It's like Disneyland for classicists, minus the people dressed as your favorite characters.

Thursday we went to Ostia. And it was awestiome. Ostia was Rome's port, and practically the entire city has been preserved and excavated, some buildings up to the second floor. It was so much fun to walk around the city and see so much of it still in tact, thousands of years later. I ended up taking too many pictures again, but hopefully I haven't been overloading my blog with them. After Ostia we took a train back to into Rome. We had yesterday off, and I took the day to do most of my homework, which was pretty much all I did yesterday. Ovid was a funny guy. Last night we had dinner with the TAs; Ashli is a really good cook, and luckily enjoys cooking for lots other people every so often.
A bit of bad news, however, is that we (the guys' apartment) received an e-mail from the head of the UW Rome Center saying that she had a complaint from the restaurant owner whose restaurant is directly below our room that we had dropped lit cigarettes onto his brand new dining umbrellas and burnt two large holes in the top. The problem with this, however, is that none of us smoke on a regular basis. One of the guys has smoked a couple cigarettes, and one of the TAs smokes, but no one in our program has ever smoked inside the building, let alone in our room. There's no way it could have been us; there is a whole row of windows and rooms above and below ours, not to mention the fact that the Campo we live in is known for being really busy all night long with tourists and Italians, and it could easily have been a person walking by who threw their butt up on the canvas. It's just frustrating that we have to deal with it. Hopefully it is resolved soon. But enough of that, on to pictures of Ostia, my happy place. I'll post my videos later.

This is where the members of the Ostian fire department were housed.
I'm not sure if this was an actual sewer, or just a really cool underground passageway, but there was one part where some of the paint on the roof of the underground passage was still present.
Inside the passageway. There was absolutely no light, and we didn't have one, so Stephen turned on some setting on the flash for his expensive camera and it strobe-lighted our way a little. We got a little wet, and couldn't go too far in any direction because the water started to get deeper. Pretty awesome, notwithstanding.

Cool room that still had the paint on the walls. We actually got yelled at for taking pictures, because this probably hasn't been published yet or something, so putting it on the internet is probably not terribly prudent; archaeological faux pas number two.
Ostian theater, mostly in tact. There were tours of French kids everywhere, so anytime you see a large crowd of children in my pictures of this trip, they're French.
Ostian Forum (and French kids). Ironically, the Forum was a place where people would have assembled like this, and just hang out on the steps, so I hadn't really thought about it before, but this is a pretty neat photo in that respect.

Temple of Love and Psyche. The floors here are ridiculously in tact. The wall was great, too.
This lady made the nastiest face as she walked into my picture, also at the Temple of Love and Psyche.
Ostian restaurant. It was incredible how modern it felt when you could see the whole thing. I was standing in the back, where dishes were washed, and what you see is the actual kitchen, to the right is the outside dining and the other side of the chimney is the inside dining. Fantastic.
Row of businesses. On the floor in front of where each shop would have been is a mosaic of what the shop is, like business signs hanging from the tops, but on the ground. There was a second row just like this one, but it was on the other side of the temple in the middle toward which both rows face.
Atop a two thousand year old third story of a building. View from the top of a building onto the top of another building. I wanted to jump over so many railings and go walking on the other floors that you can see.

Arianna, Stephen, and Chris in a building with yet another preserved floor mosaic.
Roman latrine. Notice the partitions? Exactly. "Doing your business" in Rome was often where they actually did business. Going to the bathroom was a social event, practically, and many business transactions, etc., were done right here. You can see below where there is a small channel cut into the floor, where there would have been running water to rinse off the sponges on sticks that were used as toilet paper.
Roman Synagogue. This is the altar(?), and to the left are some awesome columns. You might not be able to see it, but on the capitals (tops) of the columns on either side of the altar have menorahs carved into them.
Bakery for baking the choly bread.
Chris and Stephen sitting in a building next to the synagogue (I forget what it was...). Directly behind them under the modern roof is the mikveh (spelling...) where Jews then would have (and I believe some Orthadox Jews still do) descended seven steps into a bath of water and dunked under before entering the synagogue, the practice from which Christian baptism is derived.
Floor mosaic at a mythraeum.

Tunnel that if we had more time and a flashlight we would have totally crawled along the dirt that still covered most of it...there was a gate before we could get in here. Archaeological faux pas number three.
You can see the wheel-wear in the cobblestone here. Pretty sweet.
Then it was time to go. But there's always time for one more archaeological faux pas.


Latin Word for the Day: vir, viri (tr: man)

Vale, amici.