All Things Must End

Note: Entry published retroactively
Things are certainly winding down for the semester. After my Greek getaway and a week of classes, I wandered around Rome on Friday and Saturday and soaked the city in. On Friday, five of us headed down and over to Villa Borghese, which is sort of the Central Park of Rome. We even rented one of those pedal-carts so we could cover more ground in shorter time, while giggling all over the place. It was a productive afternoon, considering it was my first time finally seeing some sites, such as Piazza Barberini or the Bocca della Verità. Thankfully Deanna is an excellent planner.
The next day we got right back on a bus and explored some more. Deanna led us to a garden of orange trees (which were awful, and we may have been scolded for picking and eating them/for Kory climbing into a tree) with a great cityscape view of Rome, looking across the river to St. Peter's or north to the "Wedding Cake" or Victor Emmanuel II Monument. We continued along Via di Santa Sabina, stopped in a church or two, and went to the famous keyhole associated with the Knights of Malta. When you look through the keyhole, you look through the private gardens straight across the river and see a gorgeously framed view of the dome of St. Peter's. There's also a pyramid in Rome, which I did not know, and we saw that after continuing down the road. It was a great last pre-finals weekend.
This week on Monday I enrolled in next semester's classes (but basically it's just Block I and chosen for me). Wednesday was spectacular because Matt organized a Scavi tour with the Vatican, which goes down into the Necropolis underneath and the tomb of St. Peter, and whatever else is down there (humidity?). It was interesting... they showed us pre-Christian Roman and Egyptian tombs and such, we went through a chapel, and at the end they show you the bones of Peter. That last part was a wee bit anticlimactic but I'm glad I crammed myself down into the musty underworld of the Catholic Church for an hour or two.
I stayed up all that night finishing writing my final paper for one of my classes (which had to be in Italian), so, you know. Excruciating experience. I then turned it in yesterday and enjoyed some much-needed sleep for the afternoon. Last night, then, was the big end-of-semester banquet which took place at a fancy restaurant/theatre combination. The wine was flowin' and the dancefloor was bumpin'. I'm pretty sure Dana and I tore up that floor from the first song til the last, and we looked pretty fancy doing it. Today some of the classes come to an end with an art display, the acting class's performance, and a reading held by the Writing Fiction class.
Starting tomorrow and into next week are my final exams, and Thursday April 29th is the big move-out day. So sad! My inter-term travels are not even all the way figured out, but the flights are at least in place. I'm headed to Portugal, Spain, and France for my first times before meeting up with my family and heading to Sicily for a week. Then we'll spend a week here in Rome, they'll fly home, and I'll have my summer class for two weeks before flying back to America myself. By then it'll be the beginning of June, so May is going to be a huge month. I'm still not ready to say "Arrivederci Roma," but I'm starting to feel the mortality of my semester abroad and am coming to terms with needing to eventually return home and, you know, finish college and such.