Roma, Italia-random stories from the beginning of the end

I’m planning on writing (hopefully) two more entries: this one will describe random things that haven’t yet made it into an entry while everyone else was still around, and the second will describe my last week, once studio was done and we had time to just explore.
There’s a print shop a little ways down the street from us. It’s a tiny shop owned by an old man with very white hair and very thick glasses. The shop is full of prints of ancient Rome, panoramics of Italian cities, church plans, flowers, beautiful lettering, maps of all the regions of Italy, and some other randoms. I ended up buying a small print of the Campidoglio (one of my favorite spots in Rome) and an old magazine page for Dad that has different diagrams of solar and lunar paths, eclipses, and all sorts of other cool things…all labeled in Italian. I went to the shop twice: once with friends, when I was first introduced to it, and once later on my own to take my time going through pile after pile of maps and Roman landmarks.
We spent a lot of time towards the end of our semester hanging out with some of the kids from University of Washington. We rent our studio space from them and they have an apartment of 9 guys one floor above us. They were all art students (drawing, painting, photography, ceramics [although the ceramics students didn’t have ceramic facilities and Rome and pretty much just had to take other studios]) and very funky, artsy people. We had a ton of fun spending time with them! We went up to their apartment a few nights and it was usually packed with other people from their program. We even went out to a club with a few of the girls one night and had fun dancing for hours. Their program ended earlier than ours did, though, and I was sorry we hadn’t gotten to know them earlier! We went to their final exhibition, which was fun. Some of the art was really interesting, some really weird…I guess that’s pretty typical, though. It was great to talk to them about their projects after having gotten to know them. Although the art was fun, we were told that they didn’t really do much other than studio…they had no history class and only took Italian language for 3 weeks in the beginning, which seemed so strange to all of us! I couldn’t imagine living in Rome and not knowing the history of the city (not even architecture, just general history!). Oh well.
One night in the apartment we decided to have an “American picnic”. Jeff and Rach cooked and made sloppy joes and potato salad. The sloppy joe sauce was makeshift since Jeff couldn’t find all the right ingredients…I think he ended up using tomato sauce, honey, sugar, vinegar, and who knows what else, but it was delicious! I cubed eggplant and simmered it in the sauce and it was really good. Rach’s potato salad was partially mashed and had really good flavor (red wine vinegar, hard boiled eggs, red onion, and celery…the works). The served potato chips and Liz made onion dip, too. For dessert, Bruce and Sarah went out and got a carton of stracciatella gelato (chocolate chip and many people’s favorite throughout the semester) from Blue Ice around the corner. Then everyone donated toppings: we melted down chocolate chips, chopped up Reese’s cups, melted down peanut butter (both of these came from the states, as they don’t exist in Italy), I donated Oreos that were also chopped (again, hard to find in Italy, Andrew brought them over for me), and we had whipped cream. Everything was delicious!
Hmmm…that’s actually all I had to write about for pre-last-week explorings, so I guess I’ll wrap this entry up and start right on the next. No pictures this time.