Arrivederci Roma

Brace yourselves, this could get sappy, corny and emotional.

Today is my last full day in Rome. 88 days have come and gone, and I cannot believe that the program is over.

First I want to thank you all for taking this journey with me. It has been an incredible experience to have an audience, and I’m really glad you kept reading as I kept writing. 72 Blog posts in 88 days, and you keep coming back for more.

That said, I’m not done writing yet! I’ll continue to blog until my feet hit the ground in Newark Airport. My posts may not be daily because of lack of internet, but I promise I’ll do my best to keep on top of it.

So lets start with yesterday. Yesterday I did a bunch of running around to get ready to travel. I stopped off at St. Paul’s Outside The Walls for the last time, and had one last walk around the church I’ve been in for the past 2 months or so.

While doing laundry I brought my guitar and sat in Campo Di Fiori while it was in the machine. I have always wanted to sit on the street and perform, and see how much I could make if I just threw a hat out there with a couple coins in it. So I started playing, and a group of American high school students were standing behind me. I heard one say that I was playing for money, and I turned and told him I was just playing for fun, but that I wanted to play a song for all of them. Thinking quick, I played the “Rap medley” that my bandmate and good friend Kevin Tymon wrote, and I had the kids laughing and dancing. Then they started putting money in the hat. I played for about 5 minutes, going through all of the crazy songs that Kevin sings and adding a few of my own, all the while the kids were taking video of me on their cameras (I hope to come across myself on youtube someday). When I finished, they all clapped and then were on their way for more touring. Nate and I sized up my hat, and found that I had made over 10 Euro (and a coca cola), with just one song. Why haven’t I been doing that all semester???

Later that night one of the girls showed a slideshow of pictures from the past year in Rome, which was nice to see from start to finish where we had been.

We then all left together and went down to a restaurant called Mickey’s (short for Miscellanea). We are all big fans of the food there, and since we’re pretty loyal customers, with some girls going there every Sunday night, Mickey decided to throw an end of semester party for us. Free pasta, wine and dessert for all of us, which I believe totaled 40 people or so. It is incredible to think that 86 nights ago a large group of us were sitting at the same table, having one of our first dinners in Rome.

From there we went to Abbey Theater, where I performed again. We got a room to ourselves in the back and I played a few songs, including one Backstreet Boys song with a SMC girl Angela singing with me. We had a lot of fun, and so many people came I was asked by the people at Abbey to walk out to the bar and play an encore out there for all the people who couldn’t get in the back room. Way to inflate my ego St. Mary’s girls, and thank you so much for coming.

Today we had our banquet, a final wrap up lunch for the semester. The banquet was held at the hotel in the dining room we always eat at. Everyone got dressed up and we went down to a candle-lit 4 course meal. The food was incredible, some of the best I’ve had while being in Rome. The Staff did an excellent job with everything, and it was nice to have this sort of banquet.

Now I’m going to reflect on what Dr. Prebys, the head of the program, said when making her final speech. She asked us to sit and think, “What does Rome mean to you”. So here is my answer to that question:

Rome to me is where I’ve spent the past 3 months of my life, but a place that will be in my thoughts and heart forever. The people I’ve met, the friendships formed, the experiences throughout Rome on a daily basis, just being able to walk around the town and down to the Vatican on a daily basis, that to me is a lifelong memory, one that I will tell friends and family about for the rest of my life.

I wanted to reflect on the entire 3 months, so I’ve come up with a couple of lists. The first will be posted today, which I am going to miss about Rome. Later this week I’ll post my second one, which is everything that I’ve experienced, and my third will be a list of what I’m looking forward to when I get back to the States.

Okay, What I Will Miss about Rome:

The food…of course. The pasta, pizza, gelato, and everything in between, it has been some incredible food in Rome, and I would never get sick of this great Italian food.

The Coffee – I didn’t drink much coffee before I came to Rome. Now I drink at least 2 a day. It is going to be a hard transition back to the states, where I’ll have to find the equivalent of Italian coffee.

The Vatican- I will miss going to the Vatican on a daily basis, and even more so the ability to walk into such a spectacular church such as St. Peter’s and explore every inch of its enormity.

Speaking Italian- Yes I will miss speaking Italian. At times it is very stressful and inconvenient, and can become tiring, but when you succeed in speaking the language to get through an entire meal, or give directions even, it is the most satisfying feeling ever. Being able to blend in and be a true part of the Roman society is something I was set on doing when I came over here. I didn’t want to be looked at as a tourist for 3 months. Yes, there were times when I was a tourist, but on a daily basis I tried my best to blend in.

The Hotel Tiziano- Staying in a four star hotel in Rome is special. Living in a four star hotel in Rome is unheard of. The staff of the hotel are the best. They’re always eager to help us or just to say Ciao when we walk in and out past the desk. They cleaned our rooms and made us food, which made it feel like one big happy family.

The Girls of SMC – For a group of 65 girls from the same college to take in 4 strangers from Villanova and make us feel at home from day one, especially being one of 2 guys in the entire program, that was something I didn’t ever imagine. Since the first few minutes in the airport when we got here until the banquet tonight, they have always been friendly, helpful, and all around great people to be with for 3 months in a foreign country. I’ve made some really good friends here, and I am so happy for that.

Rome- I am going to miss Rome, in its entirety. The city has proven to be an incredible home for 3 months. After all of my traveling and experiences, I cannot see myself studying abroad anywhere else other than this city.

So thank you St. Mary’s for giving me this opportunity to be part of your program, and thank you Rome for being so open to my exploration and discovery of a great city.

I will surely be back again, hopefully sooner than later.

Being a good student

This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I have finals for my two classes through St. Mary's. So instead of writing a blog for tonight, and maybe tomorrow night, in order to study (cram) for my exams.

Saturday I have my Religion exam, and Sunday is my Mythology exam. I also have some visitors, the last ones I'll have, coming tomorrow morning, so I'm going to be incredibly busy. Come Sunday at 11am, I am done, and though I'm not ready to be done with Rome, I'm ready to be done with studying.

We've had some of the most beautiful weather in Rome, and I've had to enjoy it inside a library and my room, so I'm ready to have a few free days to enjoy the weather and take in as much of the city as I can before I leave it again.

Okay, I'm procrastinating, back to the books...

Internet office goodbye

This week has been full of "Lasts" for me, so why kill the streak and talk about something different?

Today was our last day of work, in the Internet office of the Holy See. Nate and I went in at 10 for work(since we didn't have Italian we got to sleep a bit!) and worked on finishing up at our computers. We mostly were backing up files, and prepping the computers for the next set of interns. It's hard to believe my work is done at the office, even though I still have some work with my St. Paul's video to finish up Stateside. Writing a note to the new interns to take our place brought back a lot of good memories from when we walked into the office the first time, and how it took us a half hour to figure out all the different passwords for the computers. They were all different, and had wacky hints from past interns to try and tell us what they were.

I took a minute to contemplate the change over the past six months or so from: "I am going to intern at the Vatican" to "I am interning at the Vatican" and now finally: "I interned at the Vatican". With each of those three statements comes to mind very distinct memories and thoughts. The first, telling everyone about my internship to come, and the mystery of it all, which at times made me nervous. Then came the present, where I was involved in the office and my project at St. Paul's, and now finally, I will talk about it in the past, as I share my experiences and stories with family and friends, and most likely some potential employers (who hopefully turn into simply "employers"). I know I will remember my experiences forever, but I'm also glad I took the chance to document them with you all on the blog.

