I will formally post a goodbye to Rome and this blog.

It's been almost 5 months since I came to Rome, and I leave a changed person. I didn't expect this to be as much of a pilgrimage it turned out to be.

I will miss this place for sure. But not the politics. The 24 hour strike planned for today was cancelled, which made me regret not being able to go out for the last time. I'm going to have a hard enough time packing though, so maybe that's good.

I've found a home here that I will have to leave behind for the time being. The Filipino community at San Marcello al Corso and the Brothers and Sisters of Gerusalemme, who may not have even known I was there...I heard my last Mass in Rome in their little church on top of the Spanish Steps, listening to their heavenly voices sing praises to our God.

And with that, a good night and a goodbye.

I remain your servant,
-j

Separation Anxiety

Time compresses as academic responsibilities and departure dates creep towards my opening eyes. Opening eyes, an accurate description of days passing here.

I don't think I will get to visit Prague or Krakau, and I probably won't be able to see ALL of Rome like I previously thought. Museums, remarkably, have not been on my urgent to-do list since the trip.

The most important experiences of this trip have been spiritual. You may have seen this coming, but I didn't see the half of it. I was apprehensive about updating the blog because it would have taken a decisive turn for the spiritual--a la GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, or a hypothetical diary by Inigo Loyola turning into St. Ignatius. Of course, I don't presume in the slightest to be a saint or a "common sense" intellectual. But I _AM_ trying every day to be in the mind of one, or in the mind of One who inspired each.

Today I went inside a small church, one S. Eustachio and participated in a small Mass there with probably 10 attendants including 2 nuns. The experience was intimate and beautiful and afterwards the priest went up to me and asked if I was Italian, which is the nice way of asking if I'm Chinese. I am neither, but that was a cynical statement. He was very genial. I cried during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. I might do this more often as I reflect on its significance.

I am getting into the heat of intellectual debates on Christianity due to my voluntary attendance in a Science and Religion class taught by a priest.

I am planning on doing St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises when I return to the States.

All of this, just from an experience in Rome. People here I have been hanging with are mostly cool. Parties are mostly lame. But both are passing, however some teach me true aspects of passion.
And so does the art in the churches, and the art of the Church. Museums are more and more disappointing and Baroque basilicas more and more exciting, contextual, meaningful, and full of grace.

Thus, I dreaded the return to a more...secular life? But I learn more and more to keep these revelations in my heart.

Although I wish I would have completed all my travel wishes. No Cinque Terre or Prague...but hopefully Ravenna will be this weekend.

My best to everyone.

Thanks to the underwhelming response and even awareness of this blog, I think I'll stop updating it.

Please protest if you feel I should continue.

This week in and out of Italy...

Sunday was great to witness the Vespers for the first time in St. Peter's. Too bad I didn't get to keep the pamphlets with all the lyrics and sheet music.

Monday was supposed to be chill but ended up full of errands and walking while hungry. Laundry, groceries, haircut, but an excellent round of wine with cool guys who really know how to talk about their state pride and anglo-American heritage with humour. Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, New York...man, being from California ROXX0R.

Today's going to be busy with making dinner for a couple friends, going out to the pub with a few from last night, and visiting a gallery.

Oh, did I mention I should be packing? Friday night I leave Rome to go to Paris, stay overnight, go to a monastery named Taize for a few days, then back to Paris till Sunday, then I'm coming back to Roma. So I'll be seein' y'all, and I hope you're all doing fine.

So what was La Notte Bianca?

1. LOTS OF WALKING.
2. Half-losing yourself, half-knowing-where-it's-at
3. A medieval town party blasted into the 21st century, but not a carnival.
4. Destroyer of my eating routine and sleep schedule.
5. The culmination of another extremely active week in Italy.

Let's take it slowly, and start from La Notte Bianca, and work our way backwards to the last post, on Tuesday.

