[Day 61] La prima notte in Italia

I'm never going to finish writing about Rome, there's so much! Today started out as a great day and it's gone downhill from there, so I've kind of been day dreaming about Rome all day. I think I forgot to mention in my first post about all of the graffiti on the buildings. Most of it was in the area that we stayed, near the train station. I guess that wasn't the nicest area or something but there was a lot of graffiti. There weren't a lot of cops/ambulances/fire trucks in comparison to what I've experienced in London. Oh and it gets dark early, just like in London. Since the time change, it's started to get dark at 4:45 in London and is pitch black by 5. It's so bizarre, right now it could be 5:30 or it could be 10, you'd never tell the difference. Rome is a little better, I think it started getting dark around 5:15. They also started eating dinner later than in London too, around 7, whereas I feel like people eat around 5:30 here. But maybe not, I don't know.

I finished the last post talking about the Trevi Fountain, which we went to around 5 when it started getting dark. The Pantheon was only a 5-10 minute walk from there, so we went there next. The Pantheon was kind of a disappointment because it seemed like they were doing construction on it to restore it. The Pantheon was finished in 126 under Emperor Hadrian. It was built as a temple to the Roman gods and is circular with a hole (oculus) in the middle of the dome that opens to the sky. Apparently it's the world's largest concrete unreinforced dome. Whatever that means. When we went inside it was basically an open floor with some chairs and a lot of sculptures around the outside of the open floor. Beginning in the 7th century it's been used as a Catholic church/place of worship. We didn't stay there for very long and ended up walking around the outside of it more. Erin and I had fun trying to translate the Latin again.

By this point we were all hungry. We started back toward our hostel and ended up looking in a lot of souvenir shops and stuff like that. They didn't have anything too special, mostly crappy pope memorabilia or little statues of the Colosseum. We stopped in some shop to look at their colorful pasta and made a new friend, Vanessa. Vanessa was the store manager and she was so sweet. She kept giving us food and drinks to try. The store had a lot of creme liqueurs and she poured us each a taste of all of the different flavors to try. Some of them were disgusting, but white chocolate and pistachio were pretty good. She also made us try Grappa, which is this Italian alcohol that was absolutely disgusting. She was so nice to us and told us all about the area. We bought some pop and absolut from her and went back to our hostel.

Our hostel had free pasta for dinner but we all ended up falling asleep on our beds. We woke up around 8, too late for the pasta, so we went out to dinner. I got alfredo with red sauce, kind of strange, but it turned out to be really good. I love Italian food. On our way back to the hostel, we were walking up a hill and saw a really pretty domed building in the distance. We all thought it was really cool looking and took pictures of it. It turned out to be St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. Really smart of us...

After dinner we went back to the hostel and showered to get ready to go out. The hostel bathrooms were pretty disgusting, but I guess that's what you get for $20 per night. We caught a bus (for only one euro!) and tried to go across town to Piazza Novana where we heard a lot of pubs and clubs were. It was raining and we couldn't see outside so we missed the stop. We got off of the bus as soon as we noticed and had to walk across a bridge to get back to the right area. The bridge was so beautiful, I wish I knew which one it was (Rome has a lot of bridges). We wandered around Piazza Novana for a while until we found a club called Anima that Erin and I had previously found on the internet. By that time it was 11:30 so we thought that there would be people there, even though it was a Tuesday night. We got inside and the set up was nice, they had a lot of couches and good music, but there were only about five other people there. We waited around for a while and decided to leave. The bartender stopped us and told us more people would come around 1am. We didn't believe her, but Vijay talked her into giving us drinks for the happy hour price of 4.50 euro, so we stayed.

As it turned out, around 1am a bunch of people showed up. We hung around each other for a while and eventually these Italian men started talking to us (or we started talking to them? I don't know). None of us know Italian, so Sammie, Vijay and I started speaking to them in Spanish. I guess it was more like Vijay spoke to them in actual Spanish and I struggled to speak coherent Spanish. I think Sammie was pretty ok with the Spanish though. They only spoke Italian but the languages are fairly similar so we were communicating somewhat. Poor Erin only knows Latin, so we had to keep telling them that she only spoke English. Most of them turned out to be pretty creepy so eventually we parted our ways and the four of us took a cab home. We got back later than we expected but we went to bed (after getting yelled at by the hostel people) and woke up the next morning around 9:30.

Erin and I got us breakfast from the kitchen (rolls) and really good red orange juice. The day before the hostel lady told us to go to the Vatican in the afternoon because it was too crowded in the morning, so the day before we decided we were going to go around noon. We all got dressed and caught the train to the stop for Vatican City.

That's a whole other story though and I need to do some homework because I'm going to Madrid on Thursday and I have two essays due next week. Today I got my third Poetry essay back and I got a 66 on it. The grading system is much different here, 70 is an A and 60 is a B. In any case I improved from my last two grades of 60 and 62 and my seminar leader said the class average was a 62 so I'm pretty happy with myself.

Vespas!

 

M