We said our final goodbyes to everyone in the office as well. The people we work with have been great. They were always willing to try and involve us in conversation, even though we sometimes couldn't understand them, or them us. We used our Italian as best we could, and they tried out english just for us. I want to thank them for allowing us to join their office life for the past 3 months.

We stayed a little late today in the office. We got caught up writing our notes to the new interns. Or maybe it was just something in our subconscious, telling us to stay as long as we could, just a little while longer, to prolong having to walk out of our office, down down the stairs, and out the giant Green doors, looking left and seeing St. Peter's just at the end of the street, before turning right and heading across the bridge, back to our hotel.

A Home Cooked Roman Meal

Tonight, as a celebration of the end of our Italian lessons, we were invited by Carlotta to her house for a home-cooked Italian meal.

When I say for a home-cooked meal, I mean genuine, home-made everything. The food was fantastic, and gave us a great idea of what a traditional home-cooked meal is like here in Rome, considering our experience is only with eating out. The dinner included not only us four Villanova Students, but also Gloria who has been mentioned in the blog before as one of the Villanova interns from a few years ago, and also Carlotta's sister-in-law Alessandra who is our age and speaks english very well.

Carlotta made home-made bread, a variety of kinds, my favorite being the bread with olives in it which was fantastic. The Pane was our Anti-Pasti and our Primi was home-made pasta in a great tomato sauce with capers and olives. The pasta was some of the best I've had while I've been here. She also let us try some Ro Olio, which is olive oil that her family grows and sells at their house by the shore (I'll use the Jersey terminology here). Our Secondi was fresh cut prosciutto and turkey, two different kinds of fresh mozzarella, and a Zucchini quiche without any sort of crust to it. Everything was so fresh. Dessert, ciambella's (donuts) that Gloria brought from a bakery which reminded me, as always, of Miss Ob Co's down the Jersey shore, and a home-made apricot pie that Carlotta made. She also offered us chocolates and caffe to end our meal (she used the Espresso machine that she always talks about with us, which is endorsed in Italy by George Clooney, a George-Foreman'esque product if you will, but just like a Foreman it works really well) .

We sat at the table eating and talking for a good 4 hours, not even noticing it was midnight when we called for a cab. The conversation switched back and forth between English and Italian, which I thought was really cool. Sometimes mid-story those more fluent in both languages (Gloria, Alessandra, and of course Carlotta) would switch from one language to another. It was fun to have this mixed conversation, and really showed how far I've come learning Italian when I realized I understood more than I ever expected to when coming to Rome 3 months ago.

And of course, one of the highlights of the night was finally meeting Carlotta's bambino (little boy) Giorgio. He was loving all the attention, showing us how he walks and throws a ball, and even posed for a couple pictures that Gloria took of him.

I've said it a thousand times, but I can't thanks Carlotta enough for all she's done for us. We've become like family with her over the past three months, and I know whenever I come back to Rome (notice it's not if, but when) she will be the first person I call to catch up with.

A Trip Inside the Walls

As you might have noticed, my blog is formally titled "Inside the Wall" followed by what I consider a pretty catchy subtitle that explains what the blog is about ("A blog of my experiences interning at the vatican, living in Rome, traveling Europe, and whatever else happens to come my way..."). As it turns out, my office is right outside the walls of the Vatican. Through a series of events and the Internet office of the Vatican switching from being under the Pope to being under the Vatican City State, we are one the only offices outside the walls that is under the jurisdiction of the Vatican City State. I consider that a cool little fun fact.
Seeing as our office is outside the walls, it isn't often that we have the opportunity to go inside the walls. Today, I made my second trip past the Swiss guards and Vatican Police security to visit inside the walls.

Nate and I had a meeting with our Adviser for the Internship who works Inside the Walls at the Telecommunication department office. We first had a tour of the telecommunications facilities, which for a technology nerd like myself, was awesome. We saw the facilities for the phone services, internet, and television, which are all their own functioning systems, meaning they don't rely on Italian companies to operate. They are all maintained in-house (or in-vatican I guess you could say). There is even a switchboard for an information phone number to the vatican that is operated by a group of Nuns from around the world. They operate on computers now through a digital interface, but the fact that they still answer each call is pretty incredible.

After the tour we met with our Adviser and Padre Fernando, who is the head of telecommunications. He thanked us for our work at the Internet office, and presented us with certificates for our work this semester. He also gave to us a very special gift: Rosary beads from the Pope. They have Pope Benedict's coat-of-arms on them and come in a brown case that has the coat-of-arms as well. It was very nice of them to do this for us, and the opportunity to work for the Vatican was alone enough of a gift (but I'll still take the Rosary beads too).

The Changing of the Guests

It feels like the Jamie duo just got here a day or two ago, yet they've been here just short of a week and they are on their way back to the states tomorrow morning. I'm really glad that they came, and I hope they had a lot of fun on their spring break. I tried to keep them busy with all of the cool stuff I've found over the past two months, suggesting things for them to do when I was in class and at work. They were just getting the hang of navigating the city, using the buses to get two and from their hostel to where I am and to other sites in the city, learning some pretty basic phrases in Italian (They had a lot of fun with that) and now it's time for them to head home, back to New Jersey and back to class on Monday. They did a really good job keeping up with my fast pace and lots of walking, I know they were sore after the first two days of so much walking, but they really toughed it out to see everything I had to show them. I'll let them speak for themselves, but I think they enjoyed the food the most. I crammed my favorite places to eat from 2 months of experimenting within 6 days. That's a lot of gelato, pizza, pasta and desserts. We had a final dinner at Fraschetta, which is my absolute favorite restaurant in Rome. I think they might agree. I'm looking forward to seeing some guest blogging from them after they get back and have time to put their thoughts into a post for me.

My week of playing tour guide is not quite over yet though. I have about 12 hours of recouping before my next set of visitors gets here. The Jamies will literally be passing Becky and her friends mid-air tomorrow, who touch down at noon. Tired yes, but I couldn't be happier to show everyone the same things all over again. Maybe I'll switch up the itinerary a bit, I did try a lot of new things with the Jamies, so I've got a lot more on my list to pick from. And I only have 3 or 4 days with Becky and her friends, so I hope their up for the challenge. And yes, I will be going back to Fraschetta with this group in the next couple of days.

So here's to my guests of the week, thank you for letting me share my life for the past two months with you. I hope its not overkill while you're all here.

And on that note, off to prep for tour group #2!

Lets talk about all of you for a change

So I've been doing a lot of talking about myself. Well actually, I've talked mostly about myself considering it is a blog about my experiences. But this wouldn't be nearly as fun and interesting if it wasn't an interaction of sorts. I'm not one to keep a private diary or journal. I do this blog to share with all of you, and I love hearing back from everyone in the comments. It is what fuels me to keep writing and bringing you stuff I think you will find interesting.

So since I know not every visitor comments every time on the blog, I began to track the visits to my website through Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a really neat google project that lets you see all sorts of information about your website, and who is visiting it. I am always curious to find out where the people visiting the blog are from, what they are looking at, how many show up each day etc... Google Analytics lets me do just that.

A month ago, about a week into the blog, I installed Google Analytics on my site. It was just a tiny piece of code in the website that tracks every visit. It is pretty impressive/scary what google can gather about each and every one of you from a small little piece of code.

