Roma!

Wednesday, 2/19/03
I am pooped! This is the reason I didn't write last night, and it'll be a struggle now. To finish up pre-Rome: I regret to say that I hardly remember Monday. Oh yes, I had my first mixed media class and it was frustrating. I guess I'm just not very good at abstract design. It went okay, though. After lunch I finally started compiling my magazine cutouts in studio, but still don't have a lot of substantial work done.

I had only about 15 pages of I Capture the Castle left before dinner, and I was in agony. I told Karin that if I hadn't read the book before, I wouldn't have come down for dinner. After dinner Kate came into out room wanting to use the secret door and she grabbed my book and ran off! Before I could put my shoes on and run out after her she was back in, had circled out the secret door to the fourth floor, then back down the regular stairs. I ran out with her and we explored the entirety of secret passageways. Then I walked on the catwalk from Sean & Eric's window to Andrea & Rory's balcony. It was a little scary, but I did it because the boys said that Dixie had stolen all their food from their outside windowsill (we call them refrigerators) via the catwalk as a joke.

I finally finished I Capture the Castle an hour after I was supposed to and the ending still broke my heart, even though it was my third time reading it. I can't express how wonderful that book is.

I actually fit everything I needed for Rome and Pompeii in my normal backpack. Good thing too, for I haven't any other. So when we got to Rome we walked by the Colosseum but didn't go in, then through the Roman Forum which was awesome. Morgan and I stopped for a few seconds to take pictures and when we looked up the group had vanished! We ran up two exits at the other side, up to the Wedding Cake [Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II], and back to the Arch for about 20 minutes. Then Morgan called Omar's cell phone, and the group was still in the same place they'd been before! They had just moved into a corner for a few minutes. We felt pretty stupid, but it was funny.

We walked through the square of the Capitoline Museums [Campidoglio] with the statue of Marcus Aurelius (not destroyed, because the Christians had mistaken him for Constantine) then to the Pantheon. The Pantheon is always our landmark to get back to the hotel.

In our free time in the afternoon a lot of us planned on going out to the catacombs but we were slow in getting our plans together to get a taxi, so by the time we would've gotten there it would be closed (it turned out that it was closed on Tuesdays anyway). So then we were going to see the Colosseum inside (this whole time we were losing people from our group, and gaining some. It was confusing). But apparently we couldn't read maps, because by the time we figured out where we were, we were on the other side of the forum and it was getting dark. We went to the museums instead. They were really neat, with paintings, frescoes, and sculptures. I am desperately in love with sculpture, particularly Bernini and Michelangelo. Cady got a beautiful Bernini book at the museum. I am going to have to search for it on e-bay some time. Bernini: the Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, by Rudolf Wittkower.

When we got home in the evening Valerie and I watched Ghost in French. I didn't have the energy for anything else.