20 minutes was not nearly enough (spring break part II)

i have to move on from santa maria degli angeli, but here's a link to a picture of the doors: ready, get set, be moved.

in the afternoon i met up with joe and we ate lunch next to the colosseo. then we walked up towards villa borghese and took pictures of each other overlooking la piazza del popolo and the rest of the roman skyline in the late afternoon sun. in the evening we went out to a lovely dinner with my friend robyn drucker (studying this semester in rome) and mike higgins (among other things: my friend from rochester, fellow fairport alum, member of intramural volleyball powerhouse team discovery channel, robyn's boyfriend). then we hung out a bit at robyn's sweet pad and headed back to the hostel, where we promptly lost consciousness. we had a nice bonding experience with the other 8 people in the room when one of our number was snoring so loudly that everyone else woke up. but, being a hostel, we all chuckled about it until we were able to rouse him long enough to get him on his side. later we learned his name was jason and he is in the 5th month of an 8 month european tour - solo. the thought of that scared me.

saturday i went to the vatican museum, and can i just say, that was bitchin'. i was very excited to recognize and name many of the paintings from our art history class, and i spent most of the morning strolling around documenting the various symbols that accompanied and identified various saints. one of my favorites, san girolamo (st. jerome), is usually pictured with a book to signify that he done learned real good (if memory serves he was the translator of such famous and influential works as...the vulgate), a wide brimmed red hat (to symbolize his leadership role within the church) and a third image, seamlessly linked to the other two - yes, you guessed it, a ferocious lion. i read in one of the little commentaries that san girolamo kindly removed a thorn from a lion's paw - i'm serious, that really happened. i feel like one of aesop's fables treats a similar subject matter, but i can't remember if at the end the lion eats the mouse who helped him or if he sits for a portrait with some cardinal in the desert translating the bible while occasionally beating his breast with a rock.

two images from the sistine chapel: michaelangelo's self-portrait, just down and to the right of the barrel chested Christ the Judge, is holding in his hand a deboned, gutted, and yet entirely preserved human skin. it creeps me out thinking about it. secondly, everyone is ripped. if all goes well with my forearm exercises, this is what i'll look like doing my italian homework by the end of the month. speaking of ripped, i was blown away by Laocoon. even with that resolution, can you see the veins in his quads? from the moment i first saw that picture in a latin book with the caption 'vatican museum,' i was pretty much on my way.

i spoke with my parents on the phone from the elliptical piazza in front of st. peter's, and while i was doing that 4 nuns came up and sat down next to me and busted out 4 pizzas. they were so excited about it!

in the evening joe and i were walking around and happened upon a large demonstration protesting the recent intensification of italian drug laws - specifically, the criminilization of marijuana. we walked along with it for a while and joe took pictures. it was in the national newspaper La Repubblica the next day, but the front page was taken up by a demonstration that had happened simultaneously in milan. neofascists had gotten a permit to have a parade, and a corpus (disjointed, naturally) of anarchists crashed the party. by crashed, i mean arrived in a large number and started throwing rocks. when the police showed up, both youthful extremes of the political spectrum turned their aggression against them. the picture in the paper was of a young man in a ski mask hurling a rock at a police barricade - tear gas in the foreground, car burning in the back. oddly, it was impossible to tell if this young person wanted an all-powerful state or no state at all - it seemed that the political spectrum we usually think of as a straight line with distant poles had horseshoed around so the points nearly touched. these skinheads and 'no global' had more in common than i think they realized. unfortunately, that commonality was violence.

so yeah, back to the idea of home on the road - after we got back from the pot protest we had a little dinner and started talking to these two girls at the hostel. their names were jennie and ulrika, and they were and are beautiful swedish psychology students. we quickly discovered we would be on the same flight to stockholm the next morning. i, never having been to stockholm or flown out in rome before, was extremely excited to have found beautiful natives with whom to travel. we left the next morning and on the flight i read all about the riots in milan, the upcoming debate between berlusconi and his challenger prodi in the april elections, and students in paris taking over the sorbonne. more on that to come.

jennie, ulrika, and i arrived in stockholm around 3 in the afternoon and immediately ate indian food. it tasted good. then we walked around the central shopping area for a while, took a picture in front of the palace, and strolled around the old town. it was 5 below zero, celsius. i was glad that i had brought the stocking cap my mother knit for me last fall - first because it is warm, secondly because it was knit out of love. seriously, love was the raw material carded, spun, and woven into hat form. with a tassel.

i parted ways with the beautiful swedish girls (they were taking an overnight bus north to umea, where they had class in the morning) in the early evening to find my hostel , which was furnished entirely by ikea and was essentially a 3 star hotel for €17 a night. i wrote some things in my journal, read some of the introduction to Ovid's Metamorphoses, written by my latin literature professor here in arezzo, and turned in.

in the morning, i walked around the city of stockholm - saw some beautiful churches, an entire island that is a park (swedish urban planners love green space - white space last week), and the national history museum, which included a large exhibit on vikings, who i like to imagine as my ancestors as they travelled around putting northern europe in its place. i also walked across two frozen rivers and felt like a bad ass. yeah, that's right. i'm a descendent of vikings. i do what i want.

tuesday, prior to departure i visited katarina kyrka and the beautifully designed and linked moderna museet and arkitekturmuseet.

this last 40 minutes has not been enough either. this spring break is apparently serialized. stay tuned for london and paris, losses and gains.