6-1-06

I woke up late today. For some reason my alarm clock didn’t go off, but my bed didn’t break at 2:00, so maybe it was a sort of trade off. The little devil who makes the slat in my bed pop out of place decided to interfere with my alarm clock instead. Fortunately I had my new bus pass, so after a quick shower I hoped on the tram and rode in for class. Of course we arrived there 15 minutes before Professor Martimucci arrived to open the door, but that is easily forgiven with all of the mess he has had to deal with at piazza Navona. After the orientation there was a meeting with Professor Benson about what had happened which I stayed for because I wanted to know how Penn State was handling the issue, and whether I had recourse to the resources of Penn State if anything where to happen in my Apartment at Largo Anzani.

After the meeting I decided to try and start planning my travels after Rome. I knew that I wanted to go to Cinque Terra for a few days, visit my cousin in Aix en Provence, my friend in Saarbrucken and another friend in Munich before finally finishing up in Scotland. I asked Mike and Jenny if they could give me some advice, and they were both extremely helpful. Jenny showed me some websites to look at for hostels in Germany, and Mike suggested some travel guides for budget travel through Europe. I guess I had always thought of travel guides as things that old people had, and weren’t much good for anyone else. I thought they just had little details about paintings that wouldn’t interest me in the least. I have discovered by reading through the one for class that there is a lot more information in them than I thought, and that the information about the paintings is more interesting than I thought. Although I still enjoy going to a museum and looking for the things that interest me, and catch my eye rather than going in to look at the same piece of work that everyone else before me has already seen and talked about, and reading everything they have said about it so that I can feel like part of the “in crowd” of art. That is a little odd because if the pieces had not been recognized by somebody as great, they wouldn’t be in the museum anyway, so I guess my thinking here is a little bit ironic in that where I want to enjoy a piece of art work because I find it personally affecting, I am only able to enjoy it because someone else found it effective for affecting the patrons of the museum.

After talking to Mike and Jenny I went to the bookstore to try and find Rick Steve’s travel guide for Europe, or the Lonely Planet travel on a budget that Mike suggested. I didn’t see either one in the big bookstore across from the cat colony, so I came back to the flat to order the books online, and try to finish Juggling the Stars by Tim Parks, which I find truly disturbing.