Last Day of the Program

Saturday was the last day of the program. We met in the lab in the morning and we were put into random groups. The assignment was a scavenger hunt for certain pictures and then we had to take those pictures and use all the different technologies we learned to do certain things with them, like Photoshop them, put them in a website, animate them, etc. The trick was we only had an hour and a half. My job in my group was to make a photo collage in Photoshop, so I poked fun a Julian Caesar in it. I called the page "All I want is a beer and a rest" and you can see it above. He was known for shouting "FBD" at like 11 a.m. (First Beer of the Day). I got all "10s" and our group came in second place and won Rome key chains/beer openers. Suitable prize, I think, although we should have come in first ha ha. They gave us the afternoon off then we met at the Colosseum at 6:15 to do our last site visit which was the remains of Roman villas that can be found under the church of Saints Giovanni and Paulo. There's an area that would have been a wine shop, the remains of the dining room with frescoes, a fountain area, and more. There is also a very nice museum there but unfortunately, no photos allowed at the site or in the museum. We knew we were having our last dinner back in Trastevere after the visit, so many of us were dressed up. Unfortunately, bad planning made it that we had to walk to the restaurant, which was unsuitably far and ticked most of us off. By the time we crossed over the Circus Maximus, then the river, then through the Trastevere neighborhood, we were sweaty, sticky, angry, hungry, thirsty and had blisters on our feet. Fortunately, these things all abated when the courses began. Each course had two courses within it - antipasto was a plate of meats and cheeses, and a seafood salad; pasta was a shrimp pasta, and a cacio e pepe spaghetti; main course was steak and potatoes, and various grilled fish; dessert was a millefoglie cake (see photo) and of course, the wine, water, and limoncello flowed freely. We had the whole room to ourselves except for this poor old couple who was stuck in the middle of it all. We toasted them and thanked them for their patience with our cheering and gift-giving and speech-making. Who knows if they understood us! Afterwards, the AUR student who had been our assistant all week had some friends who were opening a bar in Trastevere that very night so a bunch of us went to check it out, then off to bed because mostly everyone was leaving early the next morning. It was a bittersweet night, for sure.