Subiaco- Part 1

Wow! I know its been a while! But I've been so busy! We honestly don't have a moment of free time! (Ok so maybe that isnt true but being the good student that I am, naturally, my studies consume me) lol... Anyways, the plan is to blog about what just happened because going back and recounting over a weeks worth of events at this point has been so daunting that ive been avoiding it. Which kinda defeats the purpose of keeping a blog, but hey, im trying...
SUBIACO AND ASSISI
I had a wonderful time on our trip to Subiaco and Assisi. We left for Subiaco on Friday morning, bright and early. All 105 piled onto two buses, excited and energetic. Needless to say, that died down quickly once we realized we had a total of 3-4 hours of bus riding ahead of us. Luckily those hours were broken up into segments. We headed toward Subiaco first, which is a small town near the mountain ranges NE of Rome (Note: In Luke's opinion they are not mountains, they are foothills. In my opinion...whatever.) There we visited St. Benedict's Monastery.  It was absolutely gorgeous. Only about 26 people live there now. Its built around a small cave where St. Benedict stayed and prayed for three years. We toured the entire monastery, led by our history professor Dr. Hatlie (who is a beast and knows at least 5 languages or something ridiculous like that) and got to go into the cave where St. Benedict was for three years. The energy in that tiny room is indescribable. You really have a sense of strong spiritual presence when you are there. Unfortunately we dont get much time to explore on our own after the guided tours finish so I only got to spend about 10 minutes in there. (small side note: guided tours are hard for me because i just want to sit and sketch for hours on end and when every inch of the inside of a huge church is covered with frescos i have a really hard time choosing what to sketch out really quickly, which ends up wasting more time before I finally have 2 minutes to outline something I could have spent 8 minutes on lol). Anyways, I have to cut this post short because we are about to leave for a guided tour in Rome for my Art and Architecture class and I havent posted something in forever so Im typing this up instead of eating lunch because I feel bad for taking this long. I'll do my best to get more info up tonight!!
Ciao!
PS- Luke is helping me set up an online photo album type thingey that will make posting photos and videos much easier. I'm in the process of working on that as well! Miss you all!