One month down!

Well, we've officially been in Rome for a month! That's kind of scary for me to think about, because I've absolutely fallen in love with this city and this country and I cannot believe I only have about two and a half months left before I go home. This weekend was definitely the best weekend we've had since we've been in Rome... we did so many different things and I feel like I really got to experience the city!

Thursday was Valentine's Day, so we celebrated on our own with a lovely meal at the residence complete with Valentine's Day cake, sparkling red wine, and ice cream. Temple sponsored a trip to the Umbria region on Friday, and we had to meet up with the group at 7:15, so Thursday was an early night for us, but it was definitely worth it because Umbria was AMAZING!

Umbria is the region just north of Lazio, where Rome is located. It's kind of the hidden gem of Italy according to our professor...  a lot of people know where it is but not how much it produces for the country. We managed to see an olive oil factory, a winery, and a world-famous pottery factory all in one day.

We started the day off at an olive oil factory that produces the most popular brand of olive oil in Italy (and apparently you can buy it in the US). We sat through a presentation with a professional olive oil who taught us all about how olive oil is made and how to taste it:

Our olive oil expert

They poured it into cups for us, and we had to hold them in our hands for a bit to warm up the olive oil to just about body temperature. You have to smell it first to get a sense of what it will taste like and to help you remember the different kinds. Then, to taste it, you sip a little and hold it in your mouth, and then you breathe in through your mouth a few times. Finally, you breathe in through your nose to get the full taste of the olive oil. We tried three different kinds and they were all a little different He also dispelled some myths about olive oil for us and taught us all about the proper way to cook with olive oil. For instance, he said his wife bakes with olive oil instead of vegetable oil, but that he never, ever, ever heats olive oil... which is not good because that's how we've been cooking literally every single day! Apparently when you heat olive oil (especially to fry anything), you lose all of the vitamins and it turns into trans fat... oops. But then the professor we were with said that only the real experts will tell you that and that everybody in Italy still cooks with olive oil the way we have been, so I don't feel too bad.

Before we left for our next stop, they let us try some bruschetta made with different types of olive oil. It was all delicious! 

Yummy bruschetta!

Our next stop was the Novelli winery. They had arranged for a tour of the entire winery for us and then a tasting of three of their most popular wines.

The vineyards 

More bruschetta that they served in between the wines!

Smelling the wine! This was the last one they served us.

Our guide at the winery was a professional wine taster... his job is to taste the wines as they are fermenting every day to decide when they are ready to be bottled! How cool of a job would that be? I imagine it would get pretty old after a while, though... especially when you have to taste wines that aren't ready yet and don't taste nearly as good as what they served us!

Finally, we stopped at a world-famous pottery factory... seriously, they make pottery that Crate & Barrel and Neiman Marcus sell. This region is pretty famous for ceramics anyway, but this factory is the best.

The current owner of the factory (it's family-owned!) 

Some of the unpainted pottery

One of the painting rooms where the artists work (everything is hand-painted!) 

Some of the painted pottery

Deruta is so famous for its pottery that the pottery in its showroom was ridiculously expensive (we're talking 80+ euro for a plate here). But luckily our professor knew a place just down the road the produces the same kind of thing for much cheaper, and he ended up getting us an even bigger discount, so I picked up a few things there! The road we traveled was full of pottery and ceramic shops!

Our day in Umbria was long, but it was definitely worth it. I feel like I'm getting to know more about Italy as a country and about how different the different regions are (just like states in the US). But the rest of the weekend in Rome was just as eventful. Saturday morning, we got up and visited the Forum again because one of our professors has family in town this weekend and offered to take us when she took her nephew. Obviously we jumped at the opportunity because she knows absolutely everything about it, so it was nice to get another tour of it with some pretty cool stories!

I did some shopping on Saturday after our visit to the Forum, and Saturday night we went out to a few different clubs in Rome. The club scene here is really interesting because from what I've seen so far, all of the clubs are so different, and some of them can be really stuck up about who they let in, especially when it comes to letting guys in. We ended up at Art Cafe, which is cool because it is underneath the Villa Borghese (like Rome's version of Central Park). The crowd was a really interesting mix of people, and I'm not really sure it was my scene, but I'm glad I went because I feel like it's definitely one of the things you have to do in Rome. 

Today we did some really cool stuff, though. As I'm sure most of you know, the pope is resigning, which is something really huge for the city of Rome! Most of us were pretty shocked when the announcement was first made (I didn't even know that was a possibility). It's going to be really exciting to be in Rome for something like this. Today we went to Angelus, which is a weekly address that the pope makes every Sunday at noon in St. Peter's Square. This week's Angelus was a special one because it's the first one he's made since he first made the announcement that he is resigning. Obviously I'm not Catholic, so the address itself didn't mean much to me, but it was really neat to hear him make his speech (in Italian, of course) and then do the Angelus prayer with everybody in the square. At the end of it, he addressed the crowd again and thanked everybody for all of the prayers and kind thoughts throughout the past week since he made his big announcement. This was my favorite part because he repeated it in several languages (I counted for sure English, German, Polish, French, Spanish and Italian), and you could hear the different groups of people cheer for their language. He even called out specific cities in Rome and thanked them for their support! 

Here's an article about today's Angelus that explains it a little better than I can:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/17/pope-large-crowd-angelus-blessing 

Today was also really cool because it was the first Sunday of Lent! As if the resignation of the pope isn't special enough...

In the crowd of 50,000 people!

There he is! 

Everybody cheering at the end of the prayer

I cannot believe I am lucky enough to be in Rome for an experience like this. Trust me, you'll be hearing more from me as the activities progress!

Finally, to finish off our whirlwind of a weekend, we went back to the Colosseum because our tickets from the Forum yesterday were still good for the Colosseum, and we just couldn't let them go to waste.

Tara hadn't been there yet, so she was super excited!

Weekends like this make me glad that I'm not traveling every single weekend I'm here, because I absolutely love Rome, and I would hate to miss out on weekends like this. We are going to Paris next weekend, though, and I cannot wait! First of all because it's Paris and second of all because there is a Chipotle in Paris that we most definitely will be visiting. Yum!