Rome-ing Europe: Catching Up

I have really been slacking with giving up -to -date descriptions of where I have explored in the past couple of days. The days go by so quickly here. Yesterday morning I took a tour through JCU and ventured to some of the main sites. I had seen several of them before/on other tours but it was great to be able to hear different facts about each one. The best part was that I was FINALLY able to see inside of the Pantheon. It was only a two hour walk but I was tired because my friend Sarah and I had walked around for almost 8 hours nonstop on Saturday. I'm definitely going to have to get used to the walking, or at least less learn to complain less. The views are beautiful and I'm in a beautiful city so even when I get lost it's not so bad. After about a two hour tour around Rome I went out for delicious (and really inexpensive- 2 Euro!) pizza in Trastevere at a restaruant caller Carlomenta. For anyone going to Rome this is the perfect place to go if you're looking for inexpensive and delicious Italian food.
It started to rain once we got back from the tour so I used the time to finally have a chance to relax in the apartment. I try to stay out of my residence hall as much as possible because I feel bad not using the time to find something new around Rome and it's much easier to not think about being homesick or anything of that sort.
After a few hours of relaxing, my roommate Michelle and I decided to venture to Gianicolo Hill. This is supposed to have the best Panoramic views of the city, and even though yesterday was overcast and rainy, the views were spectacular. I felt like I had escaped the urban feeling of most of Rome. There are a ton of trees lining the sidewalk up to the hill and there is also a park and a garden to walk through. We decided to take the back way to get there because we couldn't tell if the main road had sidewalks or not. (Most of the sidewalks here are super narrow so you almost get clipped by a car/moped anyways). The hill we climbed by the University of Spain was monstrous, but once we turned a few streets it was completely worth it. I really hope to go back when I want to go somewhere relatively quiet. (There really isn't anywhere outside that is completely quiet except for the area outside of my residence hall at midnight). Michelle and I started to get hungry once we were leaving so we decided to try to find the grocery store that our orientation leaders had showed us on our "Navigation 101" tour the day before.
We both had no idea what street the grocery store was on, only the general direction of where we thought it may be. For the next thirty minutes we wandered around Travestere, making turns where we thought we recognized a building or a restaurant. This wasn't so bad until we realized a half hour later at a fork in the road that we still weren't sure where we were going. We decided to sit down and look at a map in the hopes of trying to figure out where we were and whether or not to continue guessing or just give up. While we were sitting down, another girl from JCU who we had met before saw us and asked if we were looking for the grocery store too! She had been looking for it on her own and at least knew which street it was on. After about 10 more minutes of walking we found it- only to see that the grocery store looked like it had been ransacked. Some shelves were completely empty- we learned our lesson to not go to the store on a Sunday evening since all of the Italians seem to go then as well.
Much of grocery shopping here is a matter of guessing what the packaging says and what section of the store it is in. The first time I went to a grocery store I just picked up items based upon the pictures... the fabric softener smelled rancid. After picking up a few basic items, we decided to go back to the apartment to try to cook ourselves some dinner. Let's just say dinner was filling, but I don't think we will be cooking the same "recipe" again. By recipe, I mean we took what we could find in our fridge to create some sort of sauce for the pasta. We ended up combining olive oil, white wine, tomatoes and peppers. The wine was really strong and rich with the olive oil, but it tasted good with our balsamic vinegar and olive oil salad. The best part of the meal was crostini with slice tomatoes and melted mozzarella. It was so yummy! Overall, not a bad meal for our first time cooking in our extremely tiny kitchen.
After dinner I went to plan a trip to Santorini with two of my friends. As of September 14, I'm off to the Greek islands! I'm really excited because I've never been there before and it will be something completely different.

I promise to post photos of the past few days ASAP!
My attempt take a "Panoramic view" of the Pantheon, minus the front: