Our last entry from Rome :(
Trip Start
Jul 08, 2010
1
14
Trip End
Jul 29, 2010
Rome, Lazio, Italy
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Anyway, yesterday we went and finished up what was left of the historic district areas on the way there the graffiti on the train (almost all of the metro trains are covered in it) had a ninja turtle, which I found funny (on the way home there was a butchered star wars quote saying something like "try it not it is to be done or not, there is no try" which made me laugh. Aside from a lot of churches we have seen it all officially now. We were pretty churched out and just didn't feel like going into anymore. So we only went into a couple here and there when we just happened to walk by. The one in the historic district we went in was a basilica of some kind. There was a kid being very noisy with a plastic cup the entire time and we tried to distance ourselves so nobody thought we were with that family. The mom of the kid would occasionally tell him to stop, which would give a reprieve for a few moments, then he would start up again. The funny thing about this is that Kat and I had just been talking about how kids like to do little annoying repetitive motions and when the parents ask them why they keep doing it they don't know exactly how to explain why it gave them pleasure, so they simply say "i dunno.' Then, we get to view this behavior very shortly after. They were doing some touch ups on a painting in the basilica, which was kinda nifty. One cool thing was that an older entrance to the place had clearly been more ancient and was sealed off, looked sort of like the inside of the pantheon from that angle.
After walking around for a bit we went to the Baths of Caracalla. Which was still reasonably in tact. It was nice, cause it had sort of been transformed into a park area so we got to sit and eat and enjoy ourselves around the area under the trees there. While we were there we suddenly noticed we had been sitting next to two tied up hawks (or some kind of bird of prey, I guess hawk) the whole time. While Kat was getting a video of the hawks sitting there A MAN JUST WALKED UP AND PET THEM! This prompted Kat to want to pet them too, I begged her not to do it and so she was eventually talked away from the action. I just didn't want her to get hurt, you need protective gloves to handle birds like that, and I know they wouldn't be flying on her or anything it still made me uneasy. Being so far from home you need to be careful about what kinds of risks you take. I don't think we wanted to deal with any types of lacerations. It would have been nice if she was able to though, I could tell she really wanted to. The baths themselves were really cool, and still pretty impressive in their more dilapidated state. We figured out how to do panoramic photos pretty effectively the day before, and you can see we had a couple from the inside St. Peter's Basilica. So we tried it again, I am pretty pleased with the result. I think it really got how big it is, which is something we were struggling to capture in most of the places we've been on the trip.
On our last full day here we decided to go back to Navona because that was our favorite area, and because we wanted to get ourselves a little something to remember the place by. We found a really nice painting being sold right in the center of the Piazza there depicting the fountains of Navona. It was very beautiful, and we'll gladly put it next to our painting from Tokyo last year when we finally have a place together. The man selling it was very nice, and gave us a 20 euro discount on the thing. Also being very gentle with packaging it. We spent most of the rest of the day just window shopping, we used a lot of our spare coinage on getting gelato one more time, and we were going to eat at a pizzaria that we had eaten at before but they were closed at 3pm for some reason. So, we just strolled around the area for a good while. We went into one more museum before we left, maybe when Kat wakes up she'll tell me what it was called. It was a nice tiny museum that only cost 3 euro a person. So, that's really good. We've done a very good job of saving this whole time, I'm pretty proud of us for it. The kitchenette has been a godsend, we've saved so much money by making our breakfast and dinner everyday. Although the clean up is something I would have liked to avoid. We brought a couple dish rags with us before we got here, I think we're just gonna throw them away. I tried my best to not make them disgusting, I failed in that task.
All together it was a wonderful trip. If the heat wave hadn't been there early in the trip it would have been even better, but it was still worth every penny and all the work we put in to make this happen. Of course it's always nice to just be able to be together for as long as this with only the other to count on. I still can't believe how we can be with each other for such long periods with almost no parting save for when one of us showers and still never get sick of one another, I'm glad we got to see all of these amazing things, there really was something to see on nearly every street corner. While I think we pretty much ran out of things to do in the city by now it's still impressive that one little city has so much to keep us occupied every single day for a whole 3 weeks. With only a metro pass to really get around with. We did miss just a couple things, we were gonna see a few catacombs and there was a region that was primarily just a bunch of churches. Between being churched out and the catacombs being sort of difficult to get to, we just decided to enjoy our last couple days here and take it super easy. Those are always some of the best days, where you can just sit on a cafe corner and watch the people go by and talk about whatever. We'll miss our little home here, but we plan on making lots of little homes wherever we go. All good things must pass however, and it's back to the real world tomorrow.
Grazie all of you for reading our blog! Until next time. Ciao Ciao!
