Notte Bianca!

‘Notte Bianca’ = White Night

Rome has a specific day, more so a specific evening, called ‘Notte Bianca’ sponsored by the Roman Comune, which by what I can gather, is more or less a bazaar-type-deal of free entrances to museums and concerts, free food, horse racing (?... I know. I felt the same way when I heard.), etc. Every year people look forward to spending all night outside, visiting places and having a good time. This year, due to lack of funds, White Night was either postponed or just not offering much (We couldn’t figure out which it was.) But, of course, one must still celebrate, right? … even if no one else does!

Yesterday, a few other girls (Maria José and Adrianna, both from Mexico, Illiana from Romania, and Carrie) and I spent the day basically crusing the city. In the morning, visiting ‘Castel S. Angelo’(Yea St. Michael!!!) and in the afternoon visiting the Roman Forum. Two of the girls had prepared mini-tours to give us about each site. The one at ‘Castel S. Angelo’ went quite smoothly, as I am sure would have been the case for our mini tour of the Roman Forum (…if we could have figured out how to actually get IN to the Roman Forum…) More or less, we had the oppurtunity to take pictures with LOTS of monuments, ask others to take group pictures of us, which sometimes didn’t turn out so well... Us:‘Sir, could you take this picture?’ Sir:‘No.’ Us:’O.k..’What of course ended up being so awesome is the fact that later that night all of us, senza Illiana, went Salsa dancing in a nearby town, merely by a spur of the moment whim. A friend had invited us to visit this small town close to Rome just to check it out, and we mentioned how much we love to dance salsa, and pretty much that was that!

I always surprise myself when I go dancing because I always seem to forget how much I love to dance and how much joy it brings me. I think I had been focused on a few other things this week, which were and are of course important, but I need to remember how equally important it is to remember how close I feel to art, because it brings me such pure joy, and as Mother Teresa would say, joy, love, and compassion go hand in hand. You can’t be one without the other.

Amazing how we never stop learning things about ourselves. In my prayers.