I couldn't actually get into the church, or anywhere near it, because there was a gate leading up to it that was closed. There was also a sign that said it didn't open til 9. However, at about 7:15 a guy came and unlocked the gate, and then went up to unlock the church. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to go in, because of the time and because I was wearing my running clothes, but I figured I couldn't come all that way and then not try, so I waited til the man was out of sight and then went for it. The church was dark inside, so I couldn't see very much of it, but outside behind the church there was a statue of Mary and a sort of mini grotto. I stayed there and prayed for a little while. It was awesome and totally unexpected, sort of like finding out about St. Dominic's tomb and then being able to visit it. Another small gift from Jesus and Mary:-) That was probably the highlight of Verona for me. Oh, and there was another tower to climb after lunch, and I took a picture of that church from the top...


it's in the furthest-back-and-up center, with a green roof

We left Verona earlier than usual, because we had an afternoon visit to Villa Rotonda, near Vicenza! Villa Rotondo consumed many many hours of our lives as freshman archies, because we drew it several times as we were learning how to draft: in plan, in elevation, in both 1 and 2 point perspective....and, these were the first drawings that we ever watercolored. So it has a very special significance to our class. Also, last year was the 500th birthday of Palladio, the architect who designed it, and we had a big celebration at Notre Dame that involved a cake in the shape of Villa Rotonda. So it was pretty incredible to finally see it with our very own eyes. Here it is!


all 4 sides are symmetrical, you can see 2 of them here

Besides Villa Rotonda though, Vicenza was only so-so...our hotel was sort of on the outskirts of town, so we had to take the bus in to get dinner that night, and then it took us quite a while to wander around and find a place to eat. When we finally did, it turned out to be a pretty local sort of hole in the wall place, so the food was good. I had pizza again:-) My run in the morning was alright, nothing special though--it was through busy streets with sidewalks just like the ones in cities in the U.S, so I almost could have been back there. I also have a small confession to make--for lunch in Vicenza, we went to McDonalds. They had a euro menu! So it was pretty cheap, and everything tasted the same as at home...my strawberry milkshake was quite good, in fact. We left Vicenza that evening by train, instead of bus, and arrived in Venezia (aka Venice). We had to take a vaporetto from the train station to our hotel. A vaporetto is Venice's form of public transportation--it's a boat bus, I guess. Anyway, it's pretty cool. Here's a picture of one that I took the next day (or possibly the day after, I can't remember--we were in Venice for 3 days).


the yellow one is where you stand to wait, and then the boat that says "Actv" on the side is the actual vaporetto

Part 3 will be my adventures in Venezia! A presto!

Field Trip! (Part 1)

My class field last week was awesome! There's so much to talk about I almost don't know where to start...but I suppose I should start with the very beginning (a very good place to start)--we left on a train Sunday morning for Bologna. It was a nicer one than I had been on before when we went to Cinque Terre. Thanks Notre Dame! The ride went very smoothly and we arrived in Bologna in time for lunch and then class at 2, which meant walking around the city with a professor and getting a tour, basically. That was one sort of class we had this week. The other was free time to complete our assignments, which involved sketching and analyzing different parts of the city. Each day basically followed the same schedule: I got up and ran every morning (an idea that I stole from my friend Evan--we decided it'd be sweet to run in every city we went to) breakfast at 8 (provided by the hotel--delicious. And I am now definitely a cappuccino drinker, no use denying it anymore; I don't even like to add sugar), class from 9-12 (usually the tour kind), lunch, class from 2-5 or 6 (usually the "free time" kind), and then the first half of the week we'd hop on a bus after that and arrive in our next city for dinner. We spent 3 whole days in Venice at the end of the week, though, so we didn't have to move around quite as much then.