La Notte Bianca was a lot of events and consequently a lot of expectations, but it became a chase for these few events I witnessed in part: (where titles are remembered, they are put)

1. The Origin of Water
2. Osadia does hair...
3. Girafes
4. La Noche Blanca[sic]
5. Diviners of Clouds
6. Fireworks and such

1. A semi-lame, semi-interesting dance performance with a waterfall on stage and hot bodies going in and out of said waterfall, creating some interesting effects with the interactions of water and such.

2. A small piazza is turned into a stage for the spectacle of two Spanish artists called Osadia, who make their art out of sculpting hair. Osadiaonline.com will have more information. Techno-opera, pomp, extravagance, style, art...crowds of people watching in awe...transformation...it was definitely the most interesting thing I saw for la notte.

3. The people I hung out with were eagerly expecting the live giraffes to walk down Via Cavour eating from treeleaves and such. Upon closer reading of the english descripition of the event, I suspected this may not've been the case. Indeed, red giraffes didn't seem like a natural occurence. What we saw on the street was a very weird show of people on levers and poles making a parade out of these red giraffes-puppets, complete with a blast of red circle paper-cutouts.

4. A brisk walk to Termini for a concert of Spanish musicians. The guys we saw looked like pirates.

5. Several performances I wasn't able to see, all along the bridge in front of the Castel Sant'Angelo. They all looked like weird alchemy-magic related stuff. Too bad.

6. Forunately, I saw the tail-end of a long performance of dance and spectacle that culminated in dancers in front of the river with torches and FIREWORKS. Sweet.

These were all witnessed between 8pm and 5am, with LONG punctuations of walking about the different places in the center of the city. What was La Notte Bianca? Apparently, it was also an excuse for Romans to go out and trash their own city instead of letting tourists do it. For the main Vias were packed: with people, and trash. But fortunately, it was still a giant celebration of culture and the city itself, once a year.

Saturday Morning

What the hell? Beaches here aren't free? This rots! Californian mind does not comprehend...2 euro to get our clothes dirty on sand?

Otherwise, Santa Marinella was a welcome seaside respite from the Big City. Fried seafood wasn't bad either.

Friday

An otherwise extraordinary day ruined by hours of near-incapacitation from a stomach ailment. A perfect score in the Italian oral test, followed by a bus ride to L'Aquila, the capital of the Abruzzo region in Italy. This region is full of forests and beautiful mountain landscapes, and they show up behind the buildings of L'Aquila. There's a fountain that's supposed to have 99 spouts but it only has 95, and it's pretty lame altogether. But otherwise it's a charming small town with a big castle, surrounded by forests and mountains.

Too bad I puked twice and layed by a lamppost waiting for my company so that we could have another torturously long and cramped bus ride back to Rome.

Thursday

This was independence day. A meeting with a priest to set my head and my spirit straight, followed by an impromptu pilgrimage to St. John the Lateran church near the outskirts of the Roman city center--definitely a magnificent place, technically more imporant that St. Peter's itself due to its place in the history of the church and the papacy. Definitely worth a wiki. I overheard what I thought were pilgrims in a Mass in one of the chapels, hearing a Tridentine Mass while also praying in front of a copy of a relic of the Madonna from a Polish city.

The cloisters of St. John the Lateran were very peaceful and beautiful, contained an original manuscript by Palestrina, and pieces of the original, old old old church.

Wednesday

A pool on the top of a hill overlooking other hills popping up from the grounds of Tuscany. A beautiful country home outside Rome with a huge kitchen for cooking classes and fine food. Swimming--not really, just wading...in the pool, with cleaner air, and a break from the heat. Beautiful full moon evening with food cooked by students.

But I remember feeling out of place amongst the cliqueishness. And arguing beliefs. But train rides are always relaxing, and getting help on Italian homework from an Italian is good too.

Tuesday

Frascati. Supposedly a land of fine wine and food. Finding the fine wine was harder than I expected, but it was a good day trip, another welcome retreat from the big city with a fine park made from a villa that was destroyed in the War.

