Día Dos en Roma

(The Colosseum in Roma, Italia)

Friday, December 11th

We got very little sleep because it turns out that Scott is quite the snorer. The worst I have ever heard, actually. Even I was woken up by the racket he was making and I am a really heavy sleeper. Then Michelle and Scott woke up late and were still using the the shower (separately, of course) when Lizzie and I woke up. While Lizzie finally got her turn in the shower, I met one of the other guys in our room, an Italian who is in acting school in Rome. Then when Lizzie came out, the last person in our room woke up and started talking to us. He was Australian and asked us all sorts of questions about what time things opened in Rome. Then when he actually adjusted to the light, he apologized because he had thought that we were someone else. Lizzie and I then headed downstairs to the hostel's restaurant/bar for breakfast, where I had french toast with bananas and Lizzie, egg and bacon sandwiches. Then we headed for the metro, with me bouncing up and down, because today was Roman Ruins Day! I was quite excited, to say the least. On the schedule were the Colosseum, Palantine Hill, and the Roman Forum. Yay!

The metro was packed, as there are only two lines in Rome. We missed the first train because we weren't standing far enough down the track and the train completely passed us, (we wondered why all the Italians were standing on the other side of the station). We then pushed our way onto the second train, me only getting squished by the doors once.

We got to the Colosseum, but it took us quite a while to find the entrance and then the audio guide booth. We walked around for a good half an hour before we were settled. Even after we had the audio guides we were lost because the audio guide's map didn't seem to correspond to the actual building. We ended up going around the Colosseum backwards and spent more time mimicking the British voices on the audio guides and taking pictures than actually listening to the guides. Two cool things that I remember were that the senators had their own assigned seats with their names actually carved into them and that the floor of the Colosseum had trapdoors so that the gladiators could rise out of the ground. Those Romans were tricky. When we were done with our tour, we again got lost trying to find the exit, and ended up meeting two German boys, who we had passed several times in our search for the door. With our combined four brains, we eventually figured it out.

Next, Lizzie and I were off to Palantine Hill and the Roman Forum, both sites of more Roman ruins. The entrance to Palantine Hill was also tricky to find and we passed these two guys dressed up as gladiators (for touristy photo ops) twice before finding the gate. Here were some of the lines we heard:

"Hey Shakira!"

"Look at those legs!"

"Where are you from? Paradise?"

The last one is my favorite. So after stopping at a stand to buy a Kinder Bar, we got to Palantine Hill, where all the Roman emperors had their palaces. The buildings were roped off though, so you can't go pretend to be an empress, as was my original plan. After a lot of pictures, we walked over to the Roman Forum, which was downtown Rome back in the day. There were so many Roman ruins, I didn't even know were to point the camera first. There were columns, stairs, buildings, arches, and amphitheaters galore, not to mention the supposed tomb of Caesar.

After the Roman Forum, we wandered through Rome a bit more, passing lots of pretty buildings and museums and then found a restaurant for lunch. It had huge windows and high ceilings and as we sat down, two very cute Italian boys were seated next to us. They seemed to know the owner of the place - the owner kept coming over to talk to them (a sign of the mafia, I know). I spent a good five minutes trying to get Lizzie to look at them, but my subtle cues were too subtle. I had pasta carbonara for lunch and Lizzie had lasagna and once we finished, we decided to find dessert elsewhere, and so started the search for tartufo.

Tartufo is an Italian ice-cream dessert, which I had heard about before even coming to Rome. But apparently it is rather tricky to find and for nearly an hour, we searched for a restaurant with tartufo on the menu (once passing the cute Italian boys by chance on the street - Lizzie missed them again). We passed several tourist shops and another open-air market and decided we needed to ask someone about this ice-cream delicacy. We stopped at a shop and Lizzie asked the cashier in English where we could find tartufo. The man said you have to go outside of Rome to find a tartufo place as it isn't very popular in the city. We must have looked confused because he then pointed at his tattooed arm and said, "Tattoos?" We responded that we were looking for tartufo, the ice-cream dessert, not tatuaggio, the painful inking process, and he said he didn't know where to find that. So we stopped at another shop and Lizzie again asked where we could find tartufo. The man didn't understand what she was saying, and when she turned to me for help, I said, "Tartufo!" (in my best Italian accent, complete with Italian hand movements - about as stereotypical as you can get). The man's face lit up and he said, "Oh - tartufo!" although he still didn't know where we could find it. Those Italians - can't speak without their hands.

