After a week of hell, we had our final presentation of our five boards on Monday afternoon. I stayed up all night Sunday night, but it wasn't really as bad as other all nighters have been- I had all my stuff, I just wanted to do it right.
Monday morning we still had to go to history class, however, and our lovely british teacher walked us all over Roma- from the Pantheon to the Aria Pacis Museum by Richard Meier back to the Pantheon and a bunch of other places too. People fell asleep sitting on the side of the road listening to her lecture. Her class are actually really interesting, though. It's like being on a tour with a tour guide (which I always loved). We learn all the interesting stuff as we're actually looking at the subject. Everyone says its like being on the history channel.
Monday morning we still had to go to history class, however, and our lovely british teacher walked us all over Roma- from the Pantheon to the Aria Pacis Museum by Richard Meier back to the Pantheon and a bunch of other places too. People fell asleep sitting on the side of the road listening to her lecture. Her class are actually really interesting, though. It's like being on a tour with a tour guide (which I always loved). We learn all the interesting stuff as we're actually looking at the subject. Everyone says its like being on the history channel.
Today we went to the national museum of Rome (I don't have the energy right now to write that in Italian). It was full of frescoes, mosaics, and statues from Roman villas. They were all very beautiful....however, the museum was a half hour walk from our apartment in freezing rain and hail....so I broke down and bought a Mcdonald's breakfast sandwich. But it didn't even have real bacon on it, it was canadian bacon. Ah well.
My favorite fact so far from her class is learning how the present Romans (and all those since Roman times) never really tear anything down, they just use it for their new buildings. A lot of piazzas and buildings in Rome have their particular shape because they built on the foundations of Roman theaters or basilicas. The word they use for this kind of translates to 'englobement.' They just surround the old building with the new, and use it as support. Part of our studio is the tower of the temple that was attached to the first permanent theater built in Rome. There is a curved apartment building behind studio that used the curved wall of the stadium seating in the theater, and the street slopes downward because it was built over the seating!
I don't really have a lot of pictures for this post, but I do have the scanned pictures of my presentation boards- an analysis of 4 famous sites in Rome, all handrawn. First here are the presentations on the wall.
Mine went horizontally but a lot of people drew theirs vertically.
And here they are:
This picture shows how the street was completely full of people. (Look towards the back- the dark color is one solid crowd). 
I was going to post pictures of my apartment, the studio, etc, but both Mo and Vikki already did...so if you want to see what my apartment looks like, you can see a nice description there. However, I liked my picture of the Campo di Fiori so I will post that.
This is the view from studio. Most of the students live in an apartment right on the campo, you can see it in the picture (just another window, hard to point out). I will eventually put a picture up of my street, it's about a 10 minute walk from the campo and studio. I live with 4 other girls- Mo, Vikki, Rose, and Lauren. I like having the smaller apartment (everyone else is in apartments of 10 people on the campo), because there is more privacy and I get to use the kitchen a lot. So far I made dinner twice, but I'm not sure how good it was. Italians don't really sell tomato or other spaghetti sauces, because they use so many other random things in their pasta. Needless to say, I am not that good of a cook. 
The evil lock on our door that is impossible to get open whether you are outside or inside. It took us about a week to figure out how to use our keys. Italian doors have locks where you have to turn the keys at least four times. Our front door is horrible too- you have to pull the key out a tiny fraction of a millitrillionith of a millimeter to get it to work. Too far and it won't work, but if, for some crazy reason, you just stick the key in all the way like for a normal lock, it won't work either. 
This is the building right out my living room window. It's painted in my favorite shades of blue and green. I love how a lot of the buildings have color- lots of oranges and yellow. Even the dirtier buildings have shades of color where various paint jobs have worn off over the years.
