It's Picture Time!

This is Peirina. My host mom...or grandma. She is making pizza in this picture and was not happy that I was taking pictures of her.
This is her apartment, and where I am staying. The street is Via Columbini and we are in apartment 20This is the Compo. It is huge..but you can't really tell
The Church Tower and the Compo
This is the bus I ride every day to school. Ugh..Via Columbini to Piazza Grumschi
This is the kitchen at my host family house. It is so tiny!
This is my bedroom ( I get my own) and it looks messy, but it isnt

Well I love everyone and I miss everyone! I weighed myself today and realized that its time to start a jog routine. Hopefully that goal will last longer than a week. I love everyone and I miss everyone!

I love Polo

I have officially been in Siena for an entire week, and It feels like I have been here for a month. It's a smaller town and it is so beautiful. I absolutely love the area. I'm going to miss all the greens, the screaming Italians and just the feel of the city. It's very different from any other area in Italy and has the perfect Tuscany feel to it.

The people of Siena pretty much live in what they call the Compo. It is a huge circle next to a bell tower that is dedicated to eat and to talk. It is so big and it is so pretty. It is always packed with people sleeping, eating lunch or smoking with their friends. It is also where everything pretty much happens in the City. When they have polo tournaments here, they fill the sloped area with dirt. I have not seen it but I have heard it is really cool. Talking about Polo....let me tell you about my new found love for the sport, or shall I say the players.

Yesterday a couple of us girls decided to go chill in the Compo before we had to go to our Host families to have dinner. We weren't there for too long before a marching band started to come down the side of the Compo a long with salsa dancers that started to perform. We thought a parade was going on, so we ran down the compo to the side of the street to watch. When we got there we realized it was actually a celebration to introduce who will be playing in the World Championships for Polo. They had Argentina, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Hungary and Germany. We watched all the boys come down on their horses and all of us just started staring. Before they reached the end of the street, we all had one picked out that we had our eyes on. The cutest one there was this boy on the Italian team with this long dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. He was so good looking. He looked like Pippin off of Lord of the Rings, not even kidding. Anyways, he saw that I was staring at him, so he kept looking back at me and smiling at me. I was on cloud nine. During the presentations of the teams, I was begging the girls to go up there with me to take a picture with them. Before I knew it, Michelle was pushing me out of the croud into the team and asking them if I could get a picture. I was so embarrassed and turned bright red. He came right up to me before his team did and we all got a picture with them. I was so happy but embarrassed. But of course, I had to make this a memorable moment, so I took pictures with all of the teams as well. I hope my friend posts these pictures on facebook. We stayed a little bit longer and then as we are leaving, his team stayed behind and he was watching me. I walked past pretending like I didn't see him and he watched me leave and said goodbye. So...... let me just finish this story by saying, the hottest guy from the Italian Polo team was checking me out. The end. Goodnight. Hallelujah. I seriously, could be famous. They told us to come to their games.

Anyways, besides that, it was more sightseeing and school. The pictures I added are not of Siena, but are from a part of a different town we visited today. It is Voltera. For all those Twilight fans, that is the place that New Moon was filmed at, and where Stephanie Meyer based the story line on.

IM BACK!!!

I finally have some internet!! I have been in the beautiful city of Sienna for the past 3 days and I love it here. It is a smaller town and everything is exactly what you would see in pictures. I am going to have to take some pictures today of what it looks like, you would love it. I attend school at a little college called Dante Alleghari and I am studying Italian 101, Humanities 201, 280 and Siena Church History. My days are all pretty much the same and it feels good to be here.

On Sunday we were paired up with our roommates and we got to meet our host families. I was paired up with a girl named Brittany Carpenter and she is really nice. We get a long great and we pretty much have the same ideas on everything. We got pretty lucky. When we got off the bus into the city, everyone's host parents were there to great them. After a while, it was only Brittany, me and a couple of girls left. Because I live so far out of the city, they sent us in a Taxi and sent us off to find her place. Her apartment is on a street called Via Columbini and it looks like a little town of old people. I have not met anyone there who is not 60 years and older. Everyone loves us and is really nice. ( I got told by an old man today that i looked like Miss Italia. I was so happy). Our host mother is around 80 years old, widowed and loves to cook. Her name is Pierina and she talks really fast. She knows that I love sweets so she bakes us pie or cake every day along with nutela and chocolate for breakfast. It's only been 3 days and I have gained 8 pounds haha. I think she likes to see us eat her food. She is a great cook and I feel safe in her place.

