Rome

Oh I'm so far behind... I'm so sorry. This wouldn't have been an issue if I had had regular (free) internet in Ireland. This is my post on Rome, written while in Cork. I'll do a post on Ireland shortly. Then I have to get into the meat of this blog, which is the semester in Leicester! Stay on your toes because between myself and Susan this blog will likely be busy over the next couple of days.

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Roma, Roma, Roma.

I am actually writing this from Cork, but I don’t have an internet connection, so I don’t know when I’ll get to post it. I’ll just focus on Rome for this post, and do something about Ireland later on. Sound good? Good.

Manlio, the Italian interpreter where I used to work, told me that I would love Rome because of the culture it’s so full of. Rome was certainly a cultural experience. Actually getting there was a bit of a nightmare. The ship docked in C... oh god I can’t spell that. We had to get to the train station, which was “only a couple of short blocks from the dock, well within walking distance.” Well yes, it was within walking distance, but it was an unpleasant drag with all our suitcases. I was responsible for my large (VERY large and VERY heavy) suitcase, along with my little suitcase and my laptop bag. My arm kept getting sore pulling the big one, and the bag kept swinging off its perch on the small suitcase. I did more or less okay unless there were stairs or ledges or sharp corners. We finally get to the train station and lo and behold we have to go down and then up a flight of stairs. No elevators. Oh. God. Luckily a strapping young man saw me struggling up the stairs after I had already done the down on my own, and he carried my big one up for me. I could have kissed the guy. We find our train and haul all our stuff onto it. We find places for all our things. By this point I’m basically close to tears. The lugging, and the pulling, and the sore, and the tired (we had had to wake up at something like 6am) and the hot. Oh the hot.

I think this is where I’ll mention that the entire time we were in Italy the temperature hovered around 36 degrees (well during the day – at night it went down to a refreshing 23).

We get into Termeni station in Rome and we know our hotel is close to the station but it appears we left the station by the wrong exit and we’re tired and positively HATING our luggage so we decide to take a taxi. I call it a golden chariot. The taxi driver totally ripped us off. Totally. Like a lot. He charged us 25 euros to go essentially around the corner. That’s like 40 bucks for less than ten minutes in a cab. Yeah. We get to the hotel, and by this point we’re pretty well miserable.
Mom talks me into taking a shower, vowing it will make me feel better. Indeed it did. What helped even more was the 1.5 litres of water that Chelsea and I downed shortly after that. I figure by that point I was severely dehydrated. Feeling so thirsty you want to cry is never a good feeling.

Sounding kind of bleak, huh? Well after all that the Rome portion turned around and was great (well with one exception I’ll get to in a bit). We did a double decker bus tour. I’ve done better bus tours, but it was all right. We went into the Coliseum and were so pleasantly surprised that we were only in line about 15 minutes. We had heard horror stories about 4 hour lineups to get in there. We weren’t even sure if we were going to try. Well we were glad we did. I did the audio self guided tour, narrating the interesting bits to mom and Chelsea. I was glad to see it.

For dinner that night I had lasagne. Whohoo! In Italy. How cool is that?

The next day we were going to the Vatican. We had booked a skip-the-line thinger for the morning, because again there were horror stories about the line up. Well I’m sure it would have gone just fine had we not gotten terribly lost and been late for our skip-the-line. The group had already gone in by the time we found the spot. We find a payphone and call the tour company asking what to do. We’re told we can join the next group (four and a half hours later) for a fee of 15 Euro a person. The money we had already paid, of course, was gone. We ask how much it is to get in without the line skipping, and we’re told that’s only 11 Euro. Well then. So we just went and stood in the. Guess what? We were only line about half an hour. We didn’t even need the damn skip the line in the first place. The money we paid for that was totally thrown away (not to mention we wasted like two hours finding the place and a pay phone etcetera). When we actually paid to go in, it turned out I got a student rate, and Chelsea got a child rate, so the entry was even cheaper.

Once we got in, it was amazing. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the Vatican. I expected way more Jesus, way less Zeus. There was room after room of some of the most amazing Greek and Roman artefacts I’ve ever seen. Whereas many places have things like bust of random senator dude, and big pot with things engraved, this place had amazingly preserved full sized statues of gods and mythical beings (along with a healthy helping of random senator dude). There was also an amazing collection of Egyptian stuff, including super awesome mummies and sarcophaguses and all kinds of things. We spent hours in there. Then we got to the religious bits. There was unfortunately a lot of unnecessary seeming stairs, and that kind of sucked. The Sistine chapel was so beautiful. That Michelangelo was quite the artist, huh? That bit with Adam and God nearly touching fingers is of course the most famous part, but it’s such a small part of the beautiful whole. The mood was kind of killed in there by the rather militant grouchy security guys. But all in all it was pretty cool.

After that we had lunch and then sought out the famous Trevi fountain. They say if you throw a coin over your left shoulder into the Trevi fountain you will one day return to Rome. Of course we had to do that. It was an amazing fountain. Stunning.

We did a bunch of shopping and went back to the hotel to drop stuff off. We went to a fancy Italian restaurant for dinner and there was the most amazing thunder and lightning storm. We were sitting outside under the canopy and we still got wet – but this was the time we were most physically comfortable the entire time we were in Rome. We soaked up the rain... literally. It totally cut the humidity. It dropped the temperature. It made the waiters really funny to watch. The owner guy came out and was all distressed, but then kind of threw up his hands as if to say “there’s really nothing I can do” and made the best of it. It was so nice. It was very loud, very bright. Mom said Zeus didn’t want us to leave Rome the next day.

Well, leave we did. We woke up at 5am and made our way to the airport to fly to London. We met up with Papa at his sister’s house. The next morning I flew to Ireland. Four days in Dublin and two days in Cork later, here I am writing about Rome in a Cork B & B. Tomorrow I go to Belfast. But I’m gonna update y’all on all this later.

Cheers!