Rome Sweet Rome

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Objectively, I live a charmed life. Subjectively, I live a charmed life. I know this. I am aware of how privileged I am to live my life and I am so grateful to have the opportunities I do. I like to imagine that I’m more humble about it than not. Having said this, this post is pure travel brag and I would apologise, but I’m not all that sorry, if I’m being honest.



Over the weekend, I went to Rome. No big deal. Just a weekend jaunt. As you do.



EXCEPT NOT REALLY BECAUSE WHO REALLY LIVES THAT LIFE OH RIGHT, I DO AND OH MY GOODNESS THE FACT THAT THAT WAS A FEASIBLE THING FOR ME TO DO JUST BLOWS MY MIND SO HARD I MUST HAVE BEEN A SAINT IN A PAST LIFE.



Anyway.



Mom and Dad planned a trip for my Nana and Papa to go to Rome for like, a week. When they were planning it, there was some talk of me going to join them for the weekend but I figured it was more of a thought that wouldn’t really ever be a thing. Except that it was. My parents, in their infinite wisdom, bought me a ticket from Edinburgh to Rome. They also kept it a secret from my grandparents, so I surprised them at their hotel. But I’m getting ahead of myself.



My flight was at 6.40 in the freaking morning. Many things about me have changed over the years, but my hatred for early starts remains the same. So I was up and at the airport for 4AM. That is FOUR EH EM, for those just skimming this. As in four hours past midnight. At that time, I was AT the airport. I was dressed in normal clothes and showered and everything. Which means I was up at 3. AM. There was no sun.



I think I’ve painted you a picture of how it felt to be up. It would have been terrible if I wasn’t so pumped to go to ROME.



[Aside: I know some of you also followed my Dad’s blog from when we were travelling the world in 2008. If you were, you’ll already know that I’ve been to Rome once before. If you know this, you might be asking yourself why this trip is such a big deal when I’m going to see things I’ve already seen before. To be frank, that trip was good and all, but looking at the monuments of Rome with no sense of historical context or resonance isn’t really looking at them at all.]



When I got to the airport bright and early, the check in desk wasn’t even open yet. That’s how early I was. So I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Eventually, I was allowed to check my bag and head through security. I must have gone through some sort of portal or something because I was through security in less than ten minutes. Either that or I’m just getting really good at travelling.



Anyway, the hasty security meant that my gate wouldn’t be announced for another hour, which meant that I had the pleasure of wandering around a nearly deserted airport. I kind of felt like I was haunting the place. It was both entertaining and unnerving.



I made it on to my flight as a ‘priority boarder’, I had seat 1A. It’s the closest to first class I am ever likely to get in this life. I was sat next to this couple who did not care for my presence in the least. They bought chicken nuggets from the airline, which seems like a sketchy move to me, but they enjoyed themselves.



I tried to sleep as much as I could, but the flight isn’t very long so I didn’t manage much.



I collected my luggage just fine and I made my way to the bus stops as my father had also procured a bus ticket for me to the main bus terminal in Rome. From there, I was to hail a proper white cab and take that to the hotel. Which is all well and good until you remember that on my long list of weird social anxieties, hailing cabs is in the top three. Just below talking to people who obviously know more about things I should know about than I do and just above making personal phone calls to people I don’t know well. And they expected me to do it in Italian.

I found the bus with limited wandering and unlimited wondering at how lovely the weather was (hush, I think I’m funny. Don’t ruin it for me). The bus ride was uneventful and I made it to the terminal without incident. Then my true test began. I knew I could not trust myself to actually successfully hail a cab without ending up mugged and possibly mortally wounded, so I attempt to find some sort of taxi round or other such place where the cars would congregate.



I was tremendously relieved to find a line of people waiting their turn for a taxi; if there’s one skill that has been truly honed by my time with the British, it is my ability to queue.



With the dread of the taxi journey no longer weighing me down , I made my way to the hotel without incident. I met up with Dad, who took me to their room to drop my stuff off. Then I went to knock on my grandparents’ door. And it was as close to perfect as I could have hoped for.