Today my class doesnt start until 3 so I slept in and then walked around to the markets. Every wednesday there is a huge market that takes up the whole city. Everything is really cheap and it is really hard to not buy anything.... I also have to write a talk tonight for Sunday. I was asked by my Italian Bishop to prepare a talk on the sabbath day. I don't speak any Italian and the members dont speak any English, so I am pretty nervous. I guess if I mess up, no one will know what I am saying anyways.

Well, I will continue to update again! Arriderchi!

Italian men......bueno

I slept in...again. We had a reservation to go visit an art museum this morning at 7:15, and the girls and I in my apartment never woke up to go.... Our professor came into our apartment and told us just to meet us there and gave us these directions, " Just take one of the buses, get off the metro at Flaminio and then walk a little bit and you will find it." Well, we followed her directions and it took us to the bottom of the city. By the time we found the RIGHT bus, we were already an hour late and we knew they were in the museum already. So we decided, what better way to spend the day then go to the park, shop and buy gelato? So thats exactly what we did. We got some deserts for breakfast, took pictures and then walked around Piazza de Poppolo. Which by the way is one of my favorite places in the world. It's just a plaza FULL of shopping, the Trevi fountain, the spanish steps and music. It's just a busy place that is what Rome is all about. As we were cruising around the city, we randomly found the art museum we were supposed to go to, so we got off the bus and walked through the park to get there. It was beautiful. They had people playing guitars randomly on the park benches and there were ducks and birds every where to feed. It was just so pretty and we took a ton of pictures.

On our way out, I was in desperate need of icecream, so we stopped at this little shop and I started talking to the owner. ( another one of my "older Italian men crushes" ) He started flirting with all of us girls and giving us icecream for free. We started talking to him for a while and he was explaining to us that he was a movie producer and a doctor and an actor..... and all this stuff that just didnt make sense. And then he pulled out his phone and stared showing us pictures of him and Nicole Kidman, and a bunch of other actors it was crazy. We seriously spent an hour talking to him and by the end of it, we all had a crush on him. We told him all about us being mormons, how we don't drink and how we don't wear "sexy dresses". It was so funny. He was telling us that all of that is just part of Rome, and that no one thinks differently. It was funny to try to explain to him what we thought. Anyways, the girls invited him to take them out to dinner tonight, and I am pretty sure I will not be going. He's pretty attractive, but I don't have money and I don't want to get stuck in a random spot in Rome again.

Anyways, I also walked around the city today by myself and tried to find myself an Italian boyfriend.. I went in all the shops, and finally found someone good looking in a Cafe right across the street. It was love at first sight until I said a word wrong and then he had a lady come over because my Italian is horrible. Man, my luck is just not working out. Oh well, it just wasnt ment to be.

Drunk Italians are not very fun...

Sunday afternoon was one of the craziest days here in Rome ( and its only been a week!) I try to go out and visit sites and be with the girls, but a lot of the times we get ourselves in bad situations. This one was no exeption. Me and a different group of girls decided that we wanted to go see where they were building the new temple in Rome. We were told by a group of missionaries that we met, that they only have the foundation done so far. They told us to get on a certain bus and to only get off when we see the IKEA. Apparently the temple grounds are behind a tall gate and the only way you can see it is on the second floor through a window in the store. We waited on this bus for an hour and it randomly stopped in the middle of a neighborhood. The bus driver informed us that this was the last stop, and that the bus would only go back to Termini after the new driver came by. I was pretty pooped, so I was all for going back home and trying again the other day. The other girls were determined though, and decided that we would walk until we randomly found the store. We walked forever on the side of a freeway and we were completely lost. It started to get dark and right as we were about to go home, we saw the IKEA. When we finally got close to it we realized that there was no way to get to the store unless we ran across the freeway. So...that is what we did. I wanted to go home but I can't be alone so I had to go with them. When we got to the IKEA it was about 9:30 at night and it was completely dark. We couldnt see anything out of the windows and it was getting frustrating. Me and 3 other girls decided we should go home because we didn't know when the buses would stop running. We walked back the way we came and waited for the bus to show up. We waited for a half an hour and realized that the bus stop sign said nothing about buses showing up on a Sunday. We said a prayer together and decided to run to the next bus stop in case the last bus was running through. There was no bus there either. We waited on the side of the road for an hour and 45 minutes. It was right by a gas station and we had a lot of people honk at us, or roll down their windows and ask us if we knew where we are. It was really scary and me and another girl said we would rather pay for a taxi than wait here and get stuck. As soon as we were about to wave a taxi down, the last bus showed up. It was such a relief! We got on the bus only for 10 minutes, when a guy came into the bus. He was talking really loud and throwing peoples stuff around. He looked completly drunk. He started saying stuff to me and the other girls and it got really scary. He moved further up the bus afterwords and it was such a relief. Before the guy looked like he would pass out, he through a woman out of her seat and sat in it. The bus driver stopped the bus and threw the guys feet off the seat and told him to get off his bus. They started yelling back and forth and the bus driver called the police. The man got mad back and started trying to hit the bus driver and a huge fight started. The woman tried to get in the way and she got kicked a few times by the drunk man.All the men on the bus pushed him out and we had to wait on the side of the road to make sure no other buses would pick up the drunk guy. That made us another hour late coming home. When we finally got to Termini we had to take 2 more buses home. We got on one bus that took us a different way so we hoped off and decided we would walk from where ever we were home. It was about 12:00 at night when we walked and it was pretty scary. We finally found our apartment and we got home at around 12:24 at night. I decided taht I am never traveling anywhere unless we know exactly where it is and I know I will be home at a good hour. Thank goodness mom and dad could skype afterwards and I could tell them all about it!

