"Be careful not to fall off, but no one really cares anyway"

So I’m pretty far behind on updating my blog. My friend Rosemary, who is tudyign abroad in Paris this semester met me in Rome last week for her Spring Break. I’m pretty sure that things could not have worked out better because she got to spend the week with us in Sorrento and come to all of our sites with us. It was wonderful for me to get to spend so much time with her and have her experience my crazy life that I’ve had for the last three months. Plus, she blended in so well with our group. I think everyone enjoyed having a new face because otherwise we only see each other ALL THE TIME.

Buona Pasqua 4/8/07
On Easter morning we all got up early. Most of the group was wanting to go to St. Peter’s Square for the Pope’s service. We took the metro down to the Vatican and arrived around 8. I was expecting the square to be packed and us to have to stand in a crowd for two hours until the service started and then as long as the service took. When we got there though, most of the chairs they had set up were still empty, so I figured they were for important people and we wouldn’t be able to get in. there were several checkpoints we had to cross to get to the various sections of seating. Security was minimal at the Vatican. Each one when went through, I was sure we were going to be turned away. But the guards kept letting us through. By the time we stopped we were in the very first section of seating; the next closest section to action was the stage where the pope sat.
We had a few hours to wait before the service started so we watched St. Peter’s fill up with people. Twenty minutes after we arrived, the entire square behind us had filled. There were people from all over the world there. Everyone brought flags of their countries and they were waving them all high. It seemed more like the world cup then the Catholic Church’s most important service of the year. There were lots of South American flags- Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil. I saw a Lebanese flag, there were a bunch of Ukrainians, next to them people from Germany and people from Luxembourg. There was also an American family with three daughters who brought their priest with them. There were also lots flags from the region in Germany where Benedicto is from.
I didn’t really expect the pope to do much, just to wave from the window. But he lead the entire service for two hours. There was a large choir and readings in Italian, French, Spanish and English. The pope spoke in Latin and Italian. At the end of the service he spoke for about twenty minutes with a prayer in Italian. I could understand the gist of it because words like “terrismo” and “Darfur” translate pretty easily. He prayed for all the regions of the world in trouble. And at the very end, the best part of the entire service, Benedicto said “Happy Easter” in probably 30 different languages. It was incredible because everyone cheered with their flags whenever he spoke in their country’s language. Apparently Korean sounds funny to everyone in the world because when he read that the Koreans cheered and everyone else laughed. Whenever he would pause for a little while, everyone waved their flags higher and a lot of people shouted the “Benedicto” cheer. There is a cheer for the pope!!
Easter service at the Vatican has been my favorite experience so far on this trip even though I did really miss Easter at home.

Ro in Rome
The day after Easter, Rosemary got to Rome after 18 hours on an overnight train from Paris. We went and checked into her hostel, which is really close to our hotel in Rome before going on the fastest tour of Rome in history. Since we were leaving the next day for Sorrento, we had a lot to see in one afternoon. We jumped on the metro and went to the Colosseum, the Forum Romanum, the Imperial Fora, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and the Vatican. The St. Peter’s were still set up for the Easter service; it was cool to see all the chairs without anyone in them. That night Rosemary met the whole group over Indian food for Erika’s birthday.

On Tuesday, we took the train to Sorrento in southern Italy. Rosemary got to stay in a triple with Nicole and I for all six of our nights there and she went to all of our sites with us all week. Her enthusiasm for it was a little greater than ours most of the time because she hasn’t been doing it everyday for three months. From Sorrento, we took the train every morning up the Bay of Naples to see Pompeii, Herculaneum, Naples Museum, Paestum. I had my two reports, which I had to prepare over Christmas break, back to back in Pompeii and Naples Museum. My site report was on a Pompeian villa with first Pompeian style paintings. Laney’s handout art project went well. Everyone enjoyed it! The next day I did my paper presentation on Eros (sexuality). I presented right after our appointment in the Secret Room of the museum where all of the finds from various brothels are displayed. I practiced it on the train on the way to Naples and the man next to me definitely spoke English because he looked very uncomfortable as I talked.

After the museum in Naples, a few of us decided to go get pizza because Naples is the home of pizza (which I didn’t know). We walked around for a while and ran into one that looked like a hole in the wall but it was called Il Presidente and had an American flag on the sign. Usually that’s a major deterrent but it still looked good. As it turns out though, they changed the name after Bill Clinton visited and the basement was packed with Italians getting lunch. We were the only English speakers in there and the pizza was AMAZING!

4/15/07
The fifteenth was out last scheduled free day until France which worked our perfectly because it was also Rosemary’s 21st birthday. We had mimosas with blood orange juice in the morning then we took the ferry to Capri for the day. The island was beautiful even thought it was pretty crowded. Ro, Anne, Jess B, Scott and I got tickets for the Blue Grotto. We got on a boat with a Japanese tour group. Outside the grotto, we had to get into smaller boats to go inside. All five of us went in one boat so the girls had to squish together on one end. Going in we had to duck as low as we could because the boat just barely fit under the entrance. That part was a little frightening! But inside the grotto was absolutely beautiful. The light next to the water was such a bright blue. The tour guide tried to entertain us with singing but that didn’t detract too much from the experience.
We spent the rest of the afternoon between the beach where we had a picnic and the upper town which was full of designer shops. That really wasn’t our scene so we got some gelato and headed back down.

4/16/07
On Monday, we got the devastating news about Tech. It was Rosemary’s last night with us in Rome. Vincoli told us when he saw it flashed on the Italian news. I didn’t think that I would ever be reading about Blacksburg, Va in a European newspaper but the story covered the front pages of Roman newspapers for two days. Ro reported that the same was true in Dublin papers as well.