It would've been an uneventful laundry experience had I not decided to start singing and dancing in the laundry room only to get walked in on by one of the cleaning ladies. She always seemed happy to see me in the hallway before, but now she'll probably avert her eyes. Oh well. When songs from High School Musical 3 get stuck in your head, you just have to let them out.
Once laundry was all wrapped up, Katie, Gina, and I went to Vero because I really wanted hot chocolate. Much to my excitement, the barista put a mountain of whipped cream on top of it, so it ended up being by far the best hot chocolate I've had here so far (and all the hot chocolate here is especially good to begin with). I also had a little cup of cantaloupe, which, yet again, was amazingly perfect.
Katie and I finally started to get crackin' on studying for our Theology final. Most of the test will consist of defining fifteen terms out of a list of thirty that he gave us to study. He told us to work in groups to come up with the definitions for each word as our way of preparing for the exam, so she did 1-15, and I did 16-30. That part of the test shouldn't be too hard. The other part is to write an essay tying in what we've learned in class with the Italian film we watched on Thursday, so I might need to prepare that a little bit. All in all, though, the exam only counts for 20% of our grade, which is weird. Normally, even in some of my English classes, the final counts for 40-50%. But I'm not complaining!
We were worried we wouldn't get tickets at our weekly meeting, since we only have a few more days here, but they still gave them to us. Super clutch! Now we get to blow them all in the next couple days. It was also the shortest meeting we've had, so that was nice.
We had to meet with our City of Rome class at 1:30 at Santa Maria in Trastevere, so Katie, Gina, and I grabbed some eggplant rice balls (so good) at Mondo and walked down there. We were five minutes late, but we were still the first ones there besides our professor. She was like, "I knew you would be the first ones here!" It was funny.
For this class trip, we went to the Janiculum hill. There was a memorial for those who died in the fight for the unification of Italy, a statue of Garibaldi, a beautiful fountain, great views, the American Academy, the Spanish Academy, a gorgeous church, and more. Most people were complaining about climbing steps and walking, but I thoroughly enjoyed the trip as usual.
As we headed back to campus, it progressively got darker and cloudier, looking like it was going to start raining pretty soon, despite the forecast.
I finally got an email back from Viaggio nei Fori about the shows we were supposed to see last week, and they basically told me they couldn't reschedule anything for me and that I would have to get a refund. Not too long after I saw that, though, someone from their office called me and told me she was going to send me tickets for tonight. I was excited, but expressed my concern about the weather. She seemed pretty confident that it wouldn't rain tonight, though.
I Skyped with my mom for a little while, which was fun. Initially I wanted to Skype because I was confused about some of the information the Fori people wanted to get my refund, but then I got the phone call first. Either way, it was a fun chat.
Katie and I went to get our metro tickets in advance so that we'd be ready to rush to the Forum of Augustus right after dinner. For dinner, we took Gina to one of our favorites, Spaccio Pasta. Since we had so many tickets, we got a bottle of Pinot Grigio and each had some wonderful pasta.
We did kind of have to rush down to the forum, but it worked out great. We got there, scanned our tickets, got our audio guides, sat down, and the show started. It was so cool! I almost got a little emotional at some parts, too. It was just so amazing to see the forum recreated and whatnot. The show lasted about 40 minutes, and then we walked over to Trajan's column to wait for the Forum of Caesar tour/show.
Of course, I had to go to the bathroom, and we had 45 minutes before our show, so we went to a little cafe and I sneakily used the bathroom without actually buying anything. Haha! I cheated the system.
We waited on the steps near Trajan's column for a little while, which was chill. There were a bunch of seagulls kind of going crazy and stuff, but they stayed far enough away from us. At last, it was time for our tour/show to begin.
The audio guides were super high-tech for the Forum of Caesar. You had to point them at a red box along the way while walking and then it would start playing the next chunk of information. It was sort of annoying because the audio would start as soon as the first person clicked it, and there were a lot of people, but I doubt we missed too much.
Starting in Trajan's forum, we got to walk underground, underneath Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali, over into Julius Caesar's forum. We saw and heard all about the history of the place, and really it was just so cool to get to walk around down there. I'm pretty sure I got a little emotional again (they showed reenacted footage of Caesar's assassination), but I probably wasn't the only one...
After the 50ish-minute-long tour, we headed back to campus via metro. I didn't take any pictures during the shows, mostly because I didn't want to miss anything, but also because they honestly probably wouldn't have turned out all that great.
Overall, it was surprising that we actually got to see those shows after all, but I'm so glad we were able to! I recommend Viaggio nei Fori to anyone who visits Rome...just do your best to avoid the rain.
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