Club Med

Today was our field trip to Tarquinia to see an Etruscan Necroplis AKA...a bunch of tombs. As you can tell from my previous blogs, I'm getting very tired of touring ruins, so I was not all that excited about this one. But it was a pretty area and was nice to walk around in a big open field with a nice sea view! Claudio kept reminding us throughout the whole tour "Just be patient and soon you'll be at the beach." The tombs are basically little "huts" that are decorated inside with frescoes to honor the dead. You have to walk down a dark, claustrophobic staircase and look through a glass window to see them, but it is amazing how well preserved they are.

The tour was pretty quick and then we headed off to the beach! The weather in June so far has been rainy most days, but today was sunny and beautiful. We ate lunch at a great restaurant with a sea view and it was just so wonderful to finally have a (half) day to just relax and hang out in the sun.

Beaches in Italy are a little different. There are several different blocked off areas that are "pay beaches" and then random patches of sand that are "free beaches." There isn't much of a difference except the pay beaches come with chairs and umbrellas. The sand, as you can tell, was black because of old volcanic rock and such and the water was freeeezing, but of course, we still all had to go in. There really isn't much more to say about the beach, but I can't stress how nice it was to have some time off to do nothing.

There is an Italian phrase: il dolce far niete, which translates to "The sweetness of doing nothing," I think that perfectly describes this afternoon.

Back in Orvieto it is crackdown time for school. We only have a little over a week left which I cannot believe. In other news, Michelle and I finally tried the pizza place (which we used to refer to as "the sketchy pizza place) outside our apartment and it was good! and cheap! Coming up next we have our last fieldtrip to Florence on Friday, until then, I'll leave you with a nice image of the Mediterranean Sea.