Notte Bianco
Rome has been treating me pretty well. Living in a city is a great experience. Our building is sort of outside the city center (on the Janiculum east of the Tiber) so its quiet at night but fairly easy to go someplace more interesting. The day starts with the cooks ringing a big bell for breakfast at 8am down in the basement, since the 35 of us live in the same building where we eat and take classes. Then we either have a 3 hour lecture or a field trip out around the city until lunch time. At 1 we eat, get some free time, then go to language classes so Latin for me. Dinner is another fun food bell at 7:30 where they serve us a 3 course meal and send us on our way. Nothing happens in Italy until after 9 or 10 or 11pm anyway. Classes have a ton of reading so that takes up a chunk of time. Weekends/night with no morning classes are awesome. There's a wine bar down the street we sometimes go to where some italian dude tells us stuff I dont understand. And the main drag around here has a bunch of bars (in the sense that there is a bar instead of any tables), theatres where maybe one day they'll have an english movie, restaurants, an arcade, clubs, hooka bars, and some parks. Plus there's piazza's in the city center and more random stuff.
Last night was il notte bianco, the white night, a HUGE festival all through Rome to celebrate the end of the summer. There were performances, music, museums and randomness all over the city from 9pm to around 9am the next morning, supposedly to get everyone together and also advertise public transportation and less pollutive forms of travel. But soooooo many people showed up, literally hundreds of thousands/over a million people easily walking through the streets over the whole city. So many people that the whole streets were flooded, no buses or cars whatsoever could even run. So first we went to an Indian place to eat, then somehow decided it was a good idea to walk across half the city to Castel St. Angelo by the Vatican to go to a "Hip Hop Wine Tasting". Of course, being Italy, nothing was there when we got there but a huge crowd of people milling around doing nothing. Then we went across the rest of the city to some thing about the death of Caesar that turned out to be an old guy in a white jumpsuit talking in Italian about nothing for half an hour. So a stop in Campo di Fiori, then to a piazza near the Colosseum to see something listed at "Giant Flaming Giraffes" (not kidding). So they took 2 hours to show up, and turned out to be these 7 huge red inflated giraffes with clowns and acrobats doing...weird stuff around them. Like simulating oral sex? I think? It was hella weird. So as a last resort we headed to the spanish section to this concert which ended up being awesome, like a mix of flamenco, ska, etc. Got hit on/followed by some creepy old guy, danced with some 17 year olds, and met some sketchy hippie Italians who took us to another concert and to see the sun come up (better than the rave they first suggested I think). I haven't stayed up all night until 8 or 9am in a long time, it was a ton of fun.
I think I'm getting Skype so I can call people for cheap as hell. We'll see if I can find a microphone still.
Last night was il notte bianco, the white night, a HUGE festival all through Rome to celebrate the end of the summer. There were performances, music, museums and randomness all over the city from 9pm to around 9am the next morning, supposedly to get everyone together and also advertise public transportation and less pollutive forms of travel. But soooooo many people showed up, literally hundreds of thousands/over a million people easily walking through the streets over the whole city. So many people that the whole streets were flooded, no buses or cars whatsoever could even run. So first we went to an Indian place to eat, then somehow decided it was a good idea to walk across half the city to Castel St. Angelo by the Vatican to go to a "Hip Hop Wine Tasting". Of course, being Italy, nothing was there when we got there but a huge crowd of people milling around doing nothing. Then we went across the rest of the city to some thing about the death of Caesar that turned out to be an old guy in a white jumpsuit talking in Italian about nothing for half an hour. So a stop in Campo di Fiori, then to a piazza near the Colosseum to see something listed at "Giant Flaming Giraffes" (not kidding). So they took 2 hours to show up, and turned out to be these 7 huge red inflated giraffes with clowns and acrobats doing...weird stuff around them. Like simulating oral sex? I think? It was hella weird. So as a last resort we headed to the spanish section to this concert which ended up being awesome, like a mix of flamenco, ska, etc. Got hit on/followed by some creepy old guy, danced with some 17 year olds, and met some sketchy hippie Italians who took us to another concert and to see the sun come up (better than the rave they first suggested I think). I haven't stayed up all night until 8 or 9am in a long time, it was a ton of fun.
I think I'm getting Skype so I can call people for cheap as hell. We'll see if I can find a microphone still.