Sun­day, Sep­tem­ber 6^th, 2009

Dom, Rain, Rachel and I had orig­i­nally planned go to a mar­ket on the other side of the river, leav­ing at 7:30am. I was exhausted and quite sun­burned, so I already decided not to go when they woke me up at 10:30 (three hours later than planned) and asked if I was still going.

I couldn’t resist… so we walked the long way there in the sun to arrive at a “mar­ket” which was basi­cally cheap ran­dom stuff ran by pushy ven­dors. And the super fun part about it is that the ven­dors seemed to repeat every 10 booths. It went on for­ever. Rachel and I split off from Dom and Rain and began to go on a quest to find the end of this eter­nal hell and find the tram to flee back to our apartments.

After finally find­ing a way out of the mar­ket, we started walk­ing back along the river before dis­cov­er­ing that the path was not open to the pub­lic the entire way, so we had to cut back *through* the mar­ket to thank­fully run right into a tram line. Rid­ing in air-conditioned splen­dour, we spent the rest of the day study­ing for class and prepar­ing for a pos­si­ble group inter­view the next day.

Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 7^th, 2009

Class with Walsh before going back to our apart­ment to hang out with Dominique and Rain before she left to explore part of Europe. Since she made us so many won­der­ful meals, we all helped make a 4-course din­ner with tiramisu for the depar­ture celebration(?)

Tues­day Sep­tem­ber 8^th, 2009

Dominique was actu­ally leav­ing this day, so after class we said our goodbye’s before she actu­ally departed. This was also a pretty relax­ing day as we were prepar­ing for the rest of the week and were a lit­tle sad to see her go.

Wednes­day, Sep­tem­ber 9^th, 2009

Woke up at 7:00am to get ready for the Papal Audi­ence. After leav­ing from the Rome Cen­ter at 8:20 and walk­ing to the Rome Cen­ter, a group of us then walked the rest of the way to the Vat­i­can City. Unsure of where we were go to actu­ally go when we got there, we sim­ply fol­lowed the large crowd which was not nor­mally there. After the oblig­a­tory secu­rity check, we were guided by a lot of Swiss guards to the audi­ence hall. Luck­ily we got a seat, and waited about an hour with a bunch of overex­cited Catholics from all over the world.

The Pope finally showed up, and it was pretty meh. He talked for a while, then some bish­ops talked, and then they did it in another lan­guage, and etc. Even­tu­ally, after about 5 lan­guages later, they finally fin­ished and we were able to leave!

We had class with Pro­fes­sor Walsh at 3:00pm because of the audi­ence, and we were doing a mock meet­ing of the Euro­pean Coun­cil of Min­is­ters, with each class mem­ber being a dif­fer­ent coun­try. We were going to dis­cuss the  pre­dicted sec­ond fail­ure of the Irish ref­er­en­dum to approve the Treaty of Lisbon.

The fun part of this is that when we were choos­ing coun­tries on Mon­day, I decided on Swe­den, not remem­ber­ing that Swe­den had just taken posi­ti­tion as coun­cil pres­i­dent. So I had to basi­cally run the meet­ing with the pro­fes­sor sit­ting in the back­ground lis­ten­ing and watch­ing. It went pretty well, I kept calm while every­one was at each other’s throat over Ireland’s defense to their actions, and what to do with the failed Treaty of Lisbon.

Later, at 7:00, we had a recep­tion in Pro­fes­sor Walsh’s rather large and amaz­ing apart­ment for var­i­ous lawyers, reporters, and other peo­ple who we were inter­view­ing, try­ing to inter­view, or oth­er­wise want to schmooze with. Thanks to Sab­rina the food was quite excel­lent, and I think we had a fairly good time get­ting to know dif­fer­ent peo­ple at the event.

Future

We’re going to Flo­rence on Fri­day, and spend­ing the night there before going to Venice on Sat­ur­day and then spend­ing the night there, so I might be out of inter­net con­tact for a while.