Rome Week Seven (GL 350)

Week seven, how crazy is that?  It seems like only yesterday that we were anxiously arriving at Fiumicino Airport, ready to begin our hectic but amazing two months in Italy. 

Well, on Monday Katie Dodds and I had our student led tour of Esquiline Hill.  It went really well and we luckily didn’t get lost or anything!  That night we were taught how to make Tiramisu by Danilo.  It was so much fun.  He made the first cake and then we got to the second one and he told us that we had to make it. 

Tuesday was a free day for everyone except the education students!  Since Katie, Brandon, Gabby and I are the only education students; we got to go on an observation of a school in Albano.  It was so much fun, we got to teach them about Thanksgiving, a tradition that they don’t have here.  After that they sang us every song they knew in English and then asked us a bunch of questions.  The teacher also asked us how our education system works, since the US is different in the grades and ages of those in the grade than Italy.  Overall it was a pretty amazing experience.

Wednesday we woke up at the crack of dawn to make the 6:36 train into Rome.  We raced to the metro, and went all the way to the Vatican.  We waited in a very long line and finally we entered the very large conference room.   After waiting for two hours, at almost exactly 10:30 His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI came out.  He spoke in probably 7 or 8 different languages and addressed each of us.  Then he blessed any religious articles that we brought with us.  I got my Kairos cross blessed, which means so much to me.  Kairos was one of the best experiences of my whole life.

Thursday we visited the American Cemetery in Nettuno.  It was pretty cool to say that we were on American soil, while still in Italy.  Some people even found relatives that were buried there, I didn’t have any though. 

This weekend I am staying in Rome, working on my final papers for my classes and celebrating the last weekend we have in Italy.  It’s crazy to think that seven weeks ago we were excitedly arriving to Italy and now we’re preparing to leave.  I think that a lot of us are excited to go back to America Friday, but we’re also sad to be leaving the place we’ve called home for the last seven weeks. 

It kind of reminds me of our first group travel to Venice.  We traveled by plane, bus and boat to get to Venice and our hotel rooms weren’t what we were expecting.  While we had the best gelato and in my opinion the best pizza in Venice all we could talk about on the last day was getting back “home”.  Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley travels to Venice as an escape from everything he was dealing with in his life at that moment.  To me Venice was a kind of escape, maybe not the city of Venice but where we stayed in Lido, it felt like an escape.  It was slower than Rome, homier in a way.  I can see why Tom went to Venice of all places to get away from everything but, unlike Tom, I was glad to get “home”.  And I’m also glad to be getting home to America this coming Friday.  

Our visit to the school in Albano.

Seeing the Pope walk in the the Audience.

American Cemetery in Nettuno.

Me in Venice, an old picture but a great memory!

Looking forward to America.

Week Six (SOC 490)

To start this off I’m going to talk about the interviews we did at a market near Termini station.  We were given the task of interviewing ten people each, in Italian, about their healthcare system.  We all went into it nervous because we were unsure of how people would react to the questions, whether or not they would even understand what we were trying to do.  Once we got there the first woman that Katie D., Henna, Emily and I went up to was really nice and gladly took the survey.  This put us at ease, until people were getting finished really quickly and we only had about four surveys each.  We didn’t let it get us down and we trudged on!  We found the university nearby and a lot of the students were sympathetic to our efforts and filled them out.  We were done in no time and ready to leave.  Our final interviews were really nice and they left us on a high note.  The survey results were kind of surprising.  There were a lot of people who didn’t really care for the universal healthcare and then there were people who loved it and said that they got excellent care.  So, it’s a little hard to judge what the actual feeling of country is. 

