When in Rome...

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Well I would do as the Roman’s do but since I never met any all I can assume they do is eat gelato. Lots and lots of gelato. Gelato.

Moving right along - Once again we arrived in a city with no idea where our hostel was so I pulled out some more Italian at the tourist office which did the trick. The train station in Rome is not recommended as a place to hang out as some people seem to have treated it as a public toilet (this is actually recurring across a good deal of Europe, I blame the fact that it is not illegal to drink alcohol in the streets)

Our hostel was not ideal as we were in an 8-bed dorm with two alcoholics from America who slept during the day and only got up to drink at night - blood? You might ask, no, just beer. There was also a rather pedantic Australian whose only conversation topic was the noise - when we all arrived at the hostel around 2pm these people were asleep, the Aussie girl woke up and greeted us with “Whoever sleeps on the top of that bunk better not move because its squeaky.” She then warned that we would get no sleep at night, which was a gross over reaction, as I did not wake up once.

Feeling a little bit thrifty at this stage we opted for the supermarket to provide us with dinner, which we ate back at the hostel kitchen. We then took a late night walk around the area we were staying, which had many grand buildings and the usual crazy traffic.

The weather was incredibly hot by this stage, but somehow we managed to walk ourselves to the coliseum, this ancient sporting arena looks fantastic, (even if we did only see it from the outside) but it a shame that your experience of it is disturbed by many tour guide promoters in loud shirts, asking you if you speak English so they can show you around for the day, “why would I want to spend my day with you?” one might think whilst politely declining. We had considered pretending that we didn’t speak English but this could have got us into further trouble.

Adjacent to the coliseum are a series of ruins from the old roman city. Here amongst all the tourists is where a young couple had decided to get married and have their wedding photographs taken (if only they could have had the place to themselves) and we moseyed on through what used to be temples and town halls. It is really quite brilliant to be able to get so close to the ruins - unlike Stonehenge.

Of course the sight seeing would be cut short by the fact that the World Cup was on, and this particular day was an English match. Finding a bar would prove to be difficult (and continued to be for whatever reason) but when we did it was Irish, typically, and Brooke and I were left to sit outside whilst Tan joined his sweaty male counterparts in ceremoniously cheering and booing etc. At half time an English expat called us Australian, which didn’t go down brilliantly, and then continued on a path of foot in mouth type jokes for the remainder of the half hour before returning to the sweating and cheering. We returned to this bar later that night when it was a good deal emptier only to find that the drinks price had been raised by half. Hmm.

Now after we had watched the match and before we returned to the bar, we sat in the hostel common area watching a different football match, absolutely exhausted from the days walking. As we were staring up, tired and dazed, the Americans we had met in Florence arrived, bizarrely one of them suspected we were stoned (we were not) and we asked if they wanted to do something tonight, they declined mentioning something of a night walk. A little awkward, yes. We had found out the day before though that one of their group, Jamila, had her stuff stolen in similar circumstances to Tan. However instead of going out drinking with a German philosophy student as Tan had, Jamila's friends had thought it best that she go to bed.

The next day we were to meet up with Jamila again as her friends had gone to Naples for the day, which she had declined to do on the account of not wanting to travel anywhere with no passport. Jamila is a very sweet girl who’s a lot of fun and one of our favourite people that we met in Europe. We all three invited us to spend the day with us and she did. We took a bus slightly out of town and visited the catacombs, which we had to wait for a while to do as they were closed for siesta when we got there. When you do go down the temperature drops to a steady 15 degrees Celsius with about 80% humidity. The catacombs stretch underground for many kilometres and are about 3 or 4 stories underground, the soil is of a type that previously being soft, hardens upon contact with oxygen, which allows for levels to be built and stay intact, 500 000 bodies are buried in the catacombs. When you go down there many of the crypts are empty, Italian citizens go down to the catacombs for the celebration of the Eucharist. There were a few special chambers for what had been remains of former popes (their remains have since been moved to the Vatican city) and a particular crypt of note was that of a female saint whose grave was marked with a statue of her death pose. If you were to be separated from the group it would prove to be very easy to get lost in the labyrinth of crypts which I would definitely not like as I found it kind of creepy to be trapped underground with the remains of the dead. The last area we visited in the catacombs was a small chapel - the chapel next to it was filled with pilgrimage tourists having a religious service and we were concerned that this was also going to happen to us (for some reason we seem to find ourselves involved in many an accidental mass) Jamila was particularly concerned being Muslim. This however did not happen. The tour guide finished the tour by strangely saying, “please learn my language” - I’m trying, I thought.

We went back into the city with the purposes of seeking out the store that was meant to have the best gelato in the city. Instead we walked around for ages trying to find any type of food that was reasonably priced. We ended up in a wine bar near the Spanish steps where we had fantastic pasta and even better tiramisu whilst formulating a plan to attend that nights pub crawl, the hostel ran them every night.

Having got dressed up we waited in the Hostel foyer with the rest of the pub crawlers and were handed over to an American named Tad, our pub crawl tour guide who warned us against gypsies and then proceeded to hit on a blonde girl whilst his Aussie mate took on her friend. It turns out we couldn’t find any of the bars in Rome because they were all down the backstreets. The first bar was “open” for an hour, and the vodka was free poured with little consideration to suggested mls per glass, not the practise of responsible bartenders. As it turns out one of the hostel workers was a kiwi and knew our friend Anns. We chatted to an Indian woman who worked in the web department of the BBC.

The next bar saw the tour guide and his mate get bored by their previous girls. Tad started chatting with Jamila about college football in Texas. The Australian went toe to toe with Brooke in a Beatrice n’ Benedict fashion and found her hatred of his hometown charming. I talked to a Canadian girl in the bathroom and drank Bacardi.

In the third bar we met some girls from Chicago who would later be known to hug us whilst yelling, “we love the kiwis”. We also met a guy who was on his vacation from the war in Iraq. Brooke was surrounded by 5 men. Jamila was too.

The last bar was a club and on our way there we discussed Shaun of the Dead and the tourist attractions of Rome with Tad (during the day he does the Romeing tours) there was a lot of dancing, a republican American who was very big on the second amendment, and a DJ who didn’t know who The Streets were. The dancing was crazy, Jamila went home with Tad and we got lost with Tad not there and had to catch a taxi with the Australian (it turns out he lives in America where he manages to both study AND have an apartment in Newport Beach OC) and the gun totter.

As we were headed for the Cinque Terre the next morning we had to get up very early and we were feeling quite sorry for ourselves. Not having reservations for the train either, we were relegated to the hallway seats for 4 hours.

You know a place is going to be amazing when the train comes out of a tunnel into a railway station surrounded by sparkling bright blue water. The Cinque Terre, 5 cliff side towns on the west coast of Italy are protected by UNESCO and are one of the best places to visit in the world. The little town we stayed in was called Riomaggiore and was very quaint. We stayed in a small apartment near a great little restaurant that played the football. Getting over our hangovers, having been cured by the sheer beauty of the place, we visited the beach which is a series of flat rocks as opposed to sand, and has lagoon like turquoise water. Pizza comes by the slice on focaccia bread and there are actually Italian people. During our time there we got in some snorkelling, explored the walk between 3 of the towns and relaxed in the sun. As this was a period for chilling out we didn’t do that much activity wise, so there isn’t a lot to report, I will just ask you to look at the pictures and urge you to go yourself! This place is fantastic, I didn’t want to leave and I will definitely go back there.

And if any of you want to go - can I come too?

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Comments

[Paul rothwell]

Hi abbie this is great. i can't believe i forgot to read it for three months. I love you