Tarquinia Legend

So its midterm week, meaning the half-way mark of this Italian adventure. I have two midterms tomorrow morning; Italian and Intro to Music. Neither of the two figure to be terribly difficult and things have been going pretty well in both classes so I am not anticipating too much trouble. After the exams I have a few hours to get ready and then I head off to Brussels. I’ll be there overnight with Lindsay and James, and then we take a morning bus to Amsterdam and spend the weekend in Holland Bliss.

It’s been about a week since I returned from Oktoberfest and my body has yet to fully recover, in fact each day brings a new symptom and lessens the effects of the previous one. I’m still managing to get decent night’s sleep so at this point it hasn’t gotten too out of hand.

Last Friday the API group had a day trip planned to Tarquinia. It’s a quiet town about an hour outside of Rome with beautiful rolling hills and some nice vineyards. We started the day off with a tour of one of the bigger vineyards in the area. We got to walk through the grape fields and were giving the luxury of picking the grapes off the vine and eating them fresh. Afterwards, we headed over to an olive tree and the group picked olives for about 10 minutes. These olives were headed to become Olive Oil, which was another specialty of the vineyard. We then got to check out the family’s collection of pigs, which were used for….yes, ham, ham which we ended up enjoying for lunch. When this nice tour concluded, we set off for our bike ride through the town. We got to ride through the cobblestone roads and check out some nice, scenic views. At the end of this hour or so long journey we were taken back to the vineyard and were treated to an amazing 4-course meal, consisting of tomato and ham bruschette, vegetable lasagna, chicken and potatoes, and some sort of butter cream cake. This meal also came with a short lesson in wine tasting. They explained to us the process by which to properly taste wine and how to tell the difference between them. We were giving three kinds of red wine, and although it was a nice experience, I don’t think I am any closer to becoming a connoisseur in that field. After the meal, about 10 of us played a nice soccer game in the field, intense competition in which my team prevailed as victors. We then headed home and I took the rest of the night to relax and recover after a day of much physical stress. I believe this was the night I watched A Clockwork Orange. Crazy ass movie that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully comprehend.

Saturday began some time around noon. Tracy came over and we headed out on a day of sight-seeing in the southern part of the city. We stopped by a few churches, which were all incredible works of architecture and artwork. San Giovanni was the most magnificent one we saw, as it housed sculptures of the 12 Disciples along with several other rooms full of wonderful frescos and mosaics. Pictures of those should be going up soon. (side note – didn’t have the internet all week so Oktoberfest pictures should be coming up very shortly). We then stumbled over to the National Museum of Musical Instruments which contained various instruments since the 1500’s from all over the world. After that was John Legend.

The concert was held in one of the bigger Piazzas that I’ve seen. I’d have to estimate that nearly 10,000 people flooded this area. We managed to shimmy our way to about the tenth row of the standing room only crowd. When John finished, The Cure came on. Now, I guess I’ve heard some of their music, but apparently all the Italians that were there came to see The Cure, and didn’t take too well to John’s performance. Once John was finished we escape the madness before getting trampled by the drunken, raucous crowd. Oh, it was a free concert, too.

Lindsay’s Birthday today. Happy Birthday to her! Her parents are here and will be cooking dinner for her, along with the roomies and I. Her parents actually also treated me to dinner before my fast for Yom Kippur. A Thank you to them.

Ill be updating on Amsterdam as soon as I return. I’ll try to keep the posts a little more frequent.

Weather has been great here recently; hope the weather back home has been lovely as well.

Ciao Regazzi