I decided to write this post today, because I am celebrating my 1,000th visit to the blog. Technically right now the count is at 1,092 as I speak, but seeing as Italy has 71 visits to date, most of them probably me, my 1,000th visit came sometime yesterday. Also, I didn't have the tracking enabled the first week of the blog, so I missed counting all those visits as well, but we'll just say 1,000 for simplicity.

So 1,000 visits in about a month eh? Lets take a look at where you are from, and what you are up to on my blog!

Quick math (or Google Analyitics for that matter) says that I average 35 visits a day. The most visits in a single day came this past Monday, when I posted Paris Parts 1 and 2, which had 68 visits. A visit doesn't mean a different individual, but a count of how many times someone comes to the site. So if you type in ryan-mahoney.blogspot.com and browse a couple different posts, that counts as one visit. If you come back later in the day and check thet site again, depending on how long ago you were last on, that may also count as another visit.


I average about 20 Unique Visitors a day. That means that in any given day around 20 people make up that average of 35 visits. So almost everyone is coming back for more in the same day. This does vary greatly on different days though. Weekends that I say I am not going to be blogging tend to show less visits and visitors because people know not to check it until I am back.

What I find really cool is that I get to know my audience through these analytic reports. What do I know about you, you might ask, well I'll tell you!

I have had 150 different people visit my blog over the past month. That means that 150 different computers (probably tracked by IP address or MAC address if that means anything to you) have seen my site at one time or another. This obviously doesn't account for multiple people using the same computer to read it or who read it together.

I have had visitors from 5 different countries visit the site. The bulk of it is the US, but also Italy (of course), Spain, the UK and yesterday saw my first hit from Canada!

In the good old U.S. of A, I have had visitors from 11 different states. Here is a visual representation of them (the darker the state, the more visits from that state overall):



If that map is too small for you, or you don't know your geography, here is a list of the 11 states, with the number of visits to date:

New Jersey (608)
Pennsylvania (128)
New York (113)
Maryland (48)
California (37)
Illinois (5)
Massachusetts (2)
District of Columbia (2)
Virginia (2)
Connecticut (1)
New Hampshire (1)

So as you can see, New Jersey controls just over half the hits to the blog. Rightfully so I suppose, seeing as that is where I am from and where most of my family lives. Pennsylvania is close behind, again logical because I go to school there.

A cool little fact is that within these 11 states, 60 different cities are represented overall. 27 of which are in New Jersey.

My Hometown of Bridgewater is responsible for 110 of the visits, but is trumped by Liberty Corner in NJ, which has 247 visits. Villanova comes in at a close 3rd with 102 visits. On average, 12% of visitors every day are new visitors, meaning it is their first time on the blog.

I find this statistic to be one of the most rewarding of all: 88% of all visits are from returning users, meaning that only 12% of visitors have only visited the blog once. That must mean I am doing something right, because people keep coming back for more.

So now some nerdy statistics that I enjoy looking at. If you don't want to/don't understand the following, just skip to the next paragraph, I won't be offended. I am proud to say that the majority of my visitors use Mozilla Firefox to visit the site, not Internet Explorer. In fact, Safari comes in a close third, only 2% off of IE in 2nd. Most of you are using Windows, but 35% of visits came from Mac OS X. I even had a couple of hits through iphones, android phones, and linux. You're a tech savy bunch aren't you? Most of you are using a Cable internet connection, though some visits are even coming from a Dialup connection. I hope my pictures and long text loads okay on that connection, I'll keep you in mind dialup visitors when I post lengthy blogs and large pictures.

Okay, you can stop skipping now, the techy part is over. So now I have a bit of a challenge for you, my readers. Ready? From what I can see I have some pretty loyal readers, and for that I am very greatful. Knowing you are checking the blog day in and day out motivates me to make sure I post every day and to bring you something interesting to read about, so I try and come up with cool topics for the posts. What I would like from you, is your help in promoting this blog. I have sent out the link to most people in my email contacts list, and have posted it on facebook and the like. So if you have a minute, and know of even just one person who you feel would be interested in reading the blog, whether it be one specific post you think they would find interesting, or the entire thing, please send them the link or tell them about it. Maybe its a family member or friend who is into traveling, or someone who is interested in the Italian/Roman culture, or even someone from your church (or your entire church, dare I say it?) seeing as I am participating in an internship at the Vatican. Lets see what kind of buzz we can stir up on the internet. Maybe we can get at least one view from all 50 states? Might be a hard task to find that person in Alaska, but I think that could be a really cool goal. Maybe I'm being greedy, after all, I should be more than happy with the fact that even one person comes to the site every day, but I think if we can grow the community of readers, and get people to start commenting, and have some conversations, some interactions through the blog posts and comments (I'll start responding to comments directly both in the posts and in the comments sections) I think we could all come away with something new every day. The last thing I want is for this to become a day-by-day list of my day-to-day activities.

To all of my past and present readers, I thank you. I started talking, and you, for one reason or another, listened. I hope that you continue to check back as often as you see fit, and are getting something from all of my posts.

To any new readers who might be a result of this post, thank you for visiting. I hope that if the site has been recommended to you by someone, and you enjoy it, you will do the same and continue the cycle.

And as always, the comment section is open!

My family will be arriving very soon, they are currently in Frankfurt, waiting for their connection to leave from there to Rome, which as been delayed by 2 hours at this point. I will update twitter (on the right, as always) when they arrive.

Paris! (Part 1 of a few)

(This is part 1 of a multiple part series. To get to the other parts quickly and easily, click the links below)

Link to Part 2

Journey number two outside of Italy was, as has been alluded to, Paris. Oh Paris, Home of the Crepe, Eiffel Tower, and stuffy French people. But more on those topics later. Lets take this chronologically again shall we? I’m sure I’ll go off on tangents when I come across a topic I want to talk about. Clear your schedule for the immediate future, this is going to be a long one (I might break it up into different parts to give you a break from the reading, and my fingers a break from the typing, but this is bound to be my longest blog post to date, I’ve got a lot to say).

Friday:

This was a special trip because I met Becky (my wonderful girlfriend for those of you who do not know her) in Paris with a bunch of her friends to celebrate her 21st birthday, which happens to be today, so everyone wish Becky a Happy Birthday in the comments below. Okay, enough embarrassing Becky, I couldn’t help it.
So, as I was saying, the plan was to meet her and her friends in Paris for the weekend. Since they are all studying abroad in London, they had the opportunity to get to Paris on Thursday afternoon. So I decided to fly in as early as possible Friday morning. 7am flight from Rome FCO to Charles De Gaul airport. As it turns out, public transportation doesn’t run at 4:30 in the morning. So I bit the bullet and got a cab by myself to the airport. Since I got a cab, it took much less time than public transportation, So I got to the airport especially early. Lucky me. I think I may have been the first person through security that morning, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing except for the wait at the gate in the other end.

