First Week in Rome

We have been in Rome for a week now, and we've been so busy!  We've only made a couple of small posts, and those were mostly just to show you all some pictures.  We've got a bit of free time right now, so we thought we'd go ahead and make a longer post to let you all know what we are doing and how we are getting on here.

First off, we live in a house here on the Canossian sisters' campus.  There is a total of 6 volunteers here, including us (Marie, Michael, Adam, Ream are the others), all of which are American but one, who is Irish.  It's like having roommates all over again!  We cook, eat, grocery shop, pray, learn, clean, explore Rome, and generally have a good time together.  It is definitely challenging to share space and resources with a houseful of people again after we have gotten used to living on our own.  At least we have our own bedroom though!  

We usually get up in the mornings at 7 or 7:30 and have breakfast at 8, followed, of course, by kitchen clean-up.  We have lessons in the morning, usually with one of the sisters or a priest.  These lessons are often historical ones about figures involved in the earlier days of the Canossian order.  We have also seen some slideshows from past volunteers about their experiences in Africa.  We have a schedule set up for who cooks on what day, so one of us will cook lunch every day after morning lessons. After we eat lunch together and clean up, we usually have a couple hours before our afternoon French lesson.  This time is perfect for completing our French homework from the day before.  French lessons are about an hour and a half long, and our Filipino teacher, Digna (or Diggy, as everyone calls her), speaks only in French during lessons.  As you might imagine, it is pretty challenging to learn French while being surrounded by a whole city full of people chattering in Italian!

We do have some other events that are regularly scheduled each week.  Monday evenings, we go to help out at the local diocesan charities, which usually involves helping with their soup kitchen, but we also sometimes help out with the tasks necessary to run their dormitories, where people can get a bed to sleep in and a place to shower and wash their clothes.  We go to mass at a church here in Rome (San Luigi dei Francesi) for French Mass on Wednesdays.  Trying to follow the mass in French is always interesting, especially when the priest speaks rather quickly.  The Mass parts are easy enough to follow, but we get thoroughly lost rather quickly when it comes to the homily!  We also go to the sisters' convent every Saturday for lunch, which is wonderful.  They have a spunky little Italian woman named Rosa who cooks for them, and she is fantastic in the kitchen.    We then have the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday free to use as we see fit.  Life is very busy and definitely challenging, but we are enjoying the experience so far.

We have some more pictures for you all so you can see where we are staying.

These two pictures are of the outside of the volunteer house that we all stay in.  It has two floors, and all the bedrooms are on the top floor.  There is a porch on the roof, which is where I took the picture of St. Peter's at night.

This is the front door of our house.  The house itself is very old, as the whole campus here used to be a villa, which was willed to the sisters by the baroness who owned it. All of the doors are very short, less than 6 feet tall, and all of the windows are old wooden frames that swing open.

 This is the porch on the roof of our house.  There is usually a nice breeze and always a nice view!  We dry our clothes up there, since there is no dryer in the house.  We do have a temperamental washing machine that sort of works when it wants to.

 Looking up towards the sisters' house from our balcony.  You can see the convent building to the right of the walkway.

The Pantheon, which was originally a temple for the old Roman gods, but is now a Catholic church.

 Looking up at the oculus in the center of the roof from the inside of the Pantheon.

 The Trevi Fountain.  There are always so many people there, and most of them throw coins in.  We've been told the fountain makes 3,000 euro every day! You can see where they are doing restoration work on the left side of the photo.

 Leah in front of the Trevi Fountain.

 Looking up the Spanish Steps.

 The view back down from the top of the Spanish Steps.

Looking back towards St. Peter's (in the distance on the right in the photo) from the top of the Spanish Steps.

The Villa Doria Pamphili is the park across the road from our campus.  They have an outdoor theater there, and there was an orchestra with a vocalist on Saturday night. We sat in the grass off to the side and enjoyed a free show!