Papa opened the door and it took him a moment to register that it was someone he knew at the door. Then, in perfect Papa fashion, he asked me ‘do your parents know you’re here?’, which is the greatest question ever and I love that he thought I would have the cajones to show up in ITALY without consulting my parents first. There may be some debate as to whether I was imagining it, but I’m pretty sure he got a little teary. Nana was equally delightful to see and she and I both got a little moist in the eyes.



We soon left the hotel to embark on a tour of the Coliseum and Roman Forum, which was as interesting, if not more so, as the first time I was there. We got wheelchairs for Nana and Papa but I’m pretty sure I ended up using Papa’s more than he did as I didn’t get a nap at all before leaving and couldn’t really stay awake.



We also saw some crypts where early Christians buried their dead. It was very interesting to see the murals and the symbolism they used to indicate they were Christians without outright saying it, as Christians were persecuted at the time.



We had a nice dinner and I finally got a good night’s sleep. And then some. I ended up sleeping for roughly 13 hours. The second day, we did some exploring without a guide and looked at what the Italians reputedly called the ‘lasagne church’, although we had difficulty finding anyone who actually called it that in real life. We also saw the Capuchin Crypts, which is where the Capuchin monks laid their dead to rest in art. The bones were very nicely arranged to form different scenes and symbols of Christianity. I’d say it’s similar to parts of the catacombs of Paris but the catacombs were much, much later.



That evening, the parents and I wandered around near our hotel. We walked around the busy streets and the Spanish Steps (because those were super conveniently located literally five feet away from the entrance of our hotel). We had gelato, which was lovely, and I thought I ordered hot chocolate but it turned out to be a mug of scaldingly hot chocolate sauce. I made a valiant effort to drink it but there are limits, even for me.



The next day, we did some shopping and walked around the Borghese Gardens, within which is the art gallery housing a Bernini statue that I’m a little bit obsessed with. Which is why we managed to show up on the one day a week the gallery isn’t open. But that’s okay, because we ended up at a zoo instead. We saw lots and lots of little monkeys. Mom really enjoyed the giraffes. There was an exhibit about ‘alien fish’ that we attempted to see, but it was also closed because we were having too much fun and needed a reality check.



We got a little lost on the way back but we passed a nice restaurant during our wander and had a lovely lunch before sticking me in a cab back to the airport.



I do not like Italian cabs. My cab driver was texting and driving on the highway at the same time, which was only slightly less terrifying than when he was texting and driving in the city centre. Plus he was slow, and the time I had to get to the airport was steadily shrinking.



I made it to the airport by the skin of my teeth and the grace of the gods, and went to check my bag. There was one woman doing check-in for Ryanair and she promptly went on break when she finished checking in the bags of the people directly in front of me in the queue because that’s the type of thing that would happen to me.



Some minutes later, a man comes and takes over and checks my bag. However, he informed me that my half full bag was over weight and I had to sort that out. So I grabbed a few books and shoved them into my already-full-of-books carry on and lugged that around.



The security queue was excruciatingly long. I kept checking my boarding pass and phone, while I could do nought but watch as the minutes crept closing to the ‘gate closing’ time listed on my pass. With ten minutes to spare, I rushed to the gate to discover that the ‘closing time’ was actually when the gate opened and I was ten minutes early. Because that’s also the type of thing that would happen to me.



On a different note, the couple I sat next to on the trip there was also on the plane on the way back. It was slightly awkward for me, as I was wearing the same outfit they had last seen me wearing because I’m gross and didn’t want to wear some warm weather clothing in Scotland, oddly enough.



Landing and getting through customs was as exhausting as it always is; I ended up in the wrong line, having filled out the wrong landing card and needed to go to the back of the long line and start all over again.



But on the bright side, getting my bag from baggage claim was easy. I went to go hail a cab but oddly found none at the queue. While I waited for one to show up, I chatted to the taxi attendant who, big shocker, is in a rock band. It’s getting kind of eerie to be honest.





I returned home and neither of my flatmates remembered that I had gone. Essays will do that to you.

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