Twas also...something I cannot remember. But it was another relaxing locale, but not nearly on the scale of L'Aquila or Ostia Antica.

This is what happens when you don't write your blog in one sitting. Thoughts are forgotten.

Again, Be sure to check my Flickr photos, because it's a veritable pain to get them put up here.

Tonight was a little soiree with new kids that arrived in the Residence for Rome. They are from a Christendom University in Virginia. When I went there after dinner, I found out to my utter surprise that they are a (very conservative, ostensibly) Catholic University.

This seems to be a serendipitous meeting in which the day culminated. After class today I booked a trip to the Taize monastery in France, arranged a meeting with a Jesuit priest, and prayed at a couple nearby Churches that happened to be Jesuit as well...one was Gesu where St. Ignatius is buried and the relic of St. Francis Xavier's right hand is...and the other is the Church of St. Ignatius itself.

I prayed for fellowship, and tonight I find out I'm living next to 40 Catholic university students. Alleluia inDEED.

Here's to rosaries at 7:30pm somedays and a couple pints afterwards, God willing.


EDIT: Now the title of the journal entry referred to the fact that I'm never asked if I'm Filipino even though I am...I just don't look it. And I'm never assumed/asked if I'm Christian, even though I am...I just don't act it, but I hope I do.

I guess I forgot to put in a post about my living space, illustrated. Well here's a composite of my room...except about 4 days after I put this together, they put in a ladder to reach this loft. What you're seeing is about 9ft long by 7ft. wide where the bed is, and the drawers are about 1.5ft from the entrance. However, there's this big loft above the whole thing that's now accessible but I still don't know how to make it a cool chill space. I don't prefer to be home that much anyway.

So that's my smal cubicle-esque living space-hole.

I've decided I can probably only update once a week, and I haven't been getting much feedback so I might not put much effort into clarity of each entry. That being said...

Every week here is a month of experience. This place is big enough to be metropolitan but small enough to be accessible...I feel like I've come closer to the pulse of the city than I ever had with Los Angeles. There's an open-air market nearby that's really awesome and cheap but supposedly it's not as cheap as it used to be.

Still, 2 kilos of tomatoes for 80 cents is pretty damn cheap, and it'll last me.

This market sells horse meat and wild boar meat. My apartmentmates and I are definitely going to make a "hunter's dinner" some night, as if hunters actually ate their horse...

Meanwhile I bought some ingredients at the market and used some frozen clams and calamari to make a seafood pasta...

things I learned:
-non-fish seafood is called "frutta di mare"...fruit of the sea...which is an interesting way to think about coral (yea I know we don't eat it), clams, squid and such...it would make for an interesting aqua-still life. Actually, there was an artist who did art nouveau glassworks based on sea themes. Pretty interesting, I have to look that up sometime.

-Parsley is free here. t3h awesome. Also, the pasta lady at the market is so nice, she recommended good pasta for my foray into italian cooking.

-DO NOT put oil in the water. At least, not with this fresh homemade pasta...apparently salt's better. But I think our guide and cooking teacher said that packaged pasta in the states is so glutenous that oil would help the separation, but I'm not sure.

Class ended that day with the market visit near the residence, so I decided to walk around the area. I ended up in the Castel Sant'Angelo and decided to see the exhibition there, which was so-so, but the view at the top of the castle was worth it...and I got to learn A LOT about Baroque Rome, starring Bernini, Borromini, and di Cortona...

Then, I walked over to St. Peter's to end the day before going home and cooking. I ended up at a Mass in the chapel behind Bernini's glorious, gigantic main-altar-thing (edit: St. Peter's Baldachin). The chapel was right in front of the Throne of St. Peter, with the stained-glass dove of the Holy Spirit above it radiating a beautiful golden light from the sunset outside. Mass at St. Peter's was incredible. However, the priest who gave out the Eucharist to me seemed really old and sleepy and creepy...this led me to ponder how out of touch the higher-ups of the Church might be...meanwhile, there was a monk celebrating on the same pew as I, a couple people down. He was into it and seemed real nice and poor.

