Withdrawal, ruins and stepping into a man's mouth
Trip Start
Sep 18, 2010
1
17
86
Trip End
Jul 27, 2011
Where I stayed
Controra Hostel Rome
Rome, Lazio, Italy
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Rome, despite its stunning beauty does not have the same effect on me other cities had. I suspect it has to do with a momentary sight seeing overload. I am on week #6 and while still excited about it all, the impact the new, beautiful and foreign has on my brain and emotions has worn off somewhat. Germany will be a good break to get ready for different worlds. Middle East and South East Asia should put the wow back in my tummy just for being different I am sure.
Food! Now, that 'wow' still has not waned. I feel sorry for some people (of a certain nationality that shall not be mentioned) I overheard saying that they "just want some 'normal' food" in Spain. To me, the culinary experience and adventure is as much if not more part of taking in a culture. Between Italian and Spanish food I'd be torn to pick a winner. If I died with a Spanish cafe con leche and Italian sandwich, pasta or pizza in my tummy, life was great :)
Back to being in Rome....Arriving at the one clean hostel in this city (I swear, go check all the reviews!), I am excited to find out just how new it is. It only opened 8 days ago, so brand spanking new my duvet cover still smells of factory and so far really well maintained and managed. One of my dorm mates is from Jordan and lives in Freiburg / Germany. I am eager to talk to him, Ahmed, seeing as Jordan is my #2 on my top 3 places to see. #3 I checked off in June with the Peru trip. #1 is coming up around Dec/Jan/Feb with Cambodia. Looks like I need a new list soon :)
I spend the 1st day walking around the city with Ahmed, who is the sweetest and leaves me a CD of pictures from Petra the next morning. In the evening I connect with some folks from Couchsurfing.org. If you go to Rome, visit Christian from www.burroesugo.com and say hello from me. My night out leaves me with some new international friends, a great time had, a serious hang-over, a list of foods to eat in Turkey and a limoncello recipe:
- Put the peel of 8 lemons (minus the white, only the yellow skin) in one litre of 90% alcohol.
- Leave for 4 days.
- Per litre of alcohol, boil 2 litres of water with 1kg white sugar to make molasses.
- Mix the sugar water with the lemon alcohol.
- Filter the skin out of the liquid.
E voila, you have 3 litres of homemade limoncello!
Day 2 is a blur of more walking and checking off sights followed by an early retreat and Moroccan nuts and dates for dinner in my bunk.
On day 3 the city is packed to the brim with catholic kids and national tourists everywhere due to a long weekend. I am fascinated by the teachers' kids-and-rowdy-teenagers-crowd-control systems of various kinds. I decline the invitation of another couchsurfer to join a nearby nudist party and instead head out to Burro e Sugo again for a late dinner. During a private tour of the neighbourhood EUR (http://www.italyheaven.co.uk/rome/areas/eur.html) by night I put my foot in a creepy man's mouth (see photos). Christian has to catch an early morning flight to Paris, so staying up rather than sleeping a couple of hours seems the sensible thing to do for him. Resulting in another late night for me. But I seem to find my groove alternating one night of going out and one early night.
On day 4 I refuse to line up for the Vatican and am starting to question my being cheap and not having done any official tours or paid any covers to enter any sights. I spend more time eating delicious Italian carbs of various kinds and seeing the city from the outside. In the evening, looking at facebook, I am sad to have missed Halloween at home in Canada. Two more sleeps and then it is off to the motherland for a few days.
Day 5, my last day in the eternal city. I am determined to splurge on coverage fees to learn about what it is I am looking at today. So I head to the Vatican. If nothing else, I want to see the Sistine Chapel, for Dan Brown's sake if you can stand me being so lame. The sky is grey and it is raining. I have my fold-in-itself raincoat, so I just shake my head at the umbrella sellers. Can't waste a hand on holding an umbrella when there are pictures to be taken. I line up at the entrance to the vatican city after all. It is starting to pour pretty bad by now. I see the pope. I see the tombs of previous popes. I marvel at St. Peter's basilica. I walk to the Vatican Museum to see the Sistine Chapel. It is closed today :( By now, I am soaked to the bones, since my proud rain jacket is just that and not a coat. My jeans are sticking to me wet and cold, my sneakers are squeaking with every step. I decide to take the metro back to save on time spent being wet. One hot shower, echinacea and a nap later and I am ready for my last evening. On my Tripadvisor app I find a cheap and typical restaurant I want to try. In my dorm I find Kio from Japan who wants to join. And in the staircase we find Milan from Slovenia, who also tags along. What an odd trio we are. Kio is this adorable, innocent student from Tokio (no connection to his name) who lives in Alabama and currently in Madrid. He came to Rome standing for 7 hours in a night train. As a result he slept away all afternoon of his one day in Rome. The two of us are aligned on the importance of food and Italian culinary pleasures. Milan is a decidedly crazy guy around my age, who drives a taxi in Lujbljana and doesn't think of it as working. Very inspiring, his attitude to work. Combined with a rather illegal definition of crazyness that he is proud of and Kio and I are amused and shocked by. I learn how to use some new features in my camera from Milan. We go to the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain around midnight. Because of the bad weather earlier in the day, there is noone there. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to see these two major sights with barely anyone else there. Try find a picture of them that has no people on it!
If you made it this far in this colossally (pun intended) long entry, I'd like to close with an excerpt from a book I am currently reading. Indigo by Graham Joyce happens to be partially set in Rome. Great read!
"You didn't look at Rome, you slipped into it and it parted around you like warm water. History lay everywhere, like mineral mud on a riverbed or glistening as it broke the surface of the water. Antiquity waved vast anemone clusters and drew your attention to submerged treasure, or to a sunken rock that on closer inspection proved to be an artifact. There was no more pristine, native rock. Everything had been mined, carved, sculped, worked, improved, discarded, reworked into a lustrous flow. In Rome you needed a set of gills to move through history, and if you tried to come up for air you found that even the sky was seeded with the dust of ancient brick. It was cloying and sweet and pearly with reference. Every evening the city crumbled under the weight of its own memory; each morning it was rebuilt with the fresh hot brick of making the past anew. Too much history, a narcotic pellet. A pearl-gray gas."
Comments
oh man. I miss Rome. Vatican's worth it! I guess you didn't check out all the museums there. Sistine chapel's a bit over-rated. You can't see crap with those high ceilings and in dim light. Did you try pizza? LOL
Glad to hear your thoughts on Sistine chapel. It was the one thing I thought I should have seen. Sure, I had pizza. And more than my share of other tasty carbs :)
Agreed - the Sistine is very crowded with lots of people oogling the ceiling. The rest of the museum is pretty fly though: particularly the ancient and contemporary art. I was there on Nov 12 for most of the afternoon and once we got out of the Sistine mania, it was a very pleasant visit.
...adding Rome to the 'must-go-back' list :)