Thankfully, when I woke up Monday morning I was feeling much better. Just a little bit of sore throat was hanging around, but not enough to make me worry about my group presentation that I was giving Wednesday. But, I did have a practice run-through today that I needed to get through, so it was a little bit of a nuisance. In writing, all we did was work on our group projects and do our practice presentations for the professor. We talked her into letting the groups not presenting sit outside so they could work more on their own projects, which also meant we didn’t have to hear the same presentations twice in three days. This time, it wasn’t that hard to get her to agree with us, but she is convinced that we should be lawyers rather than engineers with all of the proposals we have for her. Anyways, our presentation went well, but we definitely had some work to do – both with research and with general presentations skills. I’m really glad we got that practice though. And while we weren’t presenting, we actually got a lot of work done since we didn’t really have anything else to do for once.

As usual, we went to get paninis for lunch and they were of course delicious. In ISE, the tables were turned on us and our professor had a proposal for us. We had covered most of the necessary material, so he had an offer that we go an extra hour on both Monday and Tuesday, take our quiz Wednesday, and then have no class on Thursday. This sounded great to all of us, so we were actually happy in that class for a change. At least for a couple minutes, anyways. The first half hour we spent going over the quiz from the previous week and then moved on to new material. Ironically, our professor got tired after a little over two hours and let us out at almost the normal time anyways.

We walked back to our apartments and got back to work on our projects and portfolios. We did some more practice for our group projects and then it was time to have a little fun. We got a call from my roommate Matt, who had arrived back in Rome the previous night. He was with a friend that was leaving the next day, which was Matt’s birthday, so we decided to celebrate on Monday night. Mike, Kara, Amanda, Becky, and I all went over to Trastevere to meet with Matt and his friend Tyler. We wandered around looking for a good restaurant for awhile, and stumbled into our writing teacher with her husband. It was fun getting to see her in a setting outside the classroom and we chatted for awhile. Then we continued our search and settled on a nice but inexpensive restaurant. I again got pizza margherita, but for my second plate I got some delicious lasagna. We had a good time and it was fun to celebrate yet another birthday in Rome. We called it a night pretty early since we had class the next day and parted ways with Matt and Tyler around 10. However, we still had the 40 minute walk back and we were exhausted by the time we got home. I crashed within minutes.