While the feeling on universal healthcare is somewhat unknown in Italy, or at least it’s unknown to me based upon my research thus far, America is still in a struggling battle on the same front.  But is universal healthcare the cure-all?  Is that going to prevent disease, illness and dying?  Or are there other ways that people believe cure their loved ones?  Johnathon S. Ross, from Universal Healthcare says “An improved and expanded Medicare for all is the proven cure and the only way to restore America’s health.”  But that isn’t everyone’s belief, is it?  When I was 9 years old my grandpa lost his battle with cancer.  I wasn’t very old but I do know one thing that my family did was pray.  We prayed for his health, we prayed that God would have mercy on him and save his life, and we prayed that we could keep him.  While the prayers didn’t cure him, neither did the medicine.  The cancer was just too strong but it is the belief in my family that the prayers helped him hold on for just a little bit longer, so that we were all prepared and able to say goodbye to him.  In another example, my best friend in seventh grade was in a life-threatening car accident.  She was induced into a coma and was that way for about a month.  When the swelling in her brain went down a little they inserted a shunt.  It was to drain the fluid from her brain so that it didn’t swell anymore.  She wasn’t even supposed to live.  My whole school rallied together and prayed for her; for the entire time she was in the coma that she would be okay.  That girl who wasn’t supposed to make it is now a sophomore in college and continues to play volleyball, a game that she loved even before the accident, and she’s playing at college level.  When the doctors are all telling you that your best friend is going to die because there isn’t anything else they can do, and she makes a full, miraculous recovery, what do you call that?  I call it a miracle.  So, I do believe that pray works and national healthcare, might not be the cure-all that everyone is looking for.  Maybe it can help, but it might not be the whole answer.     

Rome Week 6 (GL 350)

The first chapter of The Talented Mr. Ripley is filled, in my mind, with apprehension.  Tom Ripley doesn’t know if he wants to go to Italy for Mr. Greenleaf to retrieve Richard.  On top of that Tom doesn’t really know who he is as a person, a theme that plays out further into the book.  With that, I think back to the day we left for Italy.  We all gathered in the David Center at Walsh and sat in apprehension, fear and excitement.  We didn’t know what to expect from this country, we only knew about what others’ had told us and what we’ve learned from books.  Now, we’re in week seven of our eight week journey and reflecting on what we were expecting from Italy and realizing that some things we heard of were spot on and others still, were completely unexpected or not what we were told and still more we find new things that we get to create our own opinions of. 

The other thing that Tom Ripley makes me think of is our series of firsts here in Italy.  The book describes Tom’s first time seeing the leaning tower of Pisa.  It was a time of awe-inspiring and mesmerizing glory that he saw this landmark that he’d only ever heard of.  Our first time into Rome we were going to see the Colosseum, we literally walked off the metro and out of the station and there it was.  I remember my mouth literally dropping open.  It was a moment that I’ll never forget and a feeling that I couldn’t forget even if it tried.  Katie and I had another moment like that in London, England.  We got off the Tube at the stop where Big Ben was supposed to be and we walked off the train and to the bottom of a set of stairs to exit.  We both stopped and looked at each other and said in unison, “This is going to be a Colosseum moment…” and we took out our cameras and it was.  It was amazing and perfect in all its glory.  We soaked it in and just stared, mouths open for a long time.  And even after we passed it we kept turning around to make sure it was still there. 

The Talented Mr. Ripley also describes Tom’s first time on the train and the bus.  On the bus Tom was surrounded by a man who smelled and a gaggle of girls who smelled worse.  I can attest to that.  Our first time on the 64 bus wasn’t a pleasant or forgetful moment.  We were all crammed in like sardines.  My face was very close to some man’s armpit and I don’t think he used deodorant that day or any day and he definitely hadn’t showered recently.  Our first time on the trains wasn’t quite as scarring as the bus.  Nonetheless, we were still apprehensive.  We didn’t know if we had to keep our “antennas” up or not.  We were all wide-eyed as we travelled by railway into Rome; something that I won’t ever forget.  Everyone stared at us as we stared out the window.  Now, no one really notices us on the train anymore and we all sleep the whole way there and back usually.  We’ve become so accustomed to it that it’s just normal to us. 

This entire trip has made me look at things differently.  I try to find the beauty in everything, to look and find the good in each situation and mostly patients, to go with the flow.  It’s hard to believe that in ten days I’ll be on a flight back to America, just thinking about the time I had in Italy, and everywhere I travelled.  And it’s hard to imagine, a month from now that all of this will just be a fond memory.  And in ten or so years, it will turn into a “when I was in college…” story.  All I know is for these last ten days I’m going to try an experience everything that Rome has to offer.  

My first view of Big Ben

My first view of the Colosseum