Continuing from the last post...

Yesterday, after the art store, there was just a lot of general exploring of the town of Frascati. It is so pretty and there are so many interesting little stores. I am having difficulty trying to figure out how to find the apostrophe on this Italian keyboard, so I am avoiding contractions whenever possible. Lots of different and neat little stores for all sorts of things. Stationery stores, bookstores, lots of pizzerias--a pizzeria is not always necessarily a pizza place! Sometimes it is a sit down restaurant. I had dinner at a local restaurant, had tortinelli bolognese.

Finally catching up to today... I was woken up by the other girls for breakfast. I actually had woken up at two in the morning earlier today, since my sleeping habits still werent quite adjusted to Italy yet, so I had to take two Tylonel PMs to get back to sleep. So I was pretty groggy for the first few hours this morning. This morning, after breakfast, I came to the Internet cafe and typed up the previous post. Afterwards, Kate and I (Kate came with me to the cafe as well) went back to the hotel room, and Mica, Kate and I-- and we got Natasha at the last minute-- got ready to go to Rome. We spent a considerable amount of time waiting for the bus, gave up on it and bought tickets for the train instead. We got to Termini train station, and Termini is a lot more massive than I thought- I had only seen a small part of it before! Huge and chaotic, and it apparently is the central grand station for all of Italy. We kept an eye out for gypsies here--they will do sneaky things like throw yogurt in your eyes to make you drop your stuff so they can steal your items. All of us were pretty well prepared, and we were holding onto our stuff really tightly so no one bothered us.

We got bus tickets to take us to Travestere, an older, medieval section of Rome. We really didnt know what we were doing today, and when we got there, we just mainly wandered around. We had dinner at a very nice cafe, and Mom will be shocked... I ate a gnocchi platter with mussels. Yeah, I ate mussels. Oh, and also, the other day I ate sausage and mushroom pizza. Yes, I ate mushrooms. I have decided that while I am here, I want to try new things and try not to be picky. I am avoiding tomatoes, but that is because it gives me acid problems. My lunch was a mere five euros for this fantastic mussel platter, and then after that we explored a bit until we found a bit of a piazza.

In the piazza was this old, old small cathedral called S. Maria of Travestere. It had all kinds of lovely things on the interior, solid massive granite columns with Ionic features, intricate mosaic patterns in the floor, frescos and oil paintings all over the place, a coffered ceiling with gold gilt, frescos directly on the ceiling, trompe l'oeil (paintings designed to fool the eye into thinking the item depicted is real and three dimensional), life-sized and beautifully sculpted angels in the round perching on top of windows, stained glass, small niches on the sides with their own paintings and objects -- these were all sort of shrines that you could worship. The church was really great to look at, and it by no means is the best one in Rome.

After the church, we wandered around a bit more and settled in at a coffeeshop/gelati place. I indicated that I wanted the 2.50 cup for gelati, and then he asked me if I wanted it in a glass, indicating a parfait glass. I assumed he was just going to give me the 2.50 amount in the glass, as we were eating outside at one of the tables. The waiter brought out this ENORMOUS glass of chocolate chip gelati with two wafer crackers stuck in it, and it was delicious, although I had to share some of it, there was just simply too much of it to eat. Gelati shops are everywhere, and apparently it is more or less a daily staple in the diet of Italians. But no Italians are really fat at all, they care deeply about their personal appearances. It turned out the gelati was six euros, and so that means I paid $10 for ice cream. Rats. I know now to ask for it specifically in the paper cup or the cone, but at least they brought me a large amount of it so it's not like I got ripped off or anything. I just finally found the apostrophe key! During the gelati and coffee break though, there were people smoking on either side of us, and some ash must have gotten into my eye, because it started itching like madly, and Natasha told me I actually had white stuff on my eyelashes. They actually told me I was getting hives around the corner of my eyes because I was rubbing it so much. It got better about after a hour and half of trying to leave it alone.

After the gelati and coffee, we decided to start heading back for Frascati since it was getting pretty late in the afternoon. We found the bus stop after some more wandering (after directions by a street vendor and a warning to watch out for pickpockets). We were vigilant and got back to Termini train station and back to Frascati without any problems. I took a shower while the other roommates went out to put more minutes on their phone. I came back to this Internet cafe to make this post. So in all, a pretty nice day--the most important thing about today was that we were able to start getting comfortable with knowing how to get around on public transportation.

Tomorrow I would really love to do something like go out to some smaller but famous town like Pisa or Ravenna or Assisi for one of the famous chapels there. Today, I was horrified to find out that the chapel of St. Francis in Assisi was apparently destroyed in an earthquake two years ago. This particular church was completely covered in murals by Giotto, one of the most famous artists of the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, and apparently it is completely gone now.

On the bus ride to and from Travestere, we saw all kinds of really fantastic things-crumbling thousand year old ruins, assorted archaeological sites, the Column of Trajan, a brief snatching view of the Colosseum, this ridiculously large building completely covered in all sorts of monuments (which I'll find out the name of later9, more aqueducts and so on. So today was really just a sort of introduction to how Rome feels! I'm looking forward to our organized class trips starting on Monday where we'll definitely be going to specific places.

Italians are just like they are in the movie--they talk very seriously about anything and use a lot of hand gestures and body language. It's really cute to watch. It's really easy to tell the difference between Italians and tourists. But the Italians don't really look down on tourists that are dressed badly, they apparently only care if other Italians are dressing badly. Interesting.

Also, my sinuses hate Italy. They definitely flare up whenever I'm outdoors. When we had walked into the cathedral earlier today, I had been sneezing nonstop, but after a few minutes inside, that ceased until we left. But having allergies is a small price to pay for being in this stunning area.