Of course...sliiight exaggeration with my title here, but seriously came VERY close to being true. We have (unbelievably!) hit the halfway point in my semester in Rome (sadness...), which unfortunately also means I have two weeks of midterms. The first of which, I just finished with. Italian was...an experience. Yesterday, we had to give an oral presentation, in the form of a play based on the life of Emperor Hadrian (emporer of Rome 117-138 AD). These ranged from histerical to historical, but all in all pretty interesting. I, of course, was freaking out, because not only do I dislike public speaking in English, I really REALLY don't like it in Italian. I was the narrator for my skit, which meant I had to memorize paragraphs of Italian, but it went okay. Apparently, a bunch of the teachers in our hall could hear our skits going and were pretty enthusiastic about them (which meant they were standing at our classroom door listening...not stressful or anything...). The funny thing about midterms, especially those for Italian, is that every single person in my program here (about 150 students total) have them on the exact same day, so everyone had their oral presentation yesterday and everyone was studying like mad for their midterm today. Needless to say, the atmosphere in the building was a bit...tense.
After the oral presentations, my Italian Contemporary Politics and the Italy and the EU classes visited the Italian Senate while it was in session. It was such an amazing experience! It was a little stressful for the guys, because they had to wear a suit and tie (and apparently none of them thought to bring those..), but despite that, it was incredible. Granted, not a lot of members were present, since it was not a mandatory session (since they were really only complaining about the economy and the new budget), but what I really loved about it was that (of course) the entire thing was in Italian and I somewhat followed it! Yay!
Today's midterm was possibly okay-I've given up trying to guess on these things, but I can't change anything so I'm not too worried about it. What is overshadowing any worries I might have is the idea of seeing my good friend from school, Briana, tomorrow! She flies down from Milan in the morning and we are touring Rome and then going to Siena together for the weekend. So excited!! (Be excited too...there will be pics asap!) After the weekend, there is just a week of regular midterms and then I'm on fall break, so I'm getting really anxious for them to be over with!
This past Tuesday, my International Peace and Conflict Resolution teacher took us on an impromptu field trip to an Inter-religious peace conference, with speeches by a key leader in Obama's administration, Josh Dubois (I got to meet him...he told our small group to "drop him a line" if we are ever in DC...umm YES). It was unreal being in the same room as religious leaders from all over the world, and other delegates. Our group of maybe 15 students talked with both the American and Israeli Ambassadors to the Holy See (The Vatican), shaking hands and sharing names with them. And of course the food at the conference was, well, what you would expect it to be to feed said Ambassadors and delegates! These are the reasons I love Rome so much. I just can't get enough of this city.
In other news, I finally started my internship today! We walked down to the excavation, and my professor gave us a better rundown of what the excavation has turned up, and I could actually see what he was talking about. Officially, I start my actual "intern tasks" on Tuesday, but I got a good idea of what we will be doing for the semester, and now I'm even more anxious to start on in it! While cleaning and sorting Roman pottery may sound a bit boring, to me it seems like searching for that perfect puzzle piece, finding the one clue to link everything together, to "solve" something we didn't know existed before. Lame, maybe, but nevertheless I'm ecstatic about finally getting underway. Once I have some fabulous pictures of the site, I will post them.
No pics this week, just so much happened I had to share!
Miss you all!!
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