So we again walked past the Trevi Fountain and managed to find a restaurant with tartufo on the menu. By now, it was about 3 and in between meals, so we were the only ones at the restaurant, except for all the waiters and cooks, who were all smoking at the next table over (another sign of the mafia, yes, I know, but they had tartufo). We ordered (you can guess what) and the waiter brought Lizzie a chocolate tartufo and me and vanilla. They were excellent and worth the time we spent looking for them. We ended up chilling at this restaurant for quite a while, just eating and talking, and an hour and half later we decided we should go be productive. So we left (after paying with handfuls of coins, miscounting by 10 cents, of which the mafia waiter quickly reminded us) and headed in the direction of the Pantheon. We stopped to take pictures of some more Roman columns at my insistence, and ended up talking to this Italian man, who told us that he's lived in Rome his whole life and loves it. After chatting for a bit, we continued on our way, only to be stared at by a creepy, definitely in the mafia man ("Ciao," he said, while staring me down - I ran away) and stopped by another guy, Tac, who was advertising a different pub crawl from the one yesterday. After we listened to his speech, we finally made it to the Pantheon. By this time it was dark, so we didn't see the light shining through the ceiling, but it was pretty spiffy, anyway. We took pictures of all the cool things and then left, deciding to just wander and see what we could find.

The first thing we saw was a Danish store, which had all sorts of Danish Christmas stuff on display. Lizzie (who is a Danish citizen herself) explained some of the stuff to me before we continued on. In Denmark, families hold hands in a circle around the Christmas tree and sing carols. I can't picture my family doing that, so I guess it's a good thing we're not Danish. We then stopped at a high end modern interior design store, where we felt really out of place, and continued north until we hit the Tiber River. We stopped at various churches and passed a weird modern art display set up along the street. We then walked through one of the expensive shopping districts where we saw some street performers (I said: "They would be perfect if they were in Italy. Oh wait. . .") and a book signing for some Italian author neither of us had heard of (he must have been famous though, there was a line around the block).

We then decided that since we hadn't stopped eating all day, why stop now? We started looking for a restaurant for dinner, which was surprisingly hard to do, (I assumed every other building in Italy was a restaurant) and after about a half an hour, finally unearthed one. We were the only ones there, but we ordered calzones, which were gigantic and really good and then we chilled while the owner of the restaurant watched the Italian Who Wants to be a Millionaire on TV. We headed out after paying and suddenly found ourselves at the Trevi Fountain again. We stopped to get crepes (I'm not kidding when I say that we didn't stop eating all day) and I got a lemon and sugar crepe, which was delectable. Lizzie got a banana and Nutella crepe and was a mess before she was halfway through. Those crepes are very leaky and I would have had Nutella all over me if I had ordered Lizze's crepe (I had Nutella all over my arm anyway, which I still haven't figured out. . .)

As we eating by the fountain, four Italians guys appeared out of nowhere and struck up a conversation with the little English they knew, (one comment directed at Lizzie was, "Your eyes are very. . . oriental." They also couldn't keep the words bedroom and bathroom straight, neither of which were acceptable under the circumstances). Their names were Guiseppe, Carlo, Fedele, and Miguel and they were all quite friendly and, I think, a little drunk. Fedele managed to get my phone number out of my phone and soon after, Lizzie and I managed to make an escape to the nearby McDonalds, claiming the need for a bathroom, (even though they offered us the use of both the bedroom/bathroom at their houses).

After hiding in McDonalds for a few minutes and checking out the rooftop terrace (McDonalds in Europe are much nicer than in the US) we slowly snuck back to Trevi, hoping the Italians had gone, (they had interrupted our planned photo shoot). We didn't see them anywhere, so we headed down to the benches near the fountain, which I was creeped out about. Another story Tad had told us on our tour was about a man who had been pushed out the window above the fountain and died. He was the nephew of the Pope at the time, and although the fall had obviously been a murder, the Pope declared it a suicide (as the guy was a bit of a loose cannon, and the Church didn't want anything to do with him). Afterwards, people reported seeing the man's ghost in the window from which he fell and also around the fountain, so the government actually closed off the room and walled up the window, painting the wall to keep the symmetry above the fountain. We had positioned ourselves right in this general location.

We had a nice long photo shoot, in which I used up most of what was left on my memory card and then we walked back to the hostel. In this amount of time, I had already received one phone call and one text from Fedele and since then I have received about 10 more calls and another text which said, "You think me?" I have not answered any of these. Geez, those Italians are persistent.