All too much

I write to you from the computer lab at JCU (I needed to set up a password, and now seemed like as good time as any to write a post). This post will not have any contractions in it because I cannot find the apostrophe on the keyboard (getting an @ sign is a serious pain, which is suprising because it is so common with emails and whatnot).

Too much has happened since I last posted. We went out to Friends for the same food as the night before, decided to head across the river, ended up walking all the way down the the Colosseum for the first time, walked back to the Campo de Fiori (we= myself, my roommate Andy, and about 7 of the girls who wanted some guys to walk with them). Two of the girls stayed with me (right now I just realized there are no quotation marks on the Italian keyboard, either. For quotes Italians use <>. This robs me of the easiest way to convey sarcasm over the internet. So if and when I do this to a word <>, mentally insert quotations) <>, waiting for Dan and what I thought were going to be my roommates, but ended up being Dan and a bunch of girls. Anyways, we then went to the Piazza Navona, then the Pantheon (my favorite building on the planet), walked home and got back around 1:15 AM, which all things considered is fairly early for a night out.

The highlight of the night was stopping on the bridge leading up to the Castel Sant'Angelo at 12:45 at night (I found the apostrophe! I knew once I started typing Castel Sant'Angelo it had to be here somewhere. Here come a string of contractions to express my joy: can't won't don't wouldn't. Ahh much better). From there we had a beautiful view not only of the Castel, but of St. Peter's Basilica.

I also ate my first cannolo at a pasticceria in Trastevere. Why oh why can Americans not get gelato or cannoli right?

Today we woke up around 9 to get to JCU to meet Maria, our envoy. She took us to the ND Architecture building, where we heard about some things that the Nanovic Institute, a European studies thing at ND, sponsors (I will probably go on a free trip to Tivoli). Anyways, we also get up to 30 euros for any <> we get, so I will be able to get a subsidized soccer game simply for writing a paragraph summary of how good a time I had. Hooray for rich people throwing money at us. We then had pizza there, then met with some guys from Campus Ministry (hey, did you know there are a few places to go to Mass in Rome? You learn something new every day), and then met with another cultural envoy who had a preoccupation with explaining cultural differences using the picture of the glacier where it shows how much of the glacier is beneath the surface (hey, did you know that people in different countries view the world differently?). Anyways, because that lady ran over her end time I couldn't go on my JCU gelato tour.

Between speakers I had my first caffe granita, an icy coffee/sugar concoction. Absolutely fantastic (probably not especially healthy), and I had a nice caffiene buzz. I can get used to this coffee culture, methinks.