Suday in Rome :)

Today we were able to attend church in a branch one bus stop away in Rome. There were a lot more members there than I thought there was going to be! Our group was maybe a fourth of the branch and they had a large group of Relief Society members and Priests. There were two missionaries who were attending the branch that was able to translate what they were saying to us in words we could understand.

What was interesting to me was that you could feel the spirit in there so strong! There was nothing special going on, but the spirit was incredibly strong. I could feel it the whole time. You could also tell the people attending the church looked different than other people in Rome. I hope I look that way to other people.

Anyways, everyone is sleeping and I am just trying to keep myself awake so I can skype my family. Today is a good day and tomorrow is going to be even better. Have a great day!

I Belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints!

My apartment is a five minute walk from Vatican City. I can walk down the street, grab a gelato, and walk straight into St. Peters. It's been a week here in Rome, and our professor decided that the last week we were here in the city we would spend our time in the Vatican.

The day was hot, and it seems like the longer we are here, the longer the sun is in the sky and the brighter it gets. Ever since I have been here, I have had to cover my body in sunscreen and I am still getting burnt! Anyways, we woke up early to get into the Sistine Chapel and there was still a five minute line to enter into the church. While I was waiting in line, I got to take a good look at the area surrounding the chapel. The area inside the church grounds is what they call St. Peters. It is named after the apostle they believe was given the priesthood, and is passed down through him. He is also buried underneath the church. (which I got to see. I felt like Indiana Jones). The church grounds is surrounded by two half circles that are covered in marble columns and marble statues of their saints. It was meant to look like open arms so the people could feel they were in the arms of the church.

As we finally got to enter into the church, it was huge. It was over 40 feet high and the ceilings were plastered in gold and bronze, marble angels and bright colored mosaics of heaven and the virgin Mary. It was amazing to see. To the side of the church you can see the marble carving made by the artist Michelangelo. It is the first work he has ever done in Rome, and is what they say made him famous. It is of Mary holding Christ in her arms after he was taken down from the cross. Aside from that, they have paintings of Christ given Peter the priesthood, confession booths, angels, Mary, and other popes. It was amazing to see and everything was so decorated. Me and one of the other girls sat and talked about how the people seemed to be so distracted by the costliness of the building and all of the money that they forget the actual church. More focus is on making it look costly instead of putting more focus on what the church is used for. I'm so glad our church focuses on simplicity.

After vising inside the church, we were given a special tour to visit underneath the chapel where they believe St. Peter was buried. I was told by the tour guide that they bury people underneath the church because they believe tombs are gates or portals to Heaven and they want to be close to it. Apparently before the Sistine chaple was built, there was a church built underneath it, ( and from what I heard it was a christian church). There were little rooms about the size of our guest room that were covered in marble tombs and Egyptian mosaics that would have been the burial site of 150 bodies. It was really creepy. . They had the times the people died written on their tombs that went down to the very hour. They also had statues of their bodies put on the wall in front of their tombs to show what they did during their lives. The masks the dead bodies would wear would be placed on those statues. The whole thing was just creepy. They even had a burial tomb dedicated to Lucifer, which creeped a lot of us girls out, but he let us know that it was just what they always did. We got to see the burial spot of Peter, and he told us that the rest of Peters body sleeps in the same area as the pope. haha, sometimes the catholics do crazy things.

The catholics also believe that when Christ suffered on the cross, so did some other people as well. They believe that people would randomly start to bleed in their hands and feet every hour on the hour. Once again, I'm glad to be a member of our Church.

Anyways, I am missing home really bad and I desperate to hear people speak English to me. I hope you get my message before Sunday, but I was thinking we would skype when it was 9 in the morning your time? to be honest I have no idea what that time would be for me, but I will be home all day because it is a free day. Anyways, I love you guys and I miss you....a lot. expecially my mommy and daddy :) and my cat.....and April...and the rest of my family....not in any order :)