rome, part 1

after spending a couple days in athens, our group flew to rome. we arrived starving and went to find a pizzeria as soon as possible on the first night. italian food did not disappoint; it was everything i hoped for and dreamed of. in rome we stayed in apartments, which was really fun, even though my apartment was kind of ghetto and we had a couple incidents where our lamp caught on fire and our power went out, not to mention our wi-fi and bathroom situations. it was definitely an adventure! the best thing about rome was arguably the gelato. we got gelato at least twice a day with no regrets. my favorite flavors were pistacchio, nutella, and stracciatella (chocolate chip). ice cream just doesn't compare!

rome is an incredible city. i love how it's made of so many layers of history, built up over centuries. to me it felt very ancient and baroque and still somewhat modern, all at the same time. one neat thing about rome is that so much of the art is not found in museums or galleries, but in churches. i love seeing artworks as intended in their original settings. on our first day in rome, we went into the church that houses caravaggio's the conversion of saint paul, and when i saw it, i cried. rome is home to so many beautiful masterpieces. you can turn a corner and suddenly see a fountain by bernini, and then walk down the street into a little church with a michelangelo. it's unreal.

we went to church in rome on our first morning, and the american missionaries in the ward translated sacrament meeting from italian to english for us. it was fun to experience church in a different language, since it was still so familiar. we rode the metro to get there, which i enjoyed. i learned that one of my favorite parts of study abroad was mastering the metro system in each city. i have a pretty terrible sense of direction, but for some reason i'm really good with subways. rome was rainy on our first two days, and we spent them visiting the spanish steps, the trevi fountain, piazza navona, the pantheon, the roman forum, the colosseum, and about a million churches. rome was exciting and exhausting. when we weren't museum-going, we were eating pizza and pasta and gelato and singing "what dreams are made of" from the lizzie mcguire movie. i love roma!