un giorno mistico

Today was a pretty cool day -- we met this author from L'Aquila this morning who took us on a tour of one of the city's largest and most important churches. There are pictures on my photo site if you're interested in seeing them. He wrote a novel inspired this fresco he discovered behind the altar of the church. It was pretty Indiana Jones of him, if you ask...him.

We also have taken a couple of really nice walks around the city in the last few days. I took this picture yesterday when we were walking around with Anna Lucia, one of the professors who teach some of the other girls in the level above me. The petals fell from a window box above them, and I thought they looked really beautiful.

Best experience of the trip so far: meeting a class of middle schoolers yesterday. They invited us to their class dinner that night, and we shared tons (and I mean tons) of delicious pizza. One of them had this shaved mushroom stuff on it called "tartuffo" and some kind of prosciutto. I

I got along really well with this one girl who told me she loves Avril Lavigne. She dressed exactly like her back in the "Complicated" days - long blond hair, cargo-y pants, and lots of plastic bracelets. She was super cute and I hope I run into her again sometime.

Some of the girls in her class brought us to Magoo, the most popular dance club in L'Aquila. We were there too early and there weren't too many people around, but they played pretty fantastic techno the whole time, just as I hoped.