AirFrance:

I am now going to write a small testimony for Air France. Air France PR people, feel free to use this all over your website, so long as you link back to this wonderful blog. I decided to fly Air France from Rome to Paris instead of one of the normal budget airlines that us college students normally use. The main two being RyanAir (coincidence?) and EasyJet, but there are many more that fly specifically between different countries. Okay so reasons to fly AirFrance, well first off, it wasn’t that expensive. Actually it was comparable to the prices of EasyJet, which also flies into Charles De Gaul airport. RyanAir I ruled out because though it was much cheaper, it flies into an airport that is about two hours away from Paris itself. I was not looking to take a bus ride from the airport to the city that is shorter than my flight from Rome to Paris.
I cannot tell you how nice it was to fly AirFrance. I flew from one real airport to another, sat in a real gate, had the ability to check a bag if I wanted to, didn’t get hassled about my carry-on being too big, didn’t have to walk to and from my plane, had a nice comfortable seat with a generous amount of legroom, was given food and drink, and was not woken up by in-flight audio commercials. I could turn this into an entire blog post, but just know that everything listed there, the opposite is what RyanAir does. “Flying AirFrance was like flying First Class compared to RyanAir”-Ryan Mahoney (hint: AirFrance, use that line!). I need to stop getting distracted like that, this post will be long enough without it.

So the flight to Paris involved a lot of sleeping, which was nice, since I haven’t really ever been able to sleep at all on flights, must be a psychological thing or something. I landed in Paris around 9am, exited the plane and found my way towards the exit. Lucky for me public transportation was running in Paris at this point. Break for Metro tangent:

Paris Metro:

The Metro in Paris lives up to the stereotypes of French people: It tries to make itself out to being more sophisticated than any other European country, while really that complexity makes it fall on its face and look bad. Yes, the Paris metro is extensive and exhaustive in its amount of lines and stops that can get you basically anywhere. I cannot take that away from it. But many things about it just didn’t feel, right. First, I go to the ticket machine to buy a ticket. I had to take an RER (certain line in the metro) subway from the airport to get to the inner city. So I bought a Metro/RER ticket, for the standard metro ticket price. Problem is, you need a special RER ticket to go to and from airports. Why? Because they want to take my money, that’s why. So after failing multiple times at going through the gate with my regular ticket, I went back and figured out that I needed the other ticket. Oh well. This would not be the last problem with tickets though. One money saver tip is to buy a carnet or book of tickets, which is 10 tickets that can be used whenever. You pay 11.60 and get 10 tickets, where a single ride is 1.60. Quick math says you pay for 7.25 tickets and get 2.75 free. Cool I guess. So when we were using the metro in the city, there being 7 of us, we would buy a book of tickets and share and keep the extras toward the next ride, so it was more economical, see? Well it turns out when you want to ride the metro you should probably buy a couple extra tickets, because they are very temperamental. Everytime we got on the metro, someone’s ticket, which was just purchased, wouldn’t work. The machine would continuously reject it. So we would pass them one of the extras and that would work. We later tried passing back tickets that had just gone through the machine 1 minute before, and you know what? Yep, sometimes those worked even though they had already been used. The other quirky thing about the Paris metro, which I’m told is similar to D.C., is that you have to put your ticket through in order to exit the metro as well. See where this and our ticket fiasco might cause a problem? Yep you guessed it, tickets that had let us on the metro just 10 minutes before would not let us exit the metro. Really, I have no explanation for why this happened. I experimented with lots of different ways of putting the ticket in, walking through the turnstile, amount of time waiting for the other person to go through, where I stood etc…. and I really couldn’t figure it out. Maybe there’s a trick to it and we were just doing it wrong, a lot. I personally think its an evil scheme to confuse, frustrate tourists while gaining entertainment and profit from the locals. Apart from this, I found the signs to be confusing and not helpful. They tell you the direction of the train just like any other metro in the world, by telling you what the last stop in that direction is. Two problems with that. Many of the lines branch off into multiple directions towards the end of the line. The B RER train, which runs to and from the airports, has 4 “ends” to it. I know many of them have even more than this, but I used that line so I figured I would talk about what I know (or don’t know for that matter). The other problem is that many of the end stations have multiple names. It’ll be firstname-nextname-nameprobablyusedonasign. See how that can be confusing? The last name on the map is the one that is posted on signs. I’m sure it’s a more recognizable street or monument or direction to locals, but again, not so easy when you aren’t from around here.

Okay, this seems like a good spot for a break. Mostly because I have class now and want to post something before I head off for that. I’ll post part 2 as soon as I type it! Rest your eyes for a little bit, we've got a long way to go.

Spin Cycle

Being here for a month so far, you can see how I could have run out of clothes by now. Well this week I hit that milestone, and had the pleasure of doing laundry in Rome for the first time.

This isn't exactly the first time. I did a few items in the sink in the hotel, which ended with taking over two days to dry, so I have opted in for a more practical solution. We had heard there was a laundromat around town nearby, so we ventured out to find it.

What we found is was a small hole in the wall storefront that doubled as laundromat and internet access point. Surf the web while your clothes get clean? Sounds like a sales pitch to me.

So in we went, with clothes in hand. I won't describe the process, it's the same as in America, except instead of picking warm, cold, hot, you pick the actual temperature. 30 minutes in a washer and 30 in a dryer, about 10 euro later and we were on our way back to the hotel with clean clothes. The washing machines were tiny, while the dryers were enormous. 3 or 4 loads of wash would fit in one dryer.

The bottom line is, I was able to make it a month without having to do laundry. Lets give credit to good packing for that. By that calculation I should only have to do laundry once more. Pretty good if you ask me (I know you didn't but I get to decide what you ask and what you don't ask).

I had a really good day at St. Paul's today, more on that soon, once I have something to show for my work.

Edit: We've been a little short on questions lately, anyone want to pick it up and start asking? Ask them in the comments! or shoot me an email, ramlax13(at)gmail.com (replace the (at) with @. Never post your email on a website fully, there are computer programs that search through websites for email addresses to send spam to. That's a whole other topic though...)

Blast from the past

Today we had some unexpected visitors to the office. Two Villanova graduates, who had participated in the Vatican internship program in the fall of 2006, Gloria and Chris, stopped by because they were in Rome. We had a really nice conversation with them at work and decided we should get together tonight to talk about our experiences.

When Gloria and Chris were here, they were not part of the Saint Mary’s Program. The program was very new at that point and many of the kinks were still being worked out. Regardless, they still found their experiences in Rome to be so influential that they have both come back to Rome multiple times since their study abroad program 4 years ago.

It was awesome to hear their stories and see the love they have for the Vatican program and for Rome. When they came into the office they were welcomed as if they were long lost relatives, with hugs and kisses, everyone happy to see them.

We decided to go to dinner tonight and we invited our Italian teacher who had also been their teacher, Carlotta, to join us. We went to dinner on Roman time, so 9pm, and Carlotta recommended a restaurant to us in Trastevere, a very nice neighborhood full of restaurants and shops. It was by no means a tourist restaurant, and it helped that we had Gloria and Carlotta with us, Gloria who speaks fluent Italian, and Carlotta being a Roman native, who not only understands the language but the culture behind it all.

Our food was fantastic. Home made pastas and pizza at a great price. The tiramisu though was the highlight of the night. Though it did not look anything like your normal tiramisu, it was probably the best I’ve ever had (Chris agreed, he has refused to eat tiramisu since the last time he had been at the restaurant).

It was a special night for all of us, and one that will forever be in my most prized memories of my time here. The experiences that Gloria and Chris shared and their connection with Rome formed while they were studying here makes me certain I will be back to visit many times throughout my life. Their friendship with Carlotta is still strong after all these years. I can only hope I can come back and have dinner with future Villanova Vatian internship students, share my experiences with them, and have the same impact that Gloria and Chris had on me tonight.