Anyway, back to Bologna...since it was Sunday, we went to mass at 6:30, and then to dinner. After dinner, I met up with my friend Maria from ND who happens to be studying in Bologna for the year. We got gelato and walked around. It made the world seem very small, to go to a small Italian city and see someone I know there from the U.S. And it made me appreciate again the awesome opportunities that ND provides for studying abroad--I know people all over the world right now. Maria told me something interesting that I didn't know--St. Dominic is buried in Bologna! I was very excited to hear that and of course decided immediately that I would have to visit his tomb the next day. Luckily, that wasn't very hard to work out, as it turned out to be one of our stops during morning class. It was amazing. I also got to go back to that church for mass at 12:30, and it was one of my favorite Italian masses so far. The chapel was small and peaceful, and the people there reminded me of daily mass go-ers back in the U.S. That afternoon the temperature suddenly dropped and it rained a lot, which was sort of uncomfortable, but not too bad. Bologna, like many other cities, has a huge tower that can climbed up by a lot of stairs, so a group of us decided to do that. Here we are at the top:


From left to right: Alex, Adriana, me, Evan, Anne

Bologna actually was supposed to have 2 huge towers right next to each other, but the other one was leaning too much and had to be chopped short. The one that we climbed is also leaning, but not as much. Turns out Pisa is definitely not the only place where towers lean...

After Bologna, we went to Montova (Italian for Mantua). This was Monday night. The days and cities definitely started to blend into each other. Liturgy of the Hours and the mysteries of the rosary helped me to somewhat keep track of the days, but still. Anyway, our dinner in Montova was one of the best meals I've had so far in Italy, if not THE best. The atmosphere was great--Evan and Katie and I went to a small restaurant on a piazza, and sat at a table with a canvas umbrella thing overhead and a candle on the table. We had delicious red wine. I had risotto, a type of rice, and some grilled vegetables. Our waitress was very nice and we even got a student discount. It was very peaceful. Life felt good. Afterwards, we walked around the town a little bit and found 3 cool things: a milk vending machine where you could get a bottle of fresh milk for a euro, which we did of course, a giant echo tube, and a castle with a real moat. A successful night. In the morning I ran by some lakes, and felt kind of like I was back at ND...the highlight of the rest of the day was definitely seeing Palazzo del Te in the afternoon. It's a building designed by Guilio Romano, who studied under Raphael, and we've been hearing about it since freshman year...it's one of the things I remember best from our architectural theory class 2nd semester of freshman year, actually. It's unique because in classical architectural, there is a certain way that elements are supposed to be put together, and here Romano doesn't do it right, but he does it in a way that shows he knows what's supposed to happen and deliberately chooses to change a few things around a little bit. One of my professors described it as a sort of "architecture inside joke". So here's Katie and I standing in the courtyard!



Next we hopped on the bus for Verona, but I think I'll leave you in suspense for a bit as to what all happened there, because this post is so long I don't have time to write it all now...it's going to have to happen in installments:-) But more to come soon!

La mia settimana

This post will probably not be as exciting as my last one, because I've had a pretty normal week. However, I wanted to blog today because I won't have a chance to for a little while--next week we're going on a class field trip and I'm not bringing my lappy. Plus, internet isn't free at most of the hotels we're staying in. I'm sure I'll have all kinds of cool stuff to write about when I get back from that, so get excited for the week after next...but for now, I'll try to come up with something interesting to say about each day of this past week. (I suppose this is a good exercise in finding the beauty in the ordinary...)

Monday--I wasn't as sore from Cinque Terre as I thought I'd be!

Tuesday--we did human figure gesture drawing in my "watercolor" class. If you know what that is then you know why it's an experience worth mentioning.

Wednesday--I met and talked with an Italian probably more than I ever had before...after noon mass I stayed in the church to pray a rosary, but ended up getting kicked out because it was siesta time. The guy who told me I had to go turned out to be walking in the same direction as I was, and we chatted a bit. By that I mean, he talked and I listened...he didn't speak much English and quickly figured out that while I can understand basic Italian, I can't say much of anything myself. But he turned out to be a philosophy student at a University pretty close to where our studio is, and told me that he has another American friend there who's in the same position as me--being able to understand but not speak Italian. And he was surprised that I was Catholic, because he didn't think many Americans were. I guess what he said isn't that important, just the fact that he was saying it in Italian, and I understood it all (mostly)!

Thursday--the lasagna we had for dinner was amazing.

