We shall try again! i have been attempting to post for the last few days and keep getting wiped out – the joys of technology!
So a fair bit of catching up to do. Carnavale has just finished and it was a lot of fun. Saturday evening the Piazza Navona was full of children and some of their parents dressed in elaborate costumes, with medieval dancers and dancing horses, fire eaters and sword swallowers and sometimes both, heroic figures on stilts, musicians and singers and puppet shows and…… well hopefully you can imagine as my pictures are woefully bad! Tuesday was Shrove or Pancake or Fat depending on your inclination so Sister Yvonne and I set out to find pancakes for lunch. We ended up eating pizza as the closest thing – which is not very – we could find. I didn’t get to sleep that night until very late as of course all the teenagers took this as an excuse to party, party, party! It is wonderful being so centrally located but of course I have managed to pick the busiest intersection in the entire city. Sunday morning I was awoken from a lovely sleep-in by a Brasilian Marching Drum Band – at 9 o’clock! Then the church bells started – have I talked about the church bells? I had been rather disappointed that in a city with as many churches as this that I didn’t hear more bells ringing – should have kept my mouth shut! The church RIGHT beside me has been undergoing renovations; which now appear to be almost finished and the bell tower is back in full swing – and I mean that literally. In my opinion one should NOT have to get up at seven am on weekends!!!
So seeing as Sunday insisted on starting so bright and bloody early I walked over to explore Trastevere. Very much one of the oldest parts of the city with tiny twisty streets and dozens of miniscule trattori tucked in all over the place. The streets are marvelous with hidden vistas around every corner and ancient buildings sort of organically growing every which way. The Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere is arguably the site of the first Christian church in Rome and has the most incredible Cavallini mosiacs (Sandra think Guy Gavrille Kay!) and again my pictures don’t do it justice so Goggle “Vedute di Roma”, scroll down to Trastevere and have a look! Incredible!
My language studies are going well but my head is full of nouns and verbs and conjugations and adverbs and pronouns and… not an intelligent sentence coms out of my mouth. My friend Barbara who should know as she speaks a bunch of languages, tells me that at about the time I have to come home it should start to jell. I suppose I shall just have to do this all over again next winter and in the meantime I’ll be touring Sicily drinking lots of good wines in May. Yah I know – tough life!
Tomorrow is the end of my first month of classes so we have a test (yech – still hate tests) and then a party (yay – still love parties).
On that note I’d better do SOME studying (yech – still hate studying) so,
Ciao di tutte
p.s. blog still isnt letting me post pictures!!