Goal!!!

If anyone followed my twitter feed, which can be found on the right hand side, you would know where I was today.

Today, I was able to experience my first (real) professional soccer(football) game. AS Roma vs. Siena, at the Rome Olympic Stadium. It was truly an experience.

We’ve been trying to go to a game since we got here, but getting your hands on tickets isn’t always the easiest. To get tickets you can go to certain AS Roma official stores, and buy them there. You have to bring some sort of ID with you, and your name gets put on the ticket to be verified at the gate when you enter. Some games though, the more popular ones, are for Lazio (the region Rome is in) residents only. So for the first two games we tried to buy tickets for, this was the case.

There must be a big difference in the attendance of those games versus the ones open to anyone, because the stadium, which holds about 80,000 fans, was only about half full today. When I say half full I don’t mean that there are people spread out all over the stadium. Fans are mostly packed into the two end zones, which also happen to be where the cheapest tickets are (only 15 euro for our tickets). We were in the north end zone, which is the quieter of the two, though there was nothing quiet about it. We had great seats though, 11 rows up right behind the goal. Normally people like to watch a soccer game from the side, because you get a better view and can tell depth of field. Seeing that I spent most of my soccer career standing in the 18 yard box as a goal keeper, I’ve developed a good eye for the action going on down field, so our seats didn’t bother me at all, and in fact brought back memories of playing the sport I love.

If when you think of European soccer, you think of crazy fans, you would be absolutely correct. From the minute we came near the stadium until the second we got on the bus to go home, the fans were cheering, whistling, chanting and making all sorts of other noises.

At the beginning of the game, as the AS Roma roster was announced, they all broke out in song, singing what seems to be Rome’s anthem. After this they began to yell and taunt the small group of Siena fans in the section next to us. There were maybe 50 Siena fans at the game. They were surrounded by 20 police officers. As if that wasn’t enough, in-between the sections was a glass partition, complete with heavy-duty dead bolted door between the two sections. It was much like a hockey rink, except instead of keeping fans and players separated, it was keeping fans and fans separated. In the opposite end zone, about a dozen large flags were waved the entire game. There were also flares set off and all sorts of noisemakers. Our end zone had plenty of flags waving as well.

The game was tied at 1 to 1 until the 87th minute when an AS Roma substitute put in the second goal. The fans went crazy. I’ve never seen so much hugging, jumping, cheering and celebrating for a regular season game. It’s as if they had won the world cup. It was an impressive goal, and coming so late in the game was pretty awesome to see, but you could see in the fans a true passion and love for their team and for the sport. When the game ended, they all sang another Rome tribute song, and we were off to find our bus back to the hotel.

I’m ready to go back to my next game. I’ve already got my AS Roma hat and scarf, and hopefully the next game we go to will be a bit warmer, though the energy of the crowd today was enough to keep me warm for all 90 minutes.

Oh so you want to know about the level of play? It was fast, strong, skilled and really some of the most well executed soccer I’ve seen. It’s great to watch athletes who can perform at the highest level of competition. It makes soccer that much more enjoyable when a player can use his head(literally) and place the ball exactly where he wants it.

What's the weather?

I’ve been in Rome for 4 weeks now, and the weather has been far from pleasant the entire trip. I’d say 20 days out of those 4 weeks it has rained, even if only for a short amount of time. Have I talked about the weather yet? I don’t think I have, but I apologize if I have touched upon this subject before, I’m beginning to get my ideas for topics confused with my actual topics I’ve used.

The rain is a bit unpredictable. It will be beautiful out in the morning, blue skies with minimal clouds, and by the time I leave the Vatican office it is raining pretty steadily. Two hours later it will be beautiful out again.

I now live strictly by these guidelines: If it is raining out currently, bring an umbrella; If it is not raining but you think it looks like it will, bring an umbrella; And lastly, if it is not raining, and looks like a beautiful day with no chance of rain, bring an umbrella.

Earlier in my trip I wasn’t adhering to these guidelines and found out the hard way. One of our first weekends here we went to the Coliseum for a tour. Remember all those pictures? Yep, no rain while touring the Coliseum. Afterwards some of us decided to go to Via Del Corso to walk around and maybe go into some stores. Coming out of one of the stores we were faced with torrential downpours. We ran to a café and tried to wait it out. It didn’t stop. Between 4 or 5 of us we had 2 umbrellas, and we dared to make the trip back home after being stuck in the café and surrounding stores for a couple hours. Needless to say I was soaking wet, head to toe.

Another funny thing about rain here is that the second a single drop of rain falls to the ground, the umbrella guys are all over the streets. The umbrella guys are immigrants who sell umbrellas. They stand on one particular part of a street and every person that passes who doesn’t have an umbrella they try to get to buy one. There is an umbrella guy just about every 20 feet, and though they see you refused to buy one from the last 10 salesmen, they will try and push an umbrella on you nonetheless. On a day similar to the one I mentioned above, Nate and I got caught in some rain, and when faced with one of these umbrella guys we decided to buy some umbrellas. He wanted 6 euro for the bigger umbrellas he had. We got him down to 8 euro for 2, so 4 each. Let me warn you, for anyone coming to Rome, these umbrellas are of the lowest quality possible. Nate’s is not completely broken and useless, and mine, though still working, feels flimsy and has had rust on one of the arms since the 2^nd time I used it. So do yourself a favor and buy a real umbrella from a real store.

Through all the rain we have had a few beautiful days here. Days where I was able to walk around in a long sleeve shirt and enjoy the sites. I’ve heard this is their wet season, so we’ll tough it out and hope for better weather in the next two months.

I’ve got some exciting plans for tomorrow, so be sure to check back tomorrow for a post all about that. I think I’ll keep it a secret for now, just to keep you all interested. Lets hope for good weather tomorrow, it would be very beneficial for the plans.

zoom zoom...

I've wanted to talk about the transportation in Rome for a while, and seeing as I've had a few questions about it lately, I'm going to do just that.

I'm going to leave public transportation for another post, because I want to do a bit more research (aka using it more) before I do that post. Even though I haven't used the transportation I'm going to talk about, meaning private modes of transportation, I think I've learned enough to write a solid post.

Private transportation consists of cars and mopeds/scooters/motorcycles. Lets talk about each because they are both equally interesting.

Cars first? A car in Rome is not a car in the United States. Cars in Rome are all what we label "smart cars". Many of them actually are the Smart brand, but they're all the same premise: a very compact car that gets great gas mileage and can be parked just about anywhere. These things can be parked parallel, sideways, backwards, probably even upside-down and they fit into just about any space available. The reason they are so common is because of this ease of parking. Most cars are parked on the side of the streets here in Rome. Since many of the roads are narrow cobblestone side streets, using these tiny cars makes it possible to park on pretty much any street.

The next mode of transportation, and probably Rome's favorite, is the scooter/moped. They are all over, and by all over I mean there are I'd say 5-10 scooters for every car on the road. We have 2 wheeled motorcycles in the US, so what's the big deal? The big deal is how the people drive these things. They are some of the most impatient drivers I have ever seen. When a scooter pulls up to a light, they weave their way to the front of the pack, so to right in front of light. So at every light there is a group of scooters at the front, ready to jump ahead of the cars they just cut off. When the light changes, they take off in a frenzy of high pitched acceleration. As they catch up to the next pack of cars on the road, they weave right through them as well. They will do whatever it takes to keep moving. If it means driving on the wrong side of the road, even on a busy road like the one in front of our hotel, they will do it. Red lights for scooters seem to only be a suggestion, as I have seen more than a few scooters not even hesitate at a red light. The light wasn't just turning red, it had been red for 30 seconds, and the scooters showed no sign of stopping.