Friday--we had a "mid-project" review for our urban reconstruction project. It's not really mid-project, because it's due the Thursday after we get back from break. Anyway, it went well! The professors liked our design for the most part (it's a group project), and we finally figured out our roofs successfully! They had been giving us quite a bit of trouble before. Also, this was the one month anniversary of our arrival in Rome:-)

Saturday--I bought a plane ticket to Egypt for a week in January! Also, in about an hour I'm going to leave to pray the rosary with the Pope! It's a special thing for university students, and the intention of the rosary is "Africa". A broad topic to pray for, so it's a good thing there will be a lot of us there.

Well, pray that we have safe travels next week!

Verso l'alto and Other Hiking Adventures

I love water. I love drinking it, especially when I eat pizza that's apparently really salty for dinner and I'm thirsty all night. I love showering in it, especially when I'm tired and dirty and haven't bathed in about 48 hours. And mostly, I love water in large quantities. HUGE quantities. Unimaginable amounts of water, like the ocean, or even a lake, or here in Italy, the sea. Something about it just captivates me, and I could sit there and look at it for hours. It's so fascinating, and always invites a bit of reflection, too. Why am I talking about this? Well, I got to spend alot of time by the sea this weekend! A group of friends and I (there were 9 of us altogether) went to Cinque Terre for the weekend. Cinque Terre literally means five earths, or five lands, or something to that effect. It's an area in northern Italy with five small coastal towns connected by hiking trails.

We took an overnight train to get there, and arrived at about 5 in the morning in the first town. (Well, half our group got there then. The other half accidentally missed the stop we needed to transfer in, and had to come up with new travel plans on the fly. Luckily, everything worked out and they made it just about an hour later than us...but that's another story). Anyway, it was still dark. We didn't really have anywhere to go or anything to do, so we went out to the beach just outside the train station. We hung out there til the sun rose and then got started with our activities for the day at about 8ish. We walked around the town, bought passes for the trails, and started hiking. The trails between the towns have a wide variety of difficulty, and we decided to go the direction that would give us the hardest hikes first, and then the easier ones at the end. So our first hike took about 2 hours, and was alot of up and down and narrow little paths.

I had a lot of "verso l'alto" moments, where I had to repeat that phrase to myself as we were going up a particularly steep portion to have the energy to keep going. "Verso l'alto" means, roughly, "towards the top". It comes from Blessed Pier Georgio Frassiti--he was a young Italian man who lived in the early 1900s. He's awesome for a lot of reasons, and one of my current favorite saints (even though he's not quite a saint yet), but among other things he loved to go mountain climbing. Once, on a picture of him halfway up a mountain, he wrote "verso l'alto". Towards the top of the mountain, and towards the top in our faith. Keep striving, keep ascending. And the journey matters, not just the destination. So anyway, sometimes I remind myself of that when I'm running up hills, and it was quite helpful during this hike, too:-)

It also helped that the scenery was absolutely gorgeous. We were basically walking along trails built into the side of a cliff the whole time, so when we looked right we saw the sea way down below us, when we looked ahead we saw more cliffs off in the distance with more of the towns, and when we looked left we saw up the rest of the cliff we were on. For awhile it seemed like every time we would round a little corner the view was more incredible that the past ones had been, like it just kept getting better and better. (And that reminded me of "further up and further in!" from Narnia).

Anyway, after a couple of hours we finished our first section of the hike and got to see the second small town. We walked around for a bit and then sat on some rocks by the sea to rest and refuel with sandwiches and fruit.

The next section of the trail was also difficult and took a long time, made even more so by a little detour we decided to take...we saw a sign that advertised a beach, and decided to follow it. We were pretty high up at the time, and so had to descend quite a ways to get there. The path leading down was probably the second most challenging part of the day, the first being coming back up. It was definitely worth it, though. We got in the water right when we finally reached the shore, and it felt great. The waves were coming in pretty hard, so we had to exert a fair amount of effort just to remain in the same place and not get carried out to sea or crashed into the rocks along the beach...the whole experience was pretty intense from start to finish. We definitely earned that beach and the water, and that made it even more awesome.

