The real adventure begins

So yesterday was still pretty dull at first... We had meetings again all day and those are just way too dull.  But last night we had dinner in the neighborhood which was absolutely delicious!!!  There were at least 50 of us in this restaurant, and they had closed most of it for us.  We had a four course meal and a glass of wine.  I'm not 100% sure what everything I ate was and I didn't love all of it, but that's okay because I'm trying to expand my horizons a lot on the food front...  I think it's working (sort of)! 

                                                               Tierney and I at dinner


Today we went to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum.  It was so unbelievably gorgeous.  The history is amazing and I can't even fathom the grandeur of these buildings when they were first built, especially when they are so beautiful now. 

                                                      There was even graffiti way back then!

                                                           View from the Colosseum

                                               Starting in middle: Me, Anne, Tierney
I'll probably add a few more photos in my next post if Tierney posts the ones that she took....
We only spent about an hour at the Colosseum, and then we moved on to the Roman Forum.  It was unbelievable how much there was to see there, but it was also very difficult to know exactly what you were seeing.  We decided it would have been cooler if we had a tour guide, but the sights were beautiful regardless. We spent hours there.  Every time we hit a fork in the road we would randomly pick and always found something new, I'm sure there are so many places in the Forum that we still did not see, but it was really warm today and we were ready to go and eat some food.

 A view in the Forum

Carly and I

 This view was so cool

 Random fountain we stumbled across

 Random garden we found

               This was one of the few things that was labeled well and I thought it was really cool

 Anne creepily took a picture of Maddie and I trying to figure out what the holes in one of the buildings would have been used for

When we finally left the Forum Anne, Carly, and I decided to walk back to the piazza where we could catch the bus and try to find a pizza place along the way.  First we walked the wrong way (oops) and ended up getting a little lost but that's okay...  Getting lost can be really fun sometimes.  We ended up walking down the road where most of the monuments seem to be, so the next time that we have some spare time at least we know how to get there!!!  The great thing about getting lost in the city is that there is so much amazing architecture here that you can just walk down an alley and there is always something gorgeous to look at.  And there are all sorts of cool little shops down random alleys.  It's just so different from anything that I've ever seen in the states.  The only issue was we started walking down a main street that was heading in the direction we wanted, but it was clearly a HUGE tourist area and it was insanely crowded.  There were lots of pizza places, but they all offered free wifi which is pretty much a dead giveaway that they are a tourist trap and probably DON'T have authentic pizza.  We tried going down some alleys and side streets and we found a place that was a little bit better, but we were still really close to the Parthenon and our waiter spoke English and offered us a pizza cutter.. I'm guessing it still wasn't quite authentic.  That's alright though because we really struggled cutting our pizza... that would have been really embarrassing in the neighborhood around here, so I guess better that it happened there where they are more accustomed to people making fools of themselves.  I'll have to ask one of the SLAs (kind of like RAs around here) what the "normal" way to eat pizza is around here.  Tomorrow is a mandatory beach day and then classes start on Monday....  It will probably start feeling a little bit more real then and less like a random vacation.  I definitely cannot wait =)  

Ciao