School starts tomorrow!

Saturday was an awesome weather day, but the kids weren't keen to do much, preferring to play playstation! So I went for a little wander myself, just up the road to Santa Maria Maggiore, a church. It was rather impressive I must say, lots of gold, and amazing paintings on the ceilings and in the domes. I tried to take some pictures with my point and click digital camera, but struggled due to the low light - the best I have uploaded below, but soon as my Sony comes back from repairs will probably wander on down and take some better ones - unlike the UK its free to come and go in the churches as often as you want!

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/vermontia/20090228SantaMariaMaggiore?authkey=Gv1sRgCI7B187CsvXknAE&feat=directlink

And then today I met up with two girls I have made friends with through the company that placed me on this program. Both French, and both calle Aurelie!! One is from Paris and the other from Rennes which is in Brittany, France. So we made plans to go to Trastevere which I was quite keen to visit, as the book I just finished reading, The Food of Love is based there - by the way I recomend this book to all, my cousin lent me it as I left London, and it certainly is a great read. Written by Anthony Capella.....check out the website :

http://www.anthonycapella.com/pages/books/food_of_love/synopsis.asp

Anyways Trastevere, which means across the Tiber (Romes main river), is supposedly the Bohemian neighbourhood, and I was looking forward to walking around it....but we took a detour to a market first, and then the rain came down!! So we never made it and I am saving it for another day. The one interesting thing I noticed while walking along the river is the width of the river, and the height above the river everything is positioned. I believe there has been some pretty bad floods here before, and I saw evidence of that where a pier had been completely destroyed...

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/vermontia/20090301WalkInRoma?authkey=Gv1sRgCN3Tqu3Txa3bLw&feat=directlink

So tomorrow I start my lessons. Really looking forward to that. The kids return to school also, so we will be back to a normal schedule - they come home from school about 16:00, get on with their homework, if they have any english homework I oversee that, and then perhaps we play some games or just generally chat in english until dinner is ready.