I was asked about the price of a gallon of gas in Rome. When I read the question it really stumped me. I realized I had not seen a gas station in my entire time in Rome. Living in the center of the historical part of Rome, there seems to be no gas stations. This is probably because the cars and mopeds get such great gas mileage (or kilomerage? maybe?). So I went searching for a gas station and made an interesting find. First off, gas stations here are are not like gas stations in the States. They are not large structures with multiple pumps, convenience stores attached, but are instead 1 or 2 small pumps on the side of the road. Second, the measurement for buying gas is per liter, considering they don't use the gallon. There are roughly 4 liters in a gallon, and a liter of gas here is from 1 euro to 1.20 euro. Quick conversion makes that about 4 euros a gallon. So you must be feeling pretty good about gas prices? Well consider that these small cars get somewhere between 35 and 55 miles per gallon. The scooters? They average about 70 miles per gallon. Gas Guzzling SUV's are unheard of here. They just aren't practical for the city, though they're not practical for any city including US ones, yet I still see plenty of GMC SUV's in New York and Philly every time. These cars are also much less expensive than cars in the US. Maybe it's their size, or that they aren't being shipped overseas, or a bit of both. Mopeds are even cheaper, a couple thousand euro will get you a shiny new moped.

Virtual Reality day 1

Today was a very cool day. This week the Villanova Professors are here visiting us and most importantly working on the virtual reality tours for the Vatican. Today we had the opportunity to help do some of the VR for St. Mary Major. 5 different VR tours in fact.

If you haven't seen what the VR tours look like, go look at them on the Vatican site (click basilicas on the bottom left hand corner of the main page).

The virtual reality tours are created through a series of photographs being stitched together to create the 360 degree panorama. This means taking somewhere between 60 to 250 pictures, depending on the place being created, and linking them all together so they look like you are actually there.

This is all done by a computer/robotic rig that when set up properly, takes pictures at consistent intervals so they can be stitched together easily, and so that no corner goes missed when photographing it. Cue drum roll for a short (little shaky) video of the rig:




See that? It rotates around on its own to get the pictures taken (It was taking pictures of the ceiling in that clip, which are awesome).

So while the rig is busy taking pictures (5 minutes for the small rig which takes 63 pictures, 20 minutes or so for the big rig that takes 240 pictures) our job is to make sure no one steps directly in front of the camera, which would block part of the church. The camera rotates, so it makes it tricky seeing as how one minute its facing towards the altar, and the next it's facing towards the back of the church, so we move people around accordingly, using our broken Italian to shuffle them aside.

The Church is normally dark during visiting hours, but for this special occasion they turned all the lights on in the church for us. Every single one. It was incredible to see it lit up, the gold detail in the ceiling and artwork glimmering. I have some pictures of it, and you can compare between my last visit to the church and this time.

Tomorrow is Saint Peters. It will be my first time there and I am extremely excited. You can expect a longer blog post about the Virtual Reality tours tomorrow, I'll label this one as a teaser.

Hola Barcelona!

As promised, I will now flood your screen with text and pictures about my weekend in Barcelona to make up for the fact that I was not able to blog for 3 days while there. I hope you will all accept this as an even trade-off, and if you do not, well then too bad for you, because I plan to type until my fingers hurt. If you aren't up for a marathon of reading, skip to topics that you find interesting, I will bold all the different topics and sections.


The Beginning:




Barcelona, Barcelona, where to start. How about a 7am flight out of Rome, which means waking up at 4am to get a taxi to the airport to go through security. To make this easy I will now introduce the 3 other people with whom I traveled: Nathan, my roommate and the one other guy from Villanova on this trip, Meghann, a St. Mary's student who is roommates with Joey (one of the girls from Villanova) and Alex, another St. Mary's student who also rooms with Joey and Meghann. Blog readers, meet Nathan, Alex and Meghann; You three, welcome to the blog. There were also about a dozen other St. Mary's Rome program girls who traveled to Barcelona, but we did not travel or stay with them the entire time so introductions would take up an entire page.

Airport security went without a hitch, except that I was pulled yet again for a random explosives swab down of my bag. I guess I travel with too much electronic equipment and they must not like that. Once through, I had a donut which looked and tasted just like a donut from Miss Ob Co's donuts down at the Jersey shore, which was awesome (for those of you farmiliar with the donuts I speak of, I know you are jealous I had one in January, for those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, just ignore this but know I had a really good donut). Enough about donuts, we boarded the flight and had a nice 90 minute flight to Barcelona. We flew into Girona, a small airport an hour or so outside Barcelona, which means we had to take a bus to Barcelona from there. Once inside Barcelona, we took the subway to our hostel.

So lets recap, taxi to airport, airplane to Girona, Bus to barcelona, subway to Badalona (where the hostel is), and all this before noon.

The Metro:
My first topic for this post: the Barcelona metro system: In a nutshell, the metro system is easy to use and understand, quick, efficient, simple yet very comprehensive, and on top of that very clean. There are several lines that run through Barcelona, labeled L1-L8(the major lines, though there are others). They are all color coded. Reading the metro map is incredibly simple, and there are plenty of connections so that you can switch lines to get to where you need to go. Trains during normal hours come every 5 minutes, at the most, and sometimes come every 3 minutes. At each station there are displays that count down until the next train. These timers are extremely precise, when the clock hits 15 seconds the train is pulling into the station, and by zero it is leaving. The trains themselves have electronic maps that show all the stations, which shows the direction you are going and which stops are coming up, with the connections listed below them. As you move it blinks on the next station, and announces its name. The trains are very clean, something that really surprised me.

This leads me to my next topic, our hostel, which was a 10 - 15 minute metro ride from the center of barcelona.

Hostel:
This was my first experience with a hostel, and for our group I was given the task of booking it. So naturally I was nervous about getting it right. When I booked it, I didn't really know it was outside of Barcelona, in a town called Badalona, but that turned out to be a great selling point for us once we realized the potential. Being in Badalona made the hostel cheaper, and actually much nicer. We booked a 4 bed private room, with our own bathroom. This is a rarity in hostels, which normally have 6-20 people in a barrack-like room, with a shared bathroom. We were able to book a private room with a bathroom for less than those who stayed in the center of Barcelona in a typical hostel.

The Barcelona Dream Hostel in Badalona was where we stayed. The room was very nice and clean, and the hostel was awesome. They had several common rooms with tv, computers, internet, board games, and even a common guitar for people to play. They had an outside patio with couches and hammocks to hang out in which was very cool. There was also a full kitchen for us to use, which we made lunch in after going to the grocery store (nothing special, ham sandwiches).

The Beach:



After our lunch, we headed down to the beach which was 5 minutes away from the hostel. It was very warm outside and I was able to wear just a t shirt and jeans to the beach. The water however was extremely cold(no brainer), but I was able to put my feet in for a few minutes. The sand was more like pebbles, which was very interesting. It wasn't as messy as normal sand, and you could brush it off easily. We soon noticed that there was a lot of sea glass mixed in. Alex and Meghann didn't know what it was, them being from Michigan and Chicago respectively, so we soon found ourselves digging through the sand. I came back with a good little collection of sea glass, mostly very tiny pieces but fun nonetheless. We spent a couple hours at the beach which was nice to relax after all the traveling.

