Semester at Sea | Civitavecchia, Italy

Because there is a specific time everyone has to be on the ship prior to departure, I did not make it back to a Wi-Fi connection after my post the other day. I did, however, find a beach and some gelato and read several chapters of my textbooks – yay!

Civitavecchia was our very first port of the voyage so you can imagine how hectic the days leading up to it were as well as the morning that we were able to get off the ship. People could not get off fast enough and many of us had field labs and field programs so we were concerned about the schedule as well. Our field labs are a way to apply what we are learning in a real-world, international setting and they constitute a large part of our grade in each class. My field lab was so lovely it deserves its own post (hopefully today).

As soon as we got off the ship the smell of fish hit you like a brick wall. Granted, we were in a port town so there’s a lot of fishing going on but MAN it smelled so bad. Haha. Once we finished our nice 1/2 hour stroll to the city (hence, the lack of Wi-Fi) Civitavecchia was exactly like I imagined coastal Italy would be like: tiny apartments all crowded together and in every color of the rainbow, beaches you could access at any time of day, and gelato + pizza around every corner.

A group of us went into the city one night for pizza and drinks and when we asked for pizza they sat us down, brought us wine. and started delivering heaping bowls of seafood which we did not ask for. When we inquired about the pizza we were told it was coming, but almost two hours later we still did not have pizza, hardly touched the seafood (it was icky), and after we were told it would cost us 4 euros, ended up paying 40 for food we didn’t want and we were still hungry. It was a pretty rough night. But what is a trip to Italy without getting scammed? Apparently, it happens to everyone. We found out that many SAS students had found themselves in similar situations so it felt a little better knowing we weren’t the only ones.

My favorite part of every town in Italy has to be the gelato. I said I was going to eat some every day and so far I have, except one day that we stayed on the ship and caught up on homework and such. A couple of times I even had gelato for breakfast. I blame it on the 8 AM trips to the ice cream parlor in Medora when I was little . . . old habits die hard. 😉

My next posts will be about my field lab in Civitavecchia and my adventures in Roma. Hope to have those done before we head out again today. If not, I will have my mom post the text and I’ll add the photos later so I’m not so behind – there’s just so much to do!

Arrivederci! We are off to shop!