It is Friday, February 5. Last weekend I did a lot of travelling. I went to the city of Perugia with some other students on Friday. There I visited a national art gallery. Since it was my roommate Eric's birthday, we made merry and went out to a discotheque. On Saturday we walked around and saw sites. I visited an archeological museum. In the late afternoon we returned. Before taking the bus up the hill from the Camuccia train station, I went to the community swimming pool for the first time. It is nice there. I hope to go again tomorrow. Its hours conflict with my class and supper schedule such that the only times I can go there are Saturday evening and Sunday mornin. Then on Sunday I went to Siena for the day with one of my school mates. Actually, for most of the trip, we were not in Siena, because it took so long to get there and back. It is not that far from Cortona, but there is no direct train line to there from here. And since there are less trains on Sunday, we had a stop at Chiusi for 90 minutes both going there and coming back. Anyway, I enjoyed going back to Siena. I climbed the tower and visited the civic museum by the famous Piazza del Campo, where the wild horse race is held every August. We also stopped by the cathedral and I found the exact spot along the wall where my friend Jeremiah had taken a picture of me almost 4 years ago. So, of course, my friend took another one! Believe it or not, on Monday morning my history class was cancelled, because it snowed in Perugia, where my professor lives, and he couldn't get his car up a hill or something! That reminded me something else someone told me. On her way here, there was a big delay at the London airport, because it had snowed a couple inches. It's times like that when I realise how much of experts we Canadians are when it comes to dealing with cold and snow. I wrote an Italian quiz on Tuesday, and a Classics midterm yesterday. The former was very easy, but the latter not so. I think I did alright. Fortunately, that's the only test to which I wasn't looking forward, and it is now out of the way! I have to get a tuberculosis test done as part of my application for the international aid volunteer programme "Canada World Youth". So Wednesday morning, one of the hostel workers drove me to a neaby hospital. Unfortunately, the test could not be done there. We will try again on Monday at a clinic in Camuccia. Yesterday, for my Italian lab, we went to the Cortona high school and just talked to some of the students taking English, a half hour in Italian and the other in English. I enjoyed that. Today I went to Rome for a field trip of my archaeology field trip. We toured the Catacombes of San Domitillo. It is very cool--literally too. According to the guide, that particular system of catacombes contain 150 000 tombs. There were filled between the late 3rd and late 8th centuries, and contained all early Christians, including some martyrs. Most are now empty, because bones were transferred to the Pantheon (Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs) in the 9th century. This weekend I will take it easy, study for my 2 midterms on Monday--Roman history and mortuary archaeology.
MC