As I walked out, a divine beam of light shone through the dome into the portals...this picture, though not the clearest, at least gives a sense of the scale of St. Peter's Basilica:
The letters around the ceiling are 6 ft. tall.

Thursday
I visited the contemporary art museum in Rome with one of my new friends. There was some cosi-cosi video art there, but the third floor was filled with a British artist's work, a one Marc Quinn. A lot of interesting use of materials that questions the intersection of the artificial and the biological. For example, he made a cast of his baby son's head with a human placenta. Also, he mixed in different drugs with wax to create life-sized sculptures eerily naturalistic in their pose.

As Kelly and I were walking back to the bus station I spied a woman sitting on a foldable chair in front of a trattoria/snack place. She had a shaved head, no eyebrows, and a black outline around her eyes. Very thin, and smoking, she rattled off phrases in Italian, saying I-dont-know-what. Something very disturbing about it. Was she a rockstar, or just crazy?

Friday
After the frighteningly difficult exams for Italian (the oral exam being the more scary), I went to the Catacombs of St. Domicilla. To our dismay we found the tour too brief, especially for the travel time to get there and the 5 euro price tag. The tour guide said there's 11 miles of catacombs underground, yet we only walked around catacombs under the church. Must've been less tan 1% of the whole thing.

This was quite unfortunate as I had a distinct feeling of communion within the catacombs. Seeing fragments of the original walls, with ancient Christian iconography...the cool, damp air a refreshing contrast from the humid warm summer Roman air. During the tour we traversed past a passage wherein I heard chanting...I immediately wanted to peel off the group and join whoever pilgrims were there. If it wasn't for my company, I probably would have. Something in me attracts me to this place of ancient worship, when saying you believed in Christ got you physically persecuted, not just intellectually persecuted. The sense of faith and community pervades the air. I want to get lost in there.

Instead, we went to a pub afterwards and I finally got to drink my Guiness, and it was EXCELLENT from the tap. The Irish bartender Tom was very genial, and hearing him speak Italian was fun. So he ended up prophesying my Friday night.

Friday Night
I planned on going to a rock concert at a place called Circolo degli Artisti. A couple girl rock bands were playing there. I found out later that the opening duo was Roman, and the headliners were UK.

Getting there was a small adventure. Arriving there I was dumbstruck...everywhere my eye layed upon Italian youth hipsters, indie kids like those in the states, except dressed a little more stylishly, with a little more expensive hair. And they all spoke Italian. There were band shirts sold for 10 euro, old vinyls...it fit the profile perfectly.

Unfortunately, I was painfully shy and sober. I tried to remedy this with a gin&tonic but that didn't work so well. What I ended up donig was attracting a few queer stares and trying to rock out American style to Roman girl punk. They sang in English. Anyway, the headliners, the Pipettes, were a fabulous group with 3 women singing and a backup band that nobody cared about. The 3 women did Supremes-style synchronized dance moves to retro music. I was in love.

Apparently the Romans were too. They were all singing along in English...I felt sorely hurt that they didn't even want to practice their inglese on me. After getting a couple autographs and a picture, I had to split the scene, because I wasn't digging it.

Friday After Dark--Summary in Italics at the end of the entry

The way home became an adventure unto itself. The area I was in was outside the tourist map I had. Nobody in the area spoke enough English. Walking back and forth along a street, I tried to find the bus stop for the line I used to get there...but it wasn't just simply across the street. After a little help from some Italians, I found the stop. Looking at the times, I was horrified to see only 1 line still running. So I did what any faithful in danger would do--I prayed. As soon as I began the Rosary the bus came...and it wasn't even the one that should've been running that late.

I arrived in Termini, the central station of metro and bus, and searched for a bus to the next transportation hub I usually take. I found said bus, and sat, exhausted and thankful for a Friday night. Then, the girls in front of me were speaking to each other in English. They didn't seem to know their way around Rome. After I interjected that the Pantheon was near Piazza Navona, one of them said, in a British accent, "You speak English?"

