Happy Birthday Augustus

Kirsten just woke me up and saved my afternoon from a Nap of Death. I was getting sleepy doing the reading for class so I thought I had earned a little nap. Usually I don’t even need an alarm to sleep almost exactly forty minutes which is a primo napping time. Unfortunately, there are times when you slip into groggy half-dream infested states of confusion, and you wake up hours later, disoriented, grouchy, confused, and still sleepy. This is the Nap of Death to which I admittedly fell a little bit victim this afternoon.

Good naps make you feel refreshed, but Naps of Death do no such thing.

So I thought instead of trying to jump right into Italian homework, I should perhaps warm up my logy brain with an exercise in writing!

It’s Sunday again. This time, the corner closest to where I live has been roped off from cars and kids are playing there on bikes, and people are selling organic honey. It is less noisy than last week, hence the nap.

Our Tuesday field trip was to Lavinium, where we trekked across a farmer’s field to take a look at a hero shrine of Aeneas and thirteen altars all set up next to each other at different times in history. It started raining while we were there, and got pretty chilly. In my infinite wisdom I had packed an umbrella at the last minute and so was somewhat shielded, although the wind was pretty fierce (or so I thought. I hadn’t seen anything yet when it comes to wind).

Heroon: Hero shrine

Thirteen altars all in a row

Then we went to the Museum of Ships at Nemi, which has inspired a new life plan (live at Nemi; step one: learn to speak Italian…). The mountain town around the lake is almost as beautiful as the lake itself.

Outside ship museum

It’s called the Museum of Ships because it houses reconstructions and materials from the ancient pleasure boats (omg, cruise!) sailed by Nero and Caligula and the like. It also has material from a nearby grove sacred to Diana.

Ship stuff

Nemi was gorgeous, but unfortunately also home to some bees that are haters. Some time during lunch, one of them stung Professor Collantoni and she had to be whisked off to the hospital by a man in a black sedan (because there were no ambulances available?). She is, apparently, allergic. But I figure anyone would hate life a little bit if they got stung in the face. I learned that Professor Roman (yeah that is his real name) is allergic as well and carries an epipen, so I know who to sprint to in case of stinging mishap.

Lunch!

After this, we went on to Tusculum, another hilltop. This is the place where Cicero had his favorite villa. We endured a lecture in super-force winds, taking notes to the best of our abilities, then were set free to explore the area. The ruins were pretty neat, but we were all much more impressed by the windy hilltop area itself. We climbed around and explored. I formed a team with Mike and Genvieve, and together we found the summit and some caves.

Me on the summit, striking a pose.

I was pretty tired on Wednesday because I’d been a little bit sick Tuesday night (indigestion? I guess..) and it kept me awake more than I would have wanted. We were supposed to have no field trip Wednesday, but Franco found out that the Forum workers (we were scheduled to visit Thursday) were planning a strike Thursday, so we moved the visit to Wednesday morning. But then Franco found out they were also striking Wednesday morning too. Not to be outdone, we switched our morning and afternoon schedules (Greek and Latin morning this time.. Forum in the afternoon) and moved off for the Forum Romanum around 2:30.

We got to see the mysterious Lapis Niger, a black rock that the Romans avoided stepping on out of respect even though they didn’t know why, or what was underneath it. There is apparently some kind of altar down there, and an inscribed thingy that says not to walk on it. After that we looked at the Comitium (the Lapis Niger is kind of inside the Comitium) where the Romans used to have assemblies and vote on things, and then speculated about the location of the Tarpeian rock (whence they threw criminals condemned to die).

Don't step on the black rock or you'll be cursed!

Then, as is policy, we were turned loose and told to explore the forum and get a better grasp of its layout, so Genvieve, Derek, and I wandered around for a while until we found ourselves off the ancient-guidebook map and near the Coliseum. We grabbed a bus home.

After this, I had almost no class to speak of on Thursday, save Italian (and the quiz that comes with it), which went fine. Thursday night, I decided to try finding karaoke in the city of Rome, which is no easy task. Once again accompanied by Genvieve and Ashley, we found Pub Julius Caesar pretty easily. It was too early for it to be full of people at that time, and we discovered that they sadly did not have karoke.

We set off for Pirati, but actually walked right past it when we got off the bus because it was closed. Getting home was difficult and took a long time. I enjoyed it in the terms of “we’re having an adventure” but “we found karaoke” it was not. Because I had been so hoping to, I started us up singing Journey on the bus home. One of the buses home, that is.. the third one of the night.

Friday there was a Wine Symposium in the centro where a certified wine expert came to teach us how to drink wine correctly. Friday night I spent doing my hand-laundry I thought I was going to do last week. It takes a long time to wash things that way.

Wine Symposium advice

I’ve been exploring the nearby park a little at a time, but I’ve decided it should get its own entire entry. It is that large and that cool.

Last night I hung out with Emily G (one of the centro’s many Emilys). We went into Rome to buy supplies for a mission of ours. Then we went on a postcard hunt which yielded no results, but did yield a delightful restaurant entirely by accident off to one side of the Coliseum (Collosseum?).

I got back and was fairly tired and the plan was to go to bed around 12, when I heard some people in the garden singing happy birthday to Brooke. I was going to just go down and tell her happy birthday, and then go to bed, but she encouraged me to go with them to a club to celebrate her birthday. I considered the fact that my only night-out experience that weekend had been getting lost in the middle of nowhere off-the-map section of town finding Pirati, so I consented. We got as far as the club itself and stood in line for a little while before a group of three of us (Chris, Genvieve, and I) all decided we didn’t want to wait in line anymore, it was 1:50am, and we would rather be in bed than waiting to pay a cover charge for what looked like a really crowded place.

Plus, I wanted to go to the “gypsy market” Sunday morning. Now that it looked like that wasn’t happening, I still preferred to leave.

I did manage to get to the gypsy market this morning, and it was a very intense experience. Some things are so out there. Some are priced really well, too. Still, that place, like every crowded bus I’ve been on, like la Notte Bianca’s crowded streets reminded me again and again of a line from a song.

It’s called SpeedStick. It’s not expensive. I kept saying it to the two Emilys that joined me in the trip to the market. They concur. But it seems that anywhere that large crowds converge, there will always be just too little deodorant to go around.

I should now be doing my homework or even doing something about my individual site report/research paper stuff.. I spent more time this weekend planning a trip to Vienna