Roma!

I'm finally settled back into the school routine here in Cambridge, so it seemed high time to start catching you up on my trip! First stop, Rome, where the coffee was delicious, the streets were crowded (even more than normal, as we were there over Easter), the art and architecture were amazing, and the sense of history was overwhelming.

Ubiquitous coffee shot. Pun...intended. So much coffee was had on this trip. Most of it delicious. This cup sure was. And STRONG, too.

Of course we hit the major highlights, like the Colosseum, which almost doesn't seem real, I think partly because you're just staring up at it going "Wow, I've seen pictures of that all my life. And here it is....this is crazy." That happened a lot, actually, and it never ceased to be strange. You'd just be walking down the street and be like, oh, hello, Trajan's Column, how's it going?

We also saw the Trevi Fountain, which I loved, but so did about 8bagillion other people, I guess, because it was SO crowded!

One of my favorite parts of Rome was the Baths of Caracalla, a not-on-your-average-tourist-map site of ruins that a friend staying in Rome brought us to. The place was huge and so much of it was still in tact...

...including some amazing mosaics that just chill outside in the elements, and yet have been around since the Roman Empire!

We went in a dizzying number of churches throughout the course of this trip (with I took with two good friends from school, Katie and Andy), and they were each stunningly beautiful. Honestly, I can't even remember the name of this one, but I loved it's ceiling, and the golden light on the underside of the arches.
The art in the churches (and everywhere else, for that matter) was equally amazing. Please forgive the blurry photograph, but these are two works by Caravaggio that were on display in one of the Churches. They were in a dark apse whose lights could only be turned on by putting a coin into a machine. Italy does know how to gouge it's tourists...But it was worth it, to be that close to such amazing art.

There was so much amazing sculpture all over the city, but these two lovely pieces were in the Vatican Museum, where I could have spent days wandering around, if only we'd had the time!
The building itself was art--it seemed like every square inch was decorated with something-or-other. The opulence was overwhelming, and a actually quite saddening, as Sarah Silverman's Sell the Vatican, Feed the World and other similar sentiments came to mind more than once....
We spent an afternoon and evening walking around the Jewish Ghetto, which, while steeped in history, wasn't too much to look at. I did love the storefronts, though!
Dinner at a restaurant in the Ghetto actually provided me with one of my favorite stories from Rome. Katie, Andy, and I met up with a friend of mine and Andy's from Cambridge, a German named Konstantine, and his French friend, Xavier. The five of us went to dinner at this tiny tiny restaurant in the Ghetto, which, while being in the Jewish district, was not a Kosher restaurant. We had a very hard time ordering with our waiters, who spoke very little English (none of us spoke Italian) but were very much mocking us the entire time...it's hard to describe exactly what they were doing, but they made frequent mentions of how they were not McDonnalds and we'd have to wait a long time for our food, sighed exasperatedly when we each ordered a dish and made a big deal about how long five meals would take to prepare, laughed with each other quite obviously about us, next to our table, and were just generally very uninviting. When the food came, the waiter plopped a plate of spaghetti with pork down in front of me, and I immediately tried to explain that I had not ordered that, but just a simple spaghetti in tomato sauce. He jabbed his finger at his notepad, showing me that he'd written down pork. The thing is, I don't eat pork, as I keep Kosher, so I know I didn't order it. I tried to explain, and he just got more and more angry, saying it was my fault for ordering wrong, and raising his voice as he tried to get me to keep the plate. My friends at the table and I were all sort of shocked and stunned by the sheer awkwardness of it all, until finally Andy just erupted with a repetition of "Jewish! Kosher! Kosher! Jewish!" while pointing at me wildly. This actually seemed to do the trick, as they angrily whipped my plate away and brought back my real order a little while later. However, in their lasting graciousness, they charged me for the more expensive plate. Oh, Rome, how I will miss you....

Next stop: Florence!