10/9/10 Orvieto, Italia

After a full day in Rome, Emily, Sofia and I decided that it might be nice to see the Italian countryside.  We bought train tickets to a town about an hour away called Orvieto.  In the morning, we left from Termini station and took the train to Orvieto.  Orvieto was a beautiful town on top of a hill.  In order to get up to the town we had to take a funicular.  The funicular ride took about 5 minutes.  For a small town an hour away from Rome, there were still plenty of tourists there.  It seemed as though the only industry in the town was tourism.  When we first got into the funicular, these three young guys (mid 20’s) jumped in front of us to get to the small window in the front of the funicular.  They immediately started taking pictures from this window.  Two of the guys had really nice cameras—with super long lenses.  Little did I know, that we would spend a majority of our day with these guys.

            At the top of the funicular ride, we stepped outside into a beautiful park on the ledge that had amazing views of the county side.  Emily, Sofia and I started to walk around the perimeter of the park taking pictures from every ledge possible.  The three guys on the funicular were also walking around the park taking pictures.  At one point, Emily, Sofia and I were on a ledge below the three guys (about 30 feet away) and they told us to stay there, so they could take our picture (in English).  We knew that they wanted to take our picture, but we pretended that we didn’t understand them and started to walk away.  Initially, we thought they were creepy.  We continued to walk around the park and take pictures.  The park was small, so obviously the guys walked in the same direction as us.  Finally, we all met up at one overlook, and the guys asked us to take a picture of them.  Emily carefully used one of the guy’s $3000+ camera to get a group shot for them.  After she took the picture, they asked if we wanted to walk to the town’s Cathedral with them.  Emily and Sofia seemed skeptical, but they seemed nice to me, so I started talking with them and told them we would walk there with them.

            As we walked through the town in search of the Cathedral, we got to know one another.  The three guys were Puya from Iran, Giovanni from Sardinia, and Felix from Germany.  They were living in Rome and getting their Masters’ in Robotics.  They were a really fun group to hang out with and had some great personalities.  Puya, the guy who had originally taken the picture of us, was taking pictures of everything in sight, while Felix and Giovanni made fun of him for it.  They said that it takes them 3 times as long to get any where with him, because he always has to stop and take pictures.  After wandering through the streets, we finally found the Cathedral.  It was a small town, so it was quite easy to find.  We walked around the outside taking pictures.  I wasn’t able to go in, because I was wearing a skirt and my knees weren’t covered.  I went to a small gift shop while everyone else went in.  They ended up coming back out after a minute, because they weren’t allowed to take pictures in the Cathedral.  Next, we decided that we wanted to do a tour of the caves in the town, but the next tour in English didn’t start until 3.  We wandered around a little more and then decided it was time to eat lunch.

            Lunch was great!  We went to this small resteraunt, but we found a table that fit all six of us.  We spent a while deciding what to order.  I eventually decided to get a basic ziti in meat sauce with white wine.  Apparently, Orvieto is known for their white wine, so I figured I should get a glass.  The bread was delicious from what I could taste.  By that time on Saturday, my cold had escalated, and I had to go to the bathroom to blow my nose every so often.  It was really frustrating, but I had to do it, because the more I cleared out my nose, the better I could taste my food.  Anyways, so we spent a long time eating and chatting, telling each other about our different countries.  We spent a while talking about stereotypes of different countries.  For example, their stereotype of the U.S. is that everyone is ignorant of the rest of the world.  They were saying that they’d seen shows where Americans were asked to find a country like Australia on the map and couldn’t.  One person they used as an example was Paris Hilton.  Everyone knows how intelligent she is, what a great representative of our country.  I think we proved to the three guys that Americans aren’t as ignorant as they expected.  It was interesting talking about our lives in the U.S. because Emily and Sofia are from rural Pennsylvania, so their depiction of life in the U.S. is a lot different than my life in the U.S.  For example, Emily’s family hunts and so she talked to them about going hunting and how using guns is no big deal.  The three guys were interested in the culture difference, because in Europe you aren’t allowed to own guns, but that culture was as new to me as it was to the three guys.  When Emily kept telling stories about life in rural Pennsylvania, I found myself frequently interjecting that not everyone in the U.S. is like that.  I didn’t want the guys to think that everyone in the U.S. owns a gun and hunts all the time.  To show how different the New England culture and Pennsylvania cultures are, Emily, Sofia and I exchanged stereotypes for one another.  Emily and Sofia told the guys that they considered New Englanders’ to be “Yankees coming from Old Money who are stuck up”, while I considered them to be “Rednecks”.  Overall, I found it interesting how different cultures are between states in the U.S. and what people think of when they of the U.S. 

            After lunch, we took a tour of the caves.  It was a quick tour but rather interesting.  The caves on the hill were built by a pre-roman civilization ( I don’t remember their name).  When the Romans invaded, they pretty much built a city on top of all the caves.  Orvieto means “ancient city”.  After the cave tour, we got some gelato.  I’m pretty sure I bought gelato everyday in Italy.  We walked around the town a little more and then headed back towards the funicular.  The train only came every few hours, so we happened to take the train back with the same three guys.  Before we all went our separate ways, we exchanged names so we could connect on Facebook.  I was really excited to the pictures that the guys had take in Orvieto—and they were amazing.  I don’t think I’ve ever been in pictures that nice.  I was sad to say good bye, because we formed such a great friendship in the short time we spent with one another, and the chances that we will see them again is slim.  I did tell them that if they ever come to the U.S. to let me know!

            When we got back to the train station, we went to Sofia’s convent.  We had left our luggage their, so we wouldn’t have to lug it around all day.  Emily and I changed into jeans, because it became really chilly, then the three of us set out to find our next hostel.  By the time we left it was about nine and we waited at the bus stop for about a half hour.  I was really frustrated with the transportation system in Rome.  Buses are the primary source of transportation, but there were no schedules for the buses.  There were also no maps at the bus stops, so you had to know in advance what stop you needed to get off at and which bus to take.  This process became even harder at night.  When we were on the bus, we knew that we had to take the 17^th stop and transfer bus lines, but it was impossible to count the 17 stops, because we didn’t stop at all of them.  We ended up asking the bus driver to stop at the stop we needed, since it was nearly impossible to see it from the bus window.  We made it to the hostel about and hour and a half later, a frustrating experience for me.  We checked in and this hostel had such a different feel from the other one.  It was in the middle of nowhere, near the Olympic Stadium and we figured out that it must have been a building to host athletes during the games.  All the rooms had at least 6 bunk beds and the bathrooms were lined with rows of sinks and showers.  Originally the three of us wanted to find a nice place to eat, but we decided it would be best if we didn’t take the bus to a different part of the city, because it was getting late.  Instead, Sofia left to get back to her convent, while Emily and I walked around the barren streets until we came across a little family restaurant.

            After a stressful evening of finding the hostel and not being able to eat until 11, this place was perfect.  We knew it was authentic, because our waiter couldn’t speak English.  We somehow managed to order and I got Pasta Carbonara.  We also decided to split some desserts at the end.  One of the desserts was cookies that you dip in a sweet red wine and another of the desserts was some sort of sweet custard dish with chocolate on top.  We were really satisfied with the meal and actually being able to find an open restaurant that late.  Rome shuts down fairly early compared to Barcelona.  We walked back a few block to the hotel and CRASHED…

PS- Pictures to come... For some reason the internet at my apartment takes forever to upload pictures, so I'll have to put them up on Monday.