Our German Friend Bion

We woke up today around 8 and headed up to the JCU campus for a breakfast at 10 (based off the events of the prior night we tried to allot ourselves an ample amount of time to get there). We ended up getting on a bus that took us most of the way there and then got off and walked about 15 minutes to the campus. I was a little nervous on the bus because we hadn't bought tickets yet and I was just waiting the whole time for the Policia to pull the bus over and fine all of us...luckily that didn't happen. Most of the day we sat through some orientation sessions and they were a little boring, the best part was this clip that they showed us of how Italy was different than the rest of Europe. Check out this link if you want to watch it, it is pretty funny and scary how accurate it is:

http://www.rivelazioni.com/mm/bozzetto/eu-it.shtml

After all of our meetings, Monica headed to an area across the river called the Area Sacra. It was a really busy square with shops all around it and right in the center was this sunken area with preserved ruins right in the middle of the square. We were amazed when we saw it because when you just walk into the square you can't really see it. It wasn't until we crossed the street and could see down into it a little better that we actually saw what it was. We took a couple of pictures but they really didn't do it justice. We went into a bookstore and bought a couple of maps to help me find my way home and then headed back.

This is a view of the of the Tiber river at night near Trastevere. It was amazing.

Here are the ruins that we stumbled upon when we arrived in Area Sacra. You can kind of see how we missed this section when we first entered the square.

This was one of the streets that we took coming out of Campo Dei Fiori. There were a ton of shops lining the street all the way into the Piazza.

When I got home, my roommates had already started cooking dinner. For our first dinner we had chicken and linguine with pesto sauce and some wine, it was pretty good. We bought a couple of bottles of wine and just kind of hung out in our kitchen for a while.

This is Mike preparing our first meal.

Afterwards we hopped on the train and headed down to Campo Dei Fiori to go to a couple of bars. We started out at a little pub called Sloppy Sam's and then I went over to a little more trendy bar called Magnolia and ran into Monica and her roommates. We finished out the night at The Drunken Ship and ran into a guy from Munich named Bion who was in town celebrating his friends 30th birthday. He followed us around for a while and tried to ditch the people he came with and we eventually had to make him go back with his friends. It was a pretty interesting night.

This is outside the Drunken Ship in Campo Dei Fiori.

This is four of my roommates and Bion. From left to right: Mark, Bion, Marko, Colin, and Sean. Right after this photo we made him go back and find his friends.

We tried to catch the night bus home and waited for about 20 min and it never showed up so we ended up just getting a taxi (so far no Taxi and no one we have talked to in our neighborhood has ever heard of the street we live on). He dropped us off like 4 blocks from our apartment. It was a pretty interesting night.