Park Güell:




By 2pm we were off to Barcelona to see what we could find. We headed to the Park Guell, a large park in the center of town which was designed by Antoni Gaudi, a famous architect. To get there, we had to climb a huge hill from the metro stop. So big in fact that they have escalators running up the center of it. We chose to be adventerous and climb the stairs. The park offers great views of the city and hosts lots of artwork from Gaudi. We made our way up the trails enjoying the scenery and view. There is a square about halfway up that hosts vendors and musicians, so we stopped there for a bit and then continued climbing. When we reached what seemed to be the end of the trails, we saw that the top of the hill (felt more like a mountain) had no trail leading to it. So we made our own path and hiked up the rest of the way to discover the best view of Barcelona, an unobstructed 360 degree view of the entire city. We then made our way down, saw more of the park, and walked the streets once at the bottom to find a metro station back to the hostel.

Food:



I am going to cover all of our food experiences in one section, just to make it easier to talk about. Barcelona has a large Catalan influence, which is a region of Spain with its own dialect and culture. The food uses seafood heavily, but not your typical fish. Squid, anchovies, shrimp, and shellfish are the common seafoods here. The first meal I had was an omlette sandwich. Not typical Catalan food, but the Italians don't eat eggs so I saw this as an opportunity to get some eggs. It was very good.

Tapas, meaning appetizers or snacks, are also big here. Many of them are made with the seafood common to the area. Nathan and I tried some crab-ball tapas, basically crab meat fried, with the claw as the handle to eat it with. Definitely right up my alley. We also had paella, ours being a mix of chicken and seafood. I liked it, but after a while the pretty much raw squid and anchovies taste started getting to me.

On Saturday morning we arrived at a metro station to an unlikely surprise, a Dunkin Donuts. Though it was not called Dunkin Donuts, but Dunkin Coffee instead. I guess coffee sells better than donuts. I got a coffee and two donuts, which hit the spot for breakfast. The coffee though was not brewed like an American dunkin donuts, but was instead expresso with enough milk to make it "coffee".

Churros, I had several while in Barcelona. I've always loved churros, but these were by far the best I've had. Besides being good by themselves, they are often filled with chocolate, a perfect combination. They were a great energy boost while walking all around the city.

Saturday:





Saturday was our major sightseeing day since we had the entire day to explore. Our first stop was Sangrada Familia, the famous Gaudi(again) church which is unfnished. It is enormous and the architectural work on it is incredibly detailed. Next we went to la Ramblas, which is the main stretch in Barcelona, full of shops, stores and restaurants. We walked down it for several hours stopping in different stores and eventually made our way to another church, Santa Maria del Pi. The church was beautiful inside, but had some very interesting features, such as an outside courtyard with geese and roosters.

From there we went to the Picaso museum, which I found much more interesting than I originally anticipated. We quickly jumped back on the Metro to head to the magic fountains which have light/music/water shows every half hour from 7pm to 8:30pm, only to find out when we got there that they are shut down until February. We then found a carnival down the street, got some churros and then headed to a restaurant to get dinner.

Sunday:



Sunday brought more walking up stairs, which seemed to be a central theme the entire weekend. We saw the Olympic stadium and park that surrounds it. The art museum is also located there, so we walked around inside the building which is in itself pretty spectacular. We then headed back to the bus station to get a 4pm bus for our 7:30 flight back to Rome. A very busy weekend indeed.

Last Thoughts:

Smoking:
People in Europe in general smoke a lot. People in Barcelona smoke like chimneys. This is probably my biggest if not only complaint about Barcelona. It is not only that they smoke a lot, but smoking inside is still permitted. When you walk into a restaurant you enter a haze of cigarette smoke. Whether it be 8pm for dinner or 9am for breakfast, people are smoking non-stop. I'm not sure what it is about the culture that they haven't realized it's killing them, but I would be interested to see the statistics of lung cancer compared to the rest of the world for that area.

Pickpockets:
Luckily we were able to avoid Pickpockets this weekend. We've been told by many that pick pockets in Barcelona are the worst. At one point though we did find that one of the compartments of Nate's backpack had been unzipped, but we're unsure if it had just been open the entire time or was opened by a pickpocket because there was nothing in it to begin with.

The Language Barrier (Again):
Just as I was getting comfortable used to hearing only Italian and speaking some, I am thrust into yet another foreign language. I do not know spanish, at all, but fortunately Nate had some Spanish background and I believe Meghann has a little too (correct me if I'm wrong!). So to some extent we were able to communicate simple ideas through Nate, except for the fact that most of the people in Barcelona do not speak regular Spanish but the Catalan dialect, which in some cases is extremely different (from what I could tell by looking at signs that had both Spanish and Catalan on them). This and that when I tried to order something or ask a question I asked it in Italian for the first two days before giving up trying to communicate at all. When we arrived back in Rome I thanked the taxi driver with "Gracias", clearly not Italian.

What's next?

This week the Villanova Professors are here to do some presentations, meetings, and oh yeah, to run the project of photographing St. Mary Major (tomorrow) and St. Peter's Basilica (wednesday and thursday). Even Father Peter, the President of the University has made the trip to present the Vatican Museum with the finished virtual reality tour of the Sistine Chapel. Exciting stuff. That also means probably no traveling this weekend, at least not out of Italy, but maybe a day trip somewhere?

The first weekend in February will see me going to Paris. ah Paris, where I'll further get more confused in the foreign language side of my brain as I struggle to remember 7 years of French all while not confusing it with my (at that point) 5 weeks of Italian.

Also, see all the pictures with this link, and of course leave your comments below for me!

http://picasaweb.google.com/ramlax13/Barcelona?feat=directlink

Some wires

A while ago I posted a long blog post about being "unwired". One of the major points of that blog was the lack of a cell phone. Well, I caved, and now have an Italian cell phone number.

(I do warn you that this may be a very techy post, so bear with me if it's not your thing and I'll try and explain it clearly)

For the first two weeks I was attempting to buy the skype phone offered by the mobile carrier 3(tre). What I found though is that the service provider 3 is not very good in Italy. I'm a tech junkie. When I go to get a new piece of technology I do my research. I had been researching cell phones abroad for months before I left. So when I went into the 3 store, I knew what I wanted and that they offered it. The salesperson disagreed with me. I was told even though it is advertised all over their website that I could not only not purchase the skypephone, but I could not get a pay as you go plan from them at all unless I signed a 24 month contract. After a frustrating argument, with the sales person speaking broken english and myself speaking very, very broken Italian, I left empty handed only to walk a block down to the TIM store, where I purchased a SIM card (I already had the phone from a friend, thanks Tim!(not TIM the cell company, Tim the person, confusing I know))

For all the non-techy readers, cell phone contracts work a little differently in Europe than in the States. You do not normally sign your freedom away to a service provider for 2 years. You instead buy a phone(cheaper than in the U.S I may add), and then buy a SIM card from one of the providers here. A SIM card is universal and can go into any phone. It is assigned your number so any phone you put your card in automatically gets connected with your number and service provider. Pretty cool huh? Well it gets better: As I mentioned, contracts don't really exist. Instead you pay-as-you-go. You put 10 euro or however much on your phone. You have an agreement with your service provider that you will pay x amount of money per minute for all calls you make. In my case, this is 10 cents a minute for every call I make. Notice how I said every call you make, because receiving calls is totally free. When you run out, you put more money on your account, either online or buying a prepaid recharge card from any "tobacco store" (tabacchi in Italian, basically a convenience store).

