Giant Rocks

This semester, one of the thirteen credits I'm taking (strenuous, I know) is for a class called "Lectures and Tours." It is a mandatory class that involves - you guessed it - lectures and tours. For the first couple weekends, we go around Rome and tour various historic sights, accompanied by professors who act as our tour guides. This weekend, I toured the Roman and Imperial Forums, as well as the Palatine hill, the Capitoline hill and museum, and the Coliseum. Despite the fact that I had to wake up at 9 am and walked approx. the distance from Sheboygan to Rome, I was completely blown away by what I saw. Looking at pictures of the ruins in a textbook is one thing - actually standing in front of places like the Coliseum is simply surreal. You can almost feel the history in every single stone. Even the cobblestones in the road of the Roman Forum were the original ones... pardon my language, but HOLY CRAP. That's just insane. I could actually picture people like Socrates walking down the very road I was walking down, accompanied by a sudden urge to kick him in the shins for his many contributions to the giant "HUH?" better known as Philosophy. Good thing for Socrates he never was in Rome (my daydreams are usually never historically accurate). Violent tendencies towards misplaced famous historical figures aside, the experience was simply incredible. The professor in charge of my tour was fantastic: she was Dutch, but studied and lived in London, so she has a crazy limey accent that made everything she said sound 10x more intelligent and 100x more awesome. She went on and on about how the Vatican pretty much ruined Rome; most of the buildings were once coated in marble, but eventually the Church decided that the marble would look nice in a church. So down went the marble on all of the ruins, and up went the Vatican. At least, that's what how my professor made it seem. She didn't seem to have a lot of love for how the ruins had been treated. I guess that's what happens when you study history you're whole life.

Saturday began full of sunshine and the promise of a beautiful day, but as soon as we set off for the Coliseum it started raining. It's not so much the rain that bothers me, it's the meddlesome umbrella vendors. They lurk everywhere, just waiting for it to start raining so they can mob people trying to cross the street, shoving an armful of umbrellas in your face and yelling in undecipherable Italian. And if you think you're safe from them if you have an umbrella, you're wrong. I made the mistake of forgetting my umbrella for the Coliseum, and I was followed by a small pack of umbrella vendors for the entire 2-mile hike back to the hotel. They wouldn't back off, even though I was clearly soaking wet and annoyed. Joyous.


Anyways, the Coliseum was simply amazing. Pictures can't do it justice, words can't do it justice; heck, even being there couldn't really do it justice. There it sits, right of a busy thoroughfare, big and imposing and ancient as busloads of people pass by. Talk about a clash of time periods. The thing that I find particularly fascinating about the Coliseum is how every day, busloads of people come to see it, admire the architecture, take cute pictures in front of it, and just admire the general splendor of it all. But then you remember that half a million people met horrible, grisly ends there, as well as nearly a million animals (Side note: they imported ostriches to the Coliseum - OSTRICHES. Incredible.), and you kind of begin to see the irony of it all. On the ground level, there is a big metal cross dedicated to the people who died while 50,000 people looked on. Doesn't seem to be quite enough, in my opinion. Oh well.

After this weekend, it looks like I'll learn more in this one-credit class than I learned in my four-credit biology course last semester. Mandatory pig dissections and memorizing the steps of meiosis vs. seeing wonders of the ancient world... hmm. I think the winner is fairly obvious here.