First Week

Hey! I know I haven't written in a while and, to some, it's been disappointing. However, I really have not been doing that much this week since school started! :( I have class Monday - Thursday until 12:45 (MW) and 2:15 (TTh). I am not very good at Italian but I hope that changes soon. After class, I'm usually pretty tired (lame, I know) so a group of us have been coming back to our apartment to nap, hang around, and make dinner. I have been making a lot of my own meals, or joining other girls who make meals, so hopefully I come back and have a few essential items I can cook on my own! That's pretty much how my days have been going. I'm hoping it gets more exciting once we start to travel.

I went for a walk and a run in the nearby park. It is HUGE and it's actually really pretty. It's just so hot here that running is almost unbearable and because of all the hills and non-paved pathways, I'm usually dying. The park has a cute pond with turtles and swans and it has some fountains around. I enjoyed it and would like to do it more often, but I'm always so whipped out from the sun that running is the least of my priorities (shocking!).

I have been trying a lot of new gelato flavors and found the BEST gelateria. It is right neat the Pantheon and it's called Del Palma (I think?). They have almost 100 flavors of gelato and it was actually amazing! I got peach (with real chunks of fruit in it) and mango and they were seriously out-of-this-world good! :) I will seriously be going back A LOT for gelato! I also tried bacio (chocolate and hazelnut) and mint. Good combo. And today, I got chocolate and mixed berries. Yummy! I LOVE GELATO! I wish we had it at home.

On Thursday, we had our first field study day in art history and it was at the Roman Forum. It was so cool to go a second time with the professor and actually KNOW what the buildings are and now know some historical background about each stucture. Besides the fact that it was 2 hours in the beating sunshine, I really enjoyed it! Here is a picture of a ddecent view of the Roman Forum and a church that we saw.

Thursday night we were celebrating Kristi's birthday so, we obvioulsy had to go on a Colosseum Pub Crawl! It is very popular amoung American tourists but it was so much fun. We got a T-shirt (obviously I loved that) and it was just really fun to have a night out similar to mine in Champaign. It was definitely a good time to be with all the people on the program in that kind of environment. We will probably go on another one by the end of the program. :) HAHA.

Today, we had some trouble finding the beach but, after two hours, we found it! It was nice to relax for a couple of hours and lay in the sun. I don't really have much else to say, since living in Rome is "the sweet life of doing nothing". I'll probably post again after the weekend is over! Keep a look out! This is a picture of a good amount of us that went on the pub crawl. More pictures of this will, most definitely, be added to facebook for your viewing pleasure.