So, on Saturday I met up with Kristin, who is a fellow student in Rome this semester, from CUA in Washington DC. (How did we meet? You've got to love the small world blogging creates, she's a friend of Lauren, who is a friend of Zadok the Roman, who is a friend of me... thus we find ourselves wandering across Rome together!)

We hoped to go to St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, so we set out to walk there on true pilgrimage, across the northern half of the city (we both live by Vila Borghese's north side) ... along the way, we stumbled across many random things (including a street that seems to have randomly changed its name solely in order to make us doubt our map reading techniques). One very cool thing we found were these posters of Fr. Andrea, the missionary priest from the Rome diocese who was murdered (martyred really) in Turkey last week. I remember we we first came to Rome in August that there were a lot of similar posters up all over thanking Papa Giovanni Paolo II for his life as well - the Romans do know how to recognize holiness with honor, down to the street advertising, even if the culture is continuing a sad downward trend towards secularism (Pray for Italy! For example, even though the people we've talked to say that abortion is "hard to get - rare", I just saw statistics in the news here that 25% of pregnancies in Italy end in abortion - compared to 27% in the USA... not encouraging news!)