The next, and last, day, I checked out the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter’s Basilica.  I absolutely loved my tour guide, and I just don’t’ know how else I would have survived that tourist death trap if I didn’t have someone guiding me through.  Plus, she was so knowledgeable!  I finished off my touristy trip by checking out the Catacombs (one of my papers was on early Christian bestiary iconography, so it was a relevant trip), and the tour actually freaked me out more than inspired me.  It killed me to see the tombs of all these Christian martyrs.  I hope for their sake they did give their life for something. In a less morose perspective, the Catacombs were a pretty cool and unconventional Roman monument to visit.

I am so sorry for peacing-out this last three weeks, but I was busy being a cave-dweller as dead to the world as the corpses of the Catacombs I visited in Rome at the beginning of December. Dramatics aside, I had those three 20-30-page art history research papers to accomplish in French. Doing each one consisted of three stages: running around like a chicken with its head cut off to various libraries in Paris (gone are the days of Wellesley where everything comes to you via Interlibrary Loan), sitting in one spot for hours or days reading the hundreds of pages of photocopies of research, and finally synthesizing/translating those sources into research papers with title page, images etc.

My last day in Paris was wonderful, and I spent it drinking champagne and eating in Montmartre with my best friend in Paris, from Wellesley (who, ironically, I did not know before). I put aside the bitterness of my workload that I had unfairly projected on Parisian society, and I began to look at the beautiful architecture of Paris, again, relish in the collections of art, and even stop judging everyone on the metro (everyone silently judges everyone on the metro). Life was like a dreamy reminiscence of good times past, until this morning when my shuttle arrived an hour and a half late to pick me up to go to Charles de Gaulle airport. I spent my last hours in Paris bawling and freaking out.

My last hoorah was an amazing but brief two-day trip to Rome. I booked it last minute and took a sleeper train down there. I couldn’t really sleep in those cramped couchettes and all I wanted to do was look out the window anyway when we reached Tuscany. Italy is sooooo beautiful! I had to hit the ground running when I got there so as not to waste time, so I memorized my Let’s Go Europe travel book, hit up an English-speaking tourist office, checked in to Hotel des Artists, and left for my first adventure. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain—a storm I never saw the likes of, and I have spent loads of time in Seattle and Boston.

I took a tour of the Coliseum, totally in awe and impressed with the martyrdom of early Christians, checked out the Roman Forum, the Trevvi (?) fountain, the Pantheon, and other historic pavilions of Rome. For the first part of this adventure I was totally shocked at how horribly everything was preserved until I realized that these things were thousands of years old. Then I realized that these were some of the oldest pieces of history I had ever seen in my life.

Well, this semester was like taking the drama and the experiences of the two first years of my life at college and sticking them in a trash compacter.  I was so excited to be there at first, and now I am so relieved and thankful to be headed home.  At the risk of sounding like Joni Mitchell in her song “California,” I am nostalgic and thrilled to be comin’ home.