Day #65 in Orvieto

April 28, 2013 - Sunday

My alarm was SO LOUD this morning when it went off at 6:30. I'm not really sure what happened to it but it was blasting. I was packed and ready to go to Heather's, ate breakfast, and left the monastery at like 7:29 because I thought the funicular started running at 7am. But as I was walking over, it was obviously closed and there was a small bus parked in front of the funicular. I started running to the bus (because I remembered that the last bus goes at 7:30) and the doors on the bus started to close but I frantically jumped in as the doors tried to crush my backpack. Awkward. There were five American girls on the bus and they had about ten suitcases with them. I think they were leaving their semester in Orvieto (there are 2-3 groups of American students here) so they were like "Byeeeeee Orvieto!" as the little bus zoomed around the mountain to get us to the station. It was weird because that will be me in less than two months! Ah. Too scary to think about. 

Anyways, I made it to the train station, feeling pretty awesome because I was all by myself - being independent and stuff. Unfortunately, the "Euro night" train was what brought me to Rome. Apparently that's the train goes all the way from Germany to Rome at night. It was packed and I had to sit on one of the little seats in the aisle that pops out from the wall (kind of like a small ironing board). Soon we arrived in Rome though, and I had a few minutes of running around because I needed to buy a ticket to Trastevere... which wasn't hard at all, but I made it more difficult for myself by running around the train station when I didn't need to. But it wasn't a big deal because I took that short, 12 minutes train to Trastevere where Jon and Kilo picked me up from the station. Then we were off on our adventure to Capalbio, a town in Tuscany! I have a few pictures from Capalbio but I'll post them tomorrow, because I don't have my camera with me right now... 

We had lunch in Capalbio and I had some pasta with wild boar meat! Cinghiale meat. Orvieto loves wild boars (there is a stuffed wild boar on every street corner), but I always forget the word for wild boar, "cinghiale," and I usually want to say "chimichanga" instead. 

Then we went to the Tarot Garden, which seems impossible to explain and even my pictures don't really show what it was like. It was a lot of really cool sculptures. Since that's an awful explanation, here's the website: http://www.nikidesaintphalle.com/

After that, we made our way back to Rome and went somewhere for dinner where we got the best steaks ever! Seriously, so good. Once again, I can't even explain how good they were but they were sizzling and awesome. I was so excited that I burnt my mouth on the first bite, but it didn't stop me from eating the whole thing. After dinner, we went to "the keyhole." We went up this hill and there were a few people looking through the keyhole of a door. When you look through the keyhole, you can see the dome of St. Peter's Basilica!

In the Tarot Garden

STEAK

I took this picture from Google... but this is what it looked like. Except we were there at night!