A BLOG CHRONICLING MY SEMESTER AND TRAVELS ABROAD

Thank you so much for visiting my blog. I hope that this will be an excellent way for me to keep all of my friends and family up to date on my semester abroad in Rome. Please feel free to post any comments you would like, or shoot me an e-mail and I will try to respond as soon as possible. Also, if you click on each of the photographs below, it will display them at their full size.

Monday, January 15, 2007

The First Night...


It was a long first night... and there was a lot of walking involved. Four of my roommates had arrived by about 4pm so 3 of them and I set off to walk to the John Cabot campus and see what else we could find. We ended up walking for about 5 hours and got completely lost for a while and only found our bearings when we hit the Tiber River. The main problem is that none of the maps of Rome that you can buy in the US nor the maps that were given to us at our orientation had our street on them. Actually they don't even have our neighborhood on them. We found out that night that we live pretty darn far from campus.

This is us when we finally hit the Tiber river and kind of got our bearings. Litlle did we know that we had a lot more walking ahead of us. From left to right my roommates Sean, Mike, and Case.

We eventually found our way to the John Cabot campus and it is in a really cool area called the Trastevere. It is on the west side of the Tiber river right int the heart of Rome. It is a pretty small school but I think it is going to be a lot of fun once classes start. There are a couple of different courtyards in the middle of the school and it is all very nice.

This is the entrance of John Cabot University. There is one door and it is always guarded by an armed Policia.

This is me on the lower terrace that overlooks the two courtyards on the main level of the school.
This is a different view from the same terrace as above.
This is a view of an old Roman gate from an upper terrace on top of the school. I walk through this gate every day to get to school.

This is Via de Lungara from the same terrace as above. This is the street that runs right in front of our school. If you follow this road, the Vatican is about a 15 minute walk away.

This is on the roof of John Cabot.

After checking out the school, we headed back home...and we were scared how long it was going to take us. We stopped off at this little place called Zio Ciro and got some pasta even though we all wanted pizza. We were starving and we went by a couple of other places that were closed and stumbled upon this one. There were three people talking inside so the one of us that knew a little Italian asked if they were open. They told us to come in but I don't think they were planning on serving dinner at this point seeing as how it was only 7:30. We sat there for about 10 minutes looking at the menu trying to figure out what everything was and the two guys that were working were just playing on the Internet with Google Video. Eventually we flagged them down and ordered. We all ordered pasta and then about 5 minutes later realized that the entire back page of the menu was pizza. The pasta was still good though. When we finished we waited about 10 minutes and all tried to remember the word for check but none of us had any idea. The waiter eventually came back over and we paid and left.

This is us right after we ordered. Notice the menu in the middle of the table on the far side is flipped over with an entire page of pizzas. Too bad we didn't see that until after we ordered.

The rest of the walk home was long and treacherous...and we were following the directions they gave us with our apartment keys. Not only did each of the streets basically change names every block, half of the roads they had us going down has beg cement walls on both sides of really busy streets and no shoulder or sidewalk. I bought a bus pass the next day.

When we got home our feet and legs hurt and we were all exhausted, so we met our other roommates that weren't there when we left and fell asleep about 10:30.

3 comments:

Aunt Sunny said...

Hi Adam this is Aunt Sunny I received your blog from Aunt Lisa. Sounds like you are truly experiencing a foreign country! It is difficult when you don't know the language.
I sent your blog to Sean as he will be in Italy (Bologna) on Saturday Jan 20 and Shad will be there on February 6th through the 13th visiting Sean. I told Sean it would be cool if he and Shad could meet you somewhere on the weekend. Don't know what your schedule is like but it would be cool!
I hope you have a great experience!
Love Aunt Sunny

corley said...

Adam - I told you the street where carzy to try and navigate! Sounds like you are haveing fun already!
We love you!

corley said...

Sorry about my typing errors:)