An Evening in Rome

I think I'm around 76% awake, so I decided to blog about today before I hit the sack.

First, if you ever get a chance to come to Rome, definitely explore the city at night. It's amazing! I'll get to that in a bit.

Today was the day of our final presentations, so we pretty much spent the day preparing for that. We had a short class to get together at 10 AM, and then within a few minutes after, we all split to work on our projects before our run-through at 2 pm.

As I've mentioned previously, Brukab and I focused on the challenges to accessing higher education for immigrant students in Italy. Because of our experiences in America have shaped our perception of higher education in terms of social mobility very definitively, we sought to understand what higher education meant for social mobility in Italy, particularly for immigrant students.

What we found was a sort of double standard, one where it's generally accepted that higher education opens doors to new opportunities, but also that higher education is not necessary for achieving economic success. We were curious how this perception changed from one population to the next, so we researched what the perceptions of and challenges to higher education are in relation to social mobility for immigrant students.

The results showed that, for immigrant children, there is a certain assumption that they don't have money so college is not an option. As such, we wanted to do further research on how these perceptions change based on whether the students are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants, the effect of socioeconomic class and privilege, and their citizenship status.

We thought perhaps there'd be support programs that help guide immigrant students along in this process, but there are none, or very few if any, programs that exist to help immigrant students access higher education. We still have much to learn, but we're excited about writing this paper over the next three months.

The presentations were a great success. We only had five minutes per group, so we had to be very speedy, and I think everyone did a great job. Turnout was fairly small, only three people outside of our class, but it was a great environment to have rich discussions.

After our presentations, we decided to go out and explore Rome by night. We'd been thinking about our presentations and class stuff for several nights, so we never took the time to go explore in the evening. Our group consisted of me, Brukab, Jasmine, Irene, Trina, Manmeet, Jamie, and Lia.

Our plan was to see the Colosseum at night because many of us had only seen it during the day. But Manmeet wanted to see the Pantheon at night, so we took a side trip over there. I wanted to see the Trevi Fountain at night, so we decided to move towards that direction too.

By this time, the sky was fairly dark, so all the lights were on. Definitely very pretty all around!

Finally, after all that walking, we hopped on a bus toward the Colosseum. It was definitely not as crowded at night compared with during the day. We took plenty of pictures (although my battery was dying) and got half of them of the girls jumping in mid-air.

By the time we finished our photos at the Colosseum, it was about 10 PM, but we had a crazy idea to head over to St. Peter's in the Vatican.

So back on the bus we went.

The only time I had been to St. Peter's was when Steffen was here, and we spent the whole day there then. I'll tell you, the whole environment changes at night. I got some good shots from the ground. Check it out!

After the long and exhausting day, we headed back to our apartment and food. I realized that I really had not eaten anything other than a peach and a few cookies/biscuits/crakers. Nice to eat more leftover pasta! Always delicious. =P.

Tomorrow is really our last full day here in Rome. We'll be at the Iqbal Masih school until around 12:30 and then our final group lunch right after. We'll have a bit of the afternoon free--to do shopping and such--until we meet back at 5:30 PM with youth leaders of the G2 organization, a second generation immigrant youth program.

Well, now I've gone from 75% sort of tired to 45 % extremely exhausted. I'm falling asleep! It's time for bed...