the underworld

i need to update more often. things are getting lost in my mind. this past friday we took our last ncstate trip (this is a good thing) to another little tuscan town called Orvieto. It was a beautiful town, on top of a volcanic plateau, all that, but to be honest somehow i woke up that morning and just wasnt feelin it. I know this is weird but i woke up that day and the first thing i thought of was how i wanted to sit outside in the sun and drink wine and cheese and take naps. shut up everyone. this was different than normal! the weather was perfect and i just wanted to take a picnic in the sun. but it didnt happen. so for some reason i just wasnt into the whole orvieto thing. truckin around with the massive ncstate group, and not to mention, we spent the whole day in caves! i know, caves are cool, but it was cold and it was sunny and perfect outside. ok back on topic. We got on the bus at like 9am and half an hour later we were two blocks from our appartment. Another Strike! Its been happening a lot lately, and its usually train personal peoples or an small airline, nothing important or anything whateverrr but today it had to do with italy's new minister to the school, something similar to our head of the school districts, and apparently he came in and whipped up some new changes that these cool teens were just not feelin. I took a picture, its pretty cool to see young people so politically active. this definitely wouldnt be the case at home,
especially concerning changes in our public school system

anyway we spent the day in orvieto in caves because apparently these people had an underworld life storing wine and breeding pigeons, probably killing people, and burrying their bodies. so no one could find them. these caves were creepy, but they did actually bury their dead aone the city walls underground in these caves. they dug so many caves that they literally spanned the entire city underground. interesting fact: everyone knows etruscans first occupied italy (we're talking pre-christ time) and not a lot is known about the origin of these people but apparently they were only 4, not even 5 feet high! tiny people. so the caves were pretty small. it was a nice day, and i enjoyed the town. And because this town is a town in italy, of course they have a humongo church in the city center, built because of some immaculate miracle that occured there centuries ago. Apparently a priest was having trouble with his faith considering the change in consecration from jesus's body to bread, and durring mass one day blood began to drip from the eucharist, onto the alter table cloth. They have this cloth in a gold thing in the church still today, and apparently people gather once and year and it happens again every time? Never the less, the church was goregeous. heres another pic!


One last thing, this past weekend i went to my first fiorentina soccer game! We played AC Milan, it was a great time. People kept singing and chanting, tons of local pride. Italians are a very divided people, the north hates the south, and people from rome definitely have views about people from florence, and overy other town in this country. i think thats why italy never really got on being a political power, they are pretty preoccupied with getting their own people to agree on shit. anyway its very weird that there isnt much national pride (in italy, immigrants are another story) but when it comes to your home town, you own it.