4 hour Walking Tour and Cooking!

I'm starting this blog super late because I was skyping with the family at home and I needed to catch up on emails and all that so I'll try to include as much as I can before I doze off with the computer on my lap. haha. Ok so today we met up at the school around 11 to take a 4 hour walking tour around the school area and down to Piazza del Popolo, then the Pantheon, and ending up at Campo dei Fiori. I will definitely have to do several walking tours over and over again so figure out everywhere we went and the places I want to visit either for shopping or little cafe places that have foods I would eat. One thing I will say, you can not going hungry in Italy. Ever. Every other shop sells food! After we were shown all the hot spots for places to eat lunch during the semester, we walked down to Piazza del Popolo which is a huge circular town center with a giant obelisk in the middle.





This is to the right of the picture with the obelisk. It's a huge fountain stetching up to, I guess, a walkway. I'd love to go up there and take pictures of the piazza looking down. There are lots of...interesting things to be found in this piazza. haha. There are the human statues of actual people dressed up to look like statues and they stand super still and change positions every so often. There are also people trying to sell you roses and shove them right in your face. And there are also random performers... perhaps you know of this guy being impersonated:



That's Kate, my one roommate towards the end of the video!

We also got to see the Pantheon! It's not the easiest place to get to. It's only accessible through side streets which are incredibly confusing and going "straight" is more like a drunken waltz back home after a night at the bar. I highly recommend a map.










The last picture is the outside of the Pantheon. Next we walked all over the place. I can't even tell you half the stuff we saw it was so overwhelming. We went to Piazza Venezia which all Italians refer to the monument building there as the wedding cake because of its shape. Looked like a regular building to me. And through the trees you can see the Colosseum a little bit. Somewhere, and I have no idea what the piazza was called if it even was one, there is a "Cat Sanctuary". Wanda, you'll appreciate this. Basically it looks like a small version of the Forum, where you see ruins of Temples and the original street level of the Roman Empire that is about maybe 30 feet down from the streets we walk on today. There are over 1,000 cats that live in there and there are people that care for them every day and give them regular check ups. Apparently if you ask to adopt one they say they're much happier and better kept there then they would be in a home. And they really do look happy.







That little guy was hanging out right under the information sign about the Cat Sanctuary. It's free to enter down along the one side of the Sanctuary to get a closer look at the ruins as well as the cats. There were also cats on the stairway leading down. They're free to come and go but they seem to be happy just staying there.

We ate lunch at Campo dei Fiori which is a decent sized market square which is, again, only accessible through side roads and is super confusing for me to follow how exactly we wound up there. The professor then left us to our own devices to make the trip back to school ourselves. And I must say I was proud of myself that I managed to understand the map well enough to get back to Piazza del Popolo. But I definitely couldn't have done it on my own. Later we had a cooking class with another professor. He just gave us tips on where to buy fresh foods and what regions had what types of foods and how they differ with the same items. He made sauces for us to try on fresh loaves of bread with some red wine. The sauce tasted just like Mom's sauce at home. It's canned tomatoes with salt and loooooots of extra virgin olive oil. He gave us a recipe book with different sauce recipes. The roommates and I plan to try them out. I guess my theory of never believing I can get sick of pasta will be tested this semester. haha.

Anyway that's about it for now. Hopefully the video worked! Ciao!