Now lets compare this to the American system of cell contracts. We will ignore exchange rates because for natives of the respective countries that's not important, and I'm going to refer to all currencies as dollars or $. Right now Verizon Wireless' cheapest individual plan is $40 for 450 minutes per month. That includes no text messaging, just 450 minutes of using your cell phone's main function, talking (I know hard to believe that's what they were made for, right?). I'm sure that includes free nights and weekends, but to me that doesn't really factor in, what matters is the ability to call someone at any time.

Take that same $40 and apply it to my rate. That's 400 minutes if you pay 10 cents a minute. Very similar isn't it. In fact, Verizon might even look more appealing at first glance. I think not. Those 400 minutes I have from the $40 I placed on my account, they don't disappear at the end of the month. I'm not restricted per month. Okay, so AT&T has rollover minutes don't they? So if you only use 200 minutes one month you get to keep the extra 200 minutes (we've all seen the commercials, "those minutes are still good!") Yes you get those minutes, but you are still paying $40 again that 2nd month for another 400 minutes. Now why do you need another 400 minutes if you just rolled over 200? See what I'm getting at?

$40 dollars prepaid. It lasts for as long as I need it. If I use 400 minutes a month, poof they're gone when I've used them all. If I only need 200 minutes a month, well then look at that I really only paid $20 a month. Busy month? Lots of gossip? Simply put more money into your account, for the same rate you've been paying all along. Verizon charges 45 cents per every minute you go over your monthly allowance. I might be beating a dead horse but lets do a little math. 600 minutes in a month? If you're using my prepaid service that will cost you $60. Verizon's 450 minute contract? $40 for the first 450 minutes, + $0.45 x 150 = $107.50. In other words, for less than it costs to pay for those 150 extra minutes, you could have 600 minutes on prepaid. Not to mention you don't pay for any calls received! (Sticking with the math theme: Free incoming calls > Free nights and weekends)

Phone break? Not happy with the one you have? Just want to upgrade? Sure, pick which one you want, buy it, and put your SIM card in, none of this waiting 2 years to get a new phone.

Anyone feel ripped off by their U.S. cell contract? I sure do. I'm not going to even get into the whole data/internet on phones argument, this post is already borderline rant, but for those interested one line of stats:

On ANY phone: Verizon: $15 per month for 25mb of data over the entire month, TIM: $10 a month for 50mb of data a day (You see where the rant would come in?)

The phones are better, the plans and pricing is better, and the coverage from what I've seen is the same if not better. All those ready to switch to the European system raise your hand...

Lets answer some questions!

So I'm making this my first of many "interactive" posts. By that I mean I would really like to take some questions from the comment sections of my posts and answer them. I have been waiting for a good day to do this, and seeing as my 6 year old cousin has just posed some questions she would like answered, I figured it would be a perfect day to finally dedicate a post to this.

So to answer your questions Carly...

Q: What Kind of Instruments do they Play in Italy:
A: Great question, and it's right up my alley. One of the fun things about Rome I have found is the street performers throughout the area. Public performances in piazza's (squares) seem to be legal, even if they get pretty loud. Musicians play sorts of stringed and wind instruments, such as violins, saxophones, trumpets, and my favorite, guitars. Some even plug into speakers, their music filling up the surrounding streets. I am trying to get my hands on a guitar so I can try this out for a day, go sit in a piazza and see how much I can make off of tips (could be an interesting blog post). I haven't seen any unique instruments so far, but I'll keep my eye out for any good ones.

Q: Do you understand the Language?
A: This is where my Italian tutor comes in. Carlotta has been great in helping us all learn pretty quickly how to manage around the city with Italian. After only 5 days of 3 hour classes I feel much more confident with the language. Understanding it tends to be much easier than speaking it. Some words are familiar to the English translation, others to a word in French I somehow remember, and even more are somewhat recognizable in the context of who it is that is talking, and where I am. If I go into the cafe and try and order a sandwich, and the person behind the counter asks whether I want it for here or to go, I can understand what they are asking and answer them. If I have to ask for directions though, it is a bit harder to have an actual conversation with someone, and to initiate the conversation. Both my understanding and ability to speak Italian has gotten much better every day, and I've come a long way from trying to order regular tap water on the airplane on the way over here (I was given seltzer water twice out of three tries). Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be able to hold a real conversation in Italian!

If you have any questions that you'd like to be answered, post them in the comments of this post and I'll be sure to answer them. If they are short answers, I'll just edit this post and add them on, if it's something I think would make for a good post then I may hold off and use it for another full post like this one.

Thanks for the questions Carly!

A virtual tour to come

Sunday was an optional tour for the program, but seeing the Basilica of St. Mary Major was definitely on my list of things to do. If some of you aren't aware, part of the program Villanova has with the Vatican is to create these awesome 360 degree virtual tours of some of the most spectacular Churches in Rome.

Currently the virtual tour of St. Paul Outside-The-Walls is up on the Vatican's website (I'll link at the bottom), and St. Mary Major is another that has been captured by the Villanova crews over the past semesters to be put online.

Knowing this, I was eager to see it in person, and I'm glad I went along for the tour. It really is an incredible Basilica, so as what seems to be an easy way for me to keep these blog posts short, I'll leave you with some pictures I took, but look forward to the virtual tour soon, because it's sure to out-do my pictures.

Saint Paul Outside The Walls Link (click on Virtual Tour): http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/san_paolo/index_en.html

It's a beautiful day

Finally a truly beautiful day in Rome. I'm glad to see that the rain held off for 3 days and we had blue skies and warm weather for our tours today. The Pantheon, Jewish Ghetto, and a couple of other places in-between, which made for some cool pictures. So here they are:



Link for Gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/ramlax13/ToursOfPantheonPiazzasJewishGhetto

balloons

A bunch of us were out enjoying the beautiful weather tonight, walking through the Piazza Navona, gelato in hand, when we saw a group of people in the center of the piazza. They had 4 or 5 of these miniature hot air balloons, which looked like plastic bags with a large votive in them, and were setting them off one by one. Every time one launched successfully they all cheered and clapped, then set up the next balloon. Watching the balloons was a spectacle. They would just barely make it above a crowd of people, and would then quickly start to rise in the air. They all followed the same path, leaving a trail of lights over the piazza. It seemed like they would get miles away within minutes of being let go, their light still visible high in the sky. It was hard to take my eyes off of the lights, hoping to watch them travel on until they were no longer visible. A feeling of realizing where I was at that moment, being in Rome, working at the Vatican, hanging out with some really awesome people, all hit me at that moment.
These next three months are a fleeting moment. They will pass me by as quickly as the balloon takes to get out of sight. It just made me realize I have to take it all in and take notice of every little detail until it is gone.

By the way, if anyone knows of any significance of the balloons, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. For those who don't know how to comment, right below this post it will say "comments". Click on that, then type your comment and either sign into one of the existing types of accounts, or if you don't have one click Anonymous and just make sure to leave your name in the comment!

Tours this weekend, lets hope for good weather.