No Pope This Time

First off- that chocolate egg I said would last for weeks? It was gone by Tuesday morning. We're still trying to solve that mystery...
Anyways... this week's been exciting! Monday was a weird day- since the day after Easter is a national holiday in Italy, we had no food served at the Centro. It made the day feel like a weekend, because we were feeding ourselves, yet we had classes... What a hard life.
Tuesday we went to Ostia! As my professor described it, it's 'Just like Pompeii, but without the terrible people!' Now, I personally disagree. I haven't actually been to Pompeii, but from what I've heard and seen, it's pretty damn cool. And 100-500 years older, which pleases the antiquity elitist in me...
But that's not to say Ostia is not a cool place! We got to see a theatre, some houses, flour mills and latrines. And- most exciting- the most ancient synagogue found in the western world! For our Ancient City course, we each have to give a 10 minute presentation on something at one of our field trips, and mine was on the synagogue. Which was amazing. I think the presentation went well- I was told I have a good 'radio-line' voice.

Post-presentation Inbar is happy and in synagogue

Menorah, shofar, lulav and etrog. FROM 2,000 YEARS AGO

While Ostia was quite awesome, after 10 hours there we were all close to crawling on our way out... On the train ride home, we all admired/pointed out each other's lanyard tans (we have to wear our headphone-radio machine things on our necks all day...) Mine is more a burn than a tan... Ouch.

Wednesday was graciously left free of field trips, probably to avoid any riots. When I decided not to wake up for breakfast, I was woken up instead by my friend Quinn clambering (with much difficulty) into my (top bunk) bed yelling, 'you weren't at breakfast!! I missed you! I'm falling!!' The day could only get better from there... But really, I did nothing all day, except go to one class. It was just what I needed after Ostia.

Today we finally went to the Vatican Museums! Since there was an unusual amount of crowds (even for summer, apparently) our visits to certain things took longer than planned, and the professors had to leave before we saw everything we wanted to. Fortunately I planned to stay later, so I got to see the Laocoön statue and the Sistine Chapel, which was pretty underwhelming. I'd imagined it would be much bigger. And less crowded and loud. (the guards 'shhhh'-ing everyone all the time didn't help). In true Centro fashion, of course, we got to go into a whole bunch of closed-off rooms while crowds of tourists stared in curiosity, or, as always, tried to follow us in only to be turned away by guards.

This evening we had a lecture about Campania to prepare for our week-long trip next week. After a short intro to the Naples Museum, we had one of the strangest lectures from our Italian professor/PhD student, Massimo. It involved 100 slides (about 20 of which were covered in the hour we had), google-earth, elaborately illustrated cartoons of people burning alive in Herculaneum, a Discovery Channel volcano-making website, and warnings about how Vesuvius could erupt any moment. Hardly any Pompeiian history, which was what the lecture was about. But we'll learn it all there, I guess? During our 11-hour day on site in Pompeii...