At one point, after we had gotten out of the water and were just relaxing on the shore (and eating more sandwiches and fruit), I wandered down a little ways away by myself and sat on a large rock right by the water. The waves were crashing on the rocks right in front of me. I just watched, mezmorized, for a little while, and then of course a few reflections/analogies came to mind that relate that water to life...

First, I thought about the rocks that the waves were breaking on. They weren't huge, but they were pretty big. As the waves came in, these rocks interrupted their flow and the water just splashed up and over them, pretty violently. In other areas without these large rocks, the water just continued undisturbed all the way to shore. From my point of view, seeing the big picture, it was obvious that the solidity of these rocks was what was causing to waves to crash hard against them. But from the rocks' point of view, it must have seemed like the whole sea was nothing but turbulence. So then make those things represent us, engaged in our spiritual battles, and you can probably guess the connection here...the more solid you are, the more evil is going to seem to crash around you. You'll come up against difficulties and challenges, simply because you refuse to be moved along with whatever direction the world is going. But you will be able to stand firm and not be shaken. And in fact these crashes are proof that you ARE solid, even if it doesn't feel like that. This isn't really a new idea, just a new way of thinking about it that I'd never had before...

Also, after thinking about the craziness and the violence of the waves coming and going out, it seemed like quite a contrast to then look far out to the horizon and see such peaceful and quiet waters. You can hardly tell that there are waves at all out there, in fact. And then I thought about how gigantic the sea is surface area wise, and it occured to me that most of the sea is in that calm, steady state. It's just on the edges where the changes occur. And that I compared to way we experience emotions. Ideally, we should have a strong inner core, peaceful and steady. On the surface (or on the edges..), our feelings might change, emotions going up and down like waves flowing in and out, but that doesn't affect that other, deep part of us. And as long as that deep part really IS strong enough to not be affected by small surface changes, then those shouldn't worry us, whether they're good or bad.

When we were finished at the beach, we had to climb back up to the main path. It wasn't easy, but we all made it, all in one piece, no less. From there it was just a short walk to the next town, where we celebrated by getting granite and in my case, gelato. It was late afternoon by this point, and we'd only been to three of the five towns. Luckily, the next two trails were MUCH easier than the first two, and much shorter as well. We breezed through them in no time, and ended up in the last town just in time for dinner. We went to a fairly nice sit down place, and everyone but me had seafood. That's really the only food I'm picky about and won't eat if I don't absolutely have to. My pizza margherita (cheese pizza) was delicious, though, and I splurged on a dessert (tartufa--a kind of fancy ice cream), which made it even better. By this point we were all pretty much exhausted, but with the good feeling of knowing we had really done something that day. We had a small mix up when we tried to get to our hostel--we had planned to take the 10:30 shuttle bus from the town, but it turned out that that bus only ran til the end of September. We had to take a 10 minute train ride to the next town and then take a taxi. It worked out alright though, and we got to experience crazy Italian driving firsthand.

We went to sleep almost as soon as we got there, but woke up early to take the first bus back into town. We went to the beach (a different, much calmer and much more easily accessible beach), and went for a morning swim. It felt great, although the water was a bit cold. It was really clear, though--we could see straight to the bottom even in places that were seven or so feet deep. We hung out on the beach for awhile, and then went to mass at 11 in the local church. It was a really neat mass. First of all, it seemed more like a parish than the churches I've been to here in Rome. They had a bulletin, and even a couple of altar servers. Also, the altar was set up for the priest to celebrate ad oriens, and I realized again that it really does just make more sense that way. At the end, the priest said some special prayers to Mary, because the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is this week. Then for the closing song, we sang the Salve Regina--in Latin, in the same tune that I know. I was pretty excited about that, because I really like singing it in general, and because there I was in little Riomaggiore, able to participate fully, in that part at least, with my Italian brothers and sisters. It was cool.

After that, we got lunch and sat on some rocks by the water to eat it. Then it was time to catch our train back to Rome. Traveling back went smoothly, and we arrived at about 6:15 pm. It was a great trip, and now I'm really looking forward to doing more traveling, which I'll get to in about a week. The week after this one is our week long class field trip to Bologna, the Veneto, and Venice, and then after that we have our week long fall break. I do have a fair amount of work to get done before then, but I definitely have things to look forward to!