Another week in Roma has come and gone. The weeks are going by quicker and
quicker and I’m realizing our time here is shortening vastly! We were lucky to
have had another tour with Jeffrey, one of the most intelligent people I’ve
ever encountered. His extensive knowledge of Baroque churches and Rome in
general was very inspirational and made me want to learn more about
architectural history. It reminded me of how lucky we are to be here in Rome,
seeing what we’ve seen in textbooks for years.
Yesterday Katie and I took a daytrip to Cinque Terre, which
was a really fun experience. I’m feeling much more confident in independent
travel, which makes me want to see something new outside of Rome as much as I
can. Cinque Terre reminded me a lot of Amalfi, but it was FULL of tourists. I
didn’t feel like a foreigner, and it made me kind of uncomfortable. Katie and I
did our best to order everything in Italian and do as much Italian speaking as
we possibly could, because we didn’t want to be ‘those Americans’ who we were
surrounded by.
Although it was
a tourist populated town, the area of Cinque Terre was absolutely beautiful. We
got tickets into their national park, allowing us to hike from city to city
along the coastline. The further we got from Riomaggiore (the first city), the
fewer tourists we encountered. We ended up finding a great rocky beach with
great areas to jump in, as well as great flat rocks to sun bathe on. We only
traveled to 3 of the 5 towns: Riomaggiore, Manarola City and Cornigula. There
was a mudslide in 2011 which prevented easy access to the last couple of towns,
and since we were only there for a day we simply didn’t have time to take the
long hikes there.
My favorite of the towns that we went to was Manarola City,
which had the best food I’ve tasted on this trip so far. I would buy another
train ticket to Manarola City just to eat there again!
We’ve been doing a lot of sketching this week, and I’m feeling stronger and stronger as
the days go by. Sketching isn’t as much of a chore anymore, which is a good
feeling. I can’t wait to take on this week and continue to improve and
challenge myself artistically.
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