Whew, time flies

Ciao everyone. It's the weekend for me already, what a concept! I mean, time here goes by quickly when you've got 8 hours of class, about three hours of walking, over an hour of cooking and getting ready in the span of 26 hours, since that's pretty much what it looks like between 9am Monday/Wednesday and 11am Tu/Th. It's crazy busy, plus all the reading and homework, it gets a bit insane.

But I get long weekends and good Tuesday afternoons off, which meant I had some time to do something fun, like oh, try and figure out how to bake here in our oven that has no temperature dial on it and is either on or off. But Chad was more than interested in helping me figure it out, so we ventured to the store together after looking up a few choice words for ingredients to try and make chocolate chip cookies. Of chief importance was "bicarbonato di soda" which means baking soda. Or so we thought.

We went to the store and got butter, farina 00 (or ultra fine flour), cane sugar, white sugar, salt, chocolate bars, eggs, and finally we got down to the final baking soda ingredient, and when I went up to the lady and asked "dov'e il bicarbonato di soda?," she looked at me like I was a complete idiot. I repeated and added "per dolci? Levante?" (for sweets? Leavening?" and she signals to hold on and asks her manager and comes back and hands us a box that has bread on the cover and assures us it's per dolci, so ok then, I guess we're set!

We head back and start the mixing, then realize that we don't know the conversions from grams to cups, etc, so we have to find something online to help us, and we did, and it turned out ok looking until the end when the dough was pretty whitish-yellow, like the butter. We used two sticks of butter and realized that butter sticks over here are about 30% larger than U.S. butter sticks, sooooo our batter was really buttery, not that that's a problem, right? But the biggest issue was the baking soda. We opened it, and it was little brown beads, and we realized she had given us beer yeast for beer bread and we were like "crap. What now?"

Soooo we made them anyway and our over was wayyyyy too hot and made this lovely, buttery, cookie-like mush. We still ate a lot of it, but the tops were burnt and the bottoms were mushy, but we were hungry boys who just wanted some cookies.

The smell? Still really good. And smells aren't always a good thing as far as with other people, and we were approached by tons of people wanting some and laughing at us for the not-so-beautiful outcome, but they sure liked the taste anyway. Some of our neighbor girls inhaled what we had left (about a third of a pan) in about 30 seconds after we offered it to them and so it was a success in the very limited sense of the word, but next time we'll do even better.

Whew. So that was Tuesday night. Yesterday, Bert, Addie and Alyte (girls in our class from downstairs) and I went off to our site visit at the Roman Forum, which was such a cool place the first time we visited, I was excited to go again. We rode the Metro over to the Colosseum, but I was seperated from my group due to the INSANE number of people on the Metro linea B. Oh well, they got there and I explored for a minute by myself. Now, just check out what it looks like to get off at the Colosseo Metro stop:

Arch of Constantine? Check. Colosseum? Of course. Sweet views you could only ever see here in Roma? Naturalmente i miei amici!

I met up with my group about 8 minutes later (time between Metros) and we walked the 5 minutes to the Forum where our class amassed and we got to go on a special tour, right past the cremation site of Caesar (yes, that Caesar) and into Santa Maria Antiqua, or the old church of Saint Mary. It's still being excavated and redone, but it was originally built in the 4th century and a century or two later they converted it to a Christian church, decorating the walls, apse, aisles, and pillars with beautiful frescoes. The problem with frescoes, however, is that they are painted onto plaster on the walls and unlike paintings, cannot be moved, really. So the restoration process going on is like a giant puzzle, often done in a clean environment, and then brought back to be reconstructed.

If you can see in this picture, the walls are being redone piece by piece, and it looks amazing to see something so old. 1600 years old is really, really, REALLY getting up there for frescoes, and it's amazing to see something so old being recreated from it's own ashes in a Phoenix-esque manner, it's pretty cool. I was impressed.

An equally cool treat was getting in there. They had to unlock three separate gates, all 10 feet tall with big locks and chains, for us to get in there, and all the excavation materials are still in there, they just weren't in there that morning. Cool stuff, we're seeing something really old.

In addition to these frescoes which have been here for a few years and are still being worked on, one was just put back in its original spot, so recently that even our professoressa hadn't seen it yet, which was a treat, for sure. Her excitement was palpable, and it made me feel enthusiastic; you can tell when someone really loves what they do and are in complete fascination with the work they're seeing, it's hard not to be affected just by being in close proximity to them. It's beautiful, too, and you can see to the left, it's early Christian, Byzantine influenced art in Rome, which is a very, very limited window, allowing Art Historians to accurately date the time of this work. And you can tell who some of these people are, at least, I hope you can if it's clear enough. I'm going big too, so hopefully it can be seen. It's really cool.
After that we just toured the Forum again and saw the original Senate House of Roma, which Caesar and other leaders often spent lots of time. It's crazy to imagine such history in these places, I can't even explain it without you actually being here or seeing something like it, but know that it's cool. Like way cool.

After that, we went over to the Arch of Constantine again and checked it out and finally went over to one last church before heading back to class in rapid fashion. The Arch has lots of pictures on here already, so maybe I'll spare you a bit; feel free to go back and check the albums if you want to see more!

The day went pretty rapidly after that, and we spent most of the day laughing at how strong the dollar was getting and how fast the market seemed to be bouncing back, which was weird. The dollar is now stronger than it's ever been since I got here, which is excellent. I had class again at 4:30 so I had to head back to school, but I came back and made Tortellini con Prosciutto in Salsa Pesto Rosso, which was great and I am glad I found a way to switch up my pastas a bit, it was getting to be a bit much having it several times a week. I can never have enough good pasta, but Craig-made on a shoestring is different than good pasta, trust me. It's good, but not good, if that makes sense.

Anyway, it's now my weekend after an exciting time at Italian this morning, and I just printed off my itineraries for the weekend in Milan and Interlaken! I am bringing my computer but probably not going to update until Sunday, but if I do, I'll be sure to let you guys know. We'll be having too much fun to update (or maybe we'll just be frozen; the high in Interlaken, Switzerland on Saturday? Under 40. Home sweet home, eh?).

But yes, enjoy your Thursday, and enjoy the debate tonight; it may be one of the more riveting societal events in a very, very long time. I'm really curious to see how space cadet Palin is going to handle the debates and how Biden is going to handle her, since he has to be careful that even though he may murder her on the issues, he may not, but if he does get ahead, he runs the risk of looking like a bully and her looking sympathetic. I'm not saying that's fair, but I do think as a society, I don't know if as a whole we'd see her getting hammered on the issues and coming away feeling like she's underqualified, but rather sympathetic and Biden looking like a mean old grouch. Should be exciting, but Interlaken and Milan? That's even more exciting in my book.

Until next time,

Ciao.