Well it has been some time since my last post. Many of you are no doubt wondering what it is like being in Rome during the election of the new Pope. Unfortunately, I was not able to see the smoke. My friend Luke, however, was able to look at both the black smoke on one day and then the white smoke on the other.

Here is his eye-witness account:

I was in St. Peter's Square, which was flipping awesome!

So when the black smoke goes up it looks grayish for a while… and then it turns black. So when the white smoke appeared everyone kind of waited for a while because we weren’t sure.  Then after a while people started clapping. Then when the bells started ringing it suddenly dawned on everyone that in a short while a whole bunch of people would be coming into the square. So everyone hurried over to get to the front. It was like a wave of people all moving at once. It was pretty awesome."

Originally everyone had their umbrellas up, until everyone started shouting "Umbrellas closed!"  I don’t remember the word for "closed" in Italian.

Hope this satisfies your blog hunger for now. Perhaps sometime I will get around to writing about my own experiences. (They are not as "flipping awesome").