"Yeah, I'm American."

The other two girls were German. They wanted to find a place to party tonight, so I told them that many of my classmates get pissed up at Campo di Fiori. That place is near the stop I planned on getting off, so I offered them guidance and I could head home. The Brit wanted me to stay at least for a drink. I couldn't refuse in politeness.

As we tried to get off, a street merchant was getting on the bus and he blocked the doorway...only two of us got through and the other two were stuck in, about to be whisked off to the next stop, which was about 5 minutes walk away. Luckily, somebody had been eye-ing them the whole ride and yelled "Prego! Prego!" to the bus driver, who angrily opened the doors and our company became whole once again.

With all four of us in the Argentinian Square, we noticed a large group of English and American drunkards wobbling about. The Brit ran over to try to find out what was going on, because they were looking for that kinda thing of course. Apparently it was the end of a Pub Crawl. Ew.

So instead of going to Campo di Fiori, they wanted me to bring them to a bar/club just down the street. To my horror I found that they were referring to BULLDOG INN, a trashy bar that played American rap (complete with DJ Compton Blackman), and was saturated with drunken english-speakers. We couldn't stay more than 90 minutes, and if I had my way, it would be less. We rambled out to the Piazza Navona area because they wanted me to guide them to a club nearabouts that place called Havana.

Lucy is from Manchester and taught me some slang. She was the most genial towards me. However, the Germans were very enlightening on German culture, especially the emnity between Northern and Southern (Bavarian) Germans. They hate Oktoberfest and never went to it because of the folk music, watered-down beer, and masses of drunkards. This sealed the deal on my decision NOT to go to Oktoberfest. Besides, every hostel would have been booked already.

At Havana, Lucy in the Sky dubbed me Josso as a nickname and the four of is just danced a bit and ended up leaving at 3:30. It was a long night, and I probably wasn't going to wake up well enough to go to the walking tour of the Forum the next morning at 9:30.

So I saw them off to a bus that took them to their place near Termini. Unfortunately for me, rambling about the main street didn't yield a bus stop that went anywhere near my place. So began the torturously long walk in my 3lb boots to my residence, at almost 4 am.

As I crossed a bridge a bus number 29N passed by with a few of my classmates. I watched in horror as they passed me, and after having laughed for randomly noticing each other, I put my hands on my head in frustrated horror that they got a much less physically strenous way home. Oddly enough, we arrived within 5 minutes of each other, around 4:30, and just talked about our night. Theirs was interesting as well, having met somebody on the bus that got them into a club free with free drinks.

So I slept the sleep of demons.

"In one Friday night I met a British girl and 2 German girls on a bus from Termini, after a show in Circolo degli Artisti seeing the Pipettes play to Italian fans and hipsters. Almost los, saved by God and the Rosary, called Jusso by Lucy of Manchester, had to walk homein boots ....-----It's 4:30am and I'm still writing on a restless night of 2 Gin & Tonics and the Germans say Oktoberfest sucks and the ber is watered and the music is folk, and the Bavarians dance in liederhosen."
-from my notebook

Saturday

I sorta woke up at 7 for the tour, but I really woke up at 1pm after deciding to sleep off my walk. Saturday was a lazy day with a visit to the National Museum of Modern Art while my comrades visited a beautiful beach called Terracina. I was jealous. Saturday night my apartmentmate Raul and I sought out some damn bluesfest that was fucking impossible to find. We finally got there, somewhat enjoyed it, and walked back to the edge of our map, passing many prostitutes and possibly a fascist gang. Then we rode the bus home.

Sunday

It was a good walking tour around the Renaissance and Baroque centers of Rome after a nice morning Mass with a dorky embarrassing moment, then a long night stroll along the Tiber River with tons of little booths.

Oh, and 8 euro laundromat meeting a Canadian couple on vacation. Nice people, and I practiced my French.

my flickr's updated.