last night was my first venture into trastevere. trastevere is an area of downtown on the other side of the tiber river. it's a really trendy neighborhood that half of my program lives in and the other half of my program lives near me in nomentana. so last night sara and her roommate isabelle decided to have a wine and cheese party in trastevere. unfortunately, the bus strike yesterday didnt fair so well for us. lisa and i planned to leave nomentana around 840 but didnt end up leaving til like 10. so lisa, gretchen, and i found the bus we needed (luckily) and proceeded to piazza venezia where we were supposed to transfer buses. of course the bus we needed wasn't working cause of the strike so we started walking down towards the river to see if we could find it by foot without a problem. of course freakin isabelle gave us retarded directions and so we had to call like 10 times to make sure we were going the right way. we encountered many sights along the way which I, of course, documented.


this is il teatro di marcello which is right near piazza venezia. it's funny cause everyone always refers to it as the thing that looks kinda like the colosseum but isn't.


here's the view across the tiber river from the street of the mouth of truth. oh roman holiday :-D


This is the tiber river from via de ponte rotto.


here's the best picture of ponte rotto i could get at night. so ponte rotto was the first stone bridge they built across the tiber river. it was so hard for them to maintain cause the current of the tiber river was so strong and kept damaging it. today, only this small piece remains as a monument of this bridge.


this is me and lisa crossing the tiber river. we tried to get ponte rotto in the background but weren't successful. so take a look at that gash on my forehead. earlier in the day, lisa tried to kill me with her yogurt and ended up slicing me right down the temple. what's funny about this picture is that we didnt even try to accent my head injury but it just ended up coming out pretty clear anyway.


what a perfect picture to portray the strong tiber current that ruined the bridge.


After trying to follow isabelle's second set of idiotic directions, we tried to figure out if we were going in the right direction based on what stops the bus makes. here's lisa with the oh so creative tagging at the bus stop.


Me and Sara in her trendy lil loft in trastevere. i adore this A girl.


Our lil wine and cheese party was set up in sara's apartment with candles and everything. it was super cute. francesco totally showed up too. um awk much?


so apparently all of our laughing and loud banter intimidated the other guests of this wondrous party. no1 wanted to approach the table we were sitting at with the wine and food so we ate all the grapes and most of the cheese and crackers. here's lisa the grape stealer, who stole half of the grapes on the table and then continued to try to take mine.


sara and isabelle bought this rancid wine from tuo di (the discount supermarket) that cost like 1,60. so it totally did not go down well at all. i felt bad wasting it so i forced people to do wine shots with me just to finish it and be done with it.


this is the only group of normal people that were at the party last night. everyone else decided to debate politics and religion in all sorts of languages. funny, i'm like one of the normal ones around here.


here's me and gretchen on the boat shaped island.


right before (luckily) catching the nocturna bus back to nomentana we passed campidoglio all lit up at night. it was pretty but really hard to photograph.

aright well that's a recap of my day yesterday. tomorrow should hopefully be mass with benny (pope benedict, for those who don't know my lingo yet) and book buying. should be a pretty exciting day.