Travelogue: Italy!

On Friday May 20th we left Houston at 4 pm on an Air France flight that went wonderfully! Shortly after we took off they served us a dinner that was shockingly good for airline food, Ben got chicken and I got pasta, and we both had a little cold niçoise rice salad, roll with butter, dishes of perfectly ripe grapes, block of cheese, mineral water, and raspberry cake for dessert. We didn't get wine (which was included) on the way out, but we did on the way back, and I have never really believed in matching food to wine until then, but man it made such a difference! We had a little quiche type thing for an appetizer then, and I had a bite and it was ok, then I had a sip or two of wine and took another bite and the flavor just exploded, it was so delicious I couldn't believe it! So I definitely recommend Air France and their wine.

We watched Season of the Witch on the way there, with Nicolas Cage (I know, I know) and Ron Perlman (Eee! I really think he's actually a Neandertal, he's so awesome!) and it was really good too! We enjoyed. I knit a bit and then we tried (and pretty much failed) to sleep for a few hours.

As we came over England the sun was coming up, so the flight attendants raised up the windows and served breakfast, which was a good way to reset your internal clock.

We landed in Paris and we saw French bunnies playing in the fields! They were so cute!

But the rest of our time in Paris kind of sucked. The flights had been chosen by Ben's parent's travel agent, and we had about an hour and half between them. But it took us 45 minutes to get off the damned plane and into the terminal, after we took the world's longest and most boring tram ride around the entire airport. After that we ran into the customs line, which we skipped after we begged an attendant to let us jump the line since our flight was boarding, then ran into the security line, which we also jumped for the same reason. Then we ran through the rest of the Paris airport and were the last people to board the plane to Rome, about 2 minutes before they shut the doors. So not that much fun.

The flight to Rome was thankfully short and I blearily tried to sleep through it but with no success. Also they didn't feed us more than a cookie or two, disappointing.

We landed in Rome with no issues, and while I thought I saw Italian sheep or possibly Italian cows on the way in, upon further investigation they proved to be Italian haybales. Bu tit was still exciting.

We had a shuttle to our hotel, so we waited for that while drinking delicious apricot juice, which I ordered after confusing the Italian counterperson a bit, though probably about the same amount as I confuse American counterpeople.

Our hotel in Rome was kind of, frankly, sucky. I wouldn't have picked it. The elevator was extremely tiny and scary, the bed was only slightly softer than the floor, and there was no way to turn on the air conditioning, and by this point we wanted it on. We live in Texas, where it is on inside every building pretty much year round, and it was hot there. We asked the desk people about how to turn it on and they said, Oh, it's controlled by us, but we don't turn it on until June. So that wasn't much fun.

We spent the rest of Saturday trying to sleep and not melt until dinnertime. We'd met up with his parents, who had been traveling around the Mediterranean for 2 week already and had gotten into Rome the day before, and went to a close by place. I had been studying Italian, especially the words for food, and "alici" was not the word for anchovies in my book, so I ordered a panzarotti with them to see what they were. Yeah, they were anchovies, bleh. But you know, I was learning. I also had an appetizer of awesome prosciutto with mozzarella, so it wasn't all smelly fish, at least!

And then we got delicious gelato on the way back, yumm.

Our next day was Rome! His parents asked me what I wanted to see, but there was no question!

The Colosseum of course! It blew my mind to be standing next to this structure that has been standing there for thousands of years, that so many people visited, that so many people fought inside, died inside, cheered inside, yelled inside. Ancient Rome has always fascinated me, they had such advanced engineering skills and citizens had so many rights and comforts that we think are so modern, but at the same time they could be so savage, owning slaves, women had so many rights and still couldn't vote, and reveling in the bloodshed here.

And I can just go there and walk where they did!

Craziness. It was awesome though.

Us in front of the Colosseum!

And the Arch of Constantine.

Our ticket to see the Colosseum also included the location of the Roman Forum and a lot of different temples, the

This is us walking, as it turns out, entirely the wrong direction to get to the forum and those temples.

But it was pretty! We wandered around for probably an hour and half in the bright sunlight, though luckily I had slathered us both in sunscreen before we left that day. Sunscreen is definitely important, we saw some people with terrible sunburns and what I'm pretty sure was sun poisoning later in the trip, but all we got was a slight burn on the front of Ben's neck where I forgot to put some the first day.

We passed the 12 stations of Christ, which is apparently a thing, and lots of honeysuckle or possibly jasmine, it smelled awesome and was everywhere, before realizing we were not at all where we wanted to be, i.e. somewhere where we knew where we were. Indeed.

So, wandered some more and eventually found


A field of rubble!

It was the forum, it's just declined a bit since it was built 2700 years ago.

We were also near the Temple of Castor and Pollux, which I was interested in because I'm a Gemini, so I took lots of pictures of it and played with my camera's zoom, which is rather awesome.



Zoomed out again!

Overlooking the temples, now rubble.

Poppies grew everywhere in Italy.


By then we were getting hungry and quite hot, so we decided to walk some more! Of course. We passed a cat sanctuary in the middle of a city block!


The kitties had free rein to wander among these ruins. They seemed quite sweet.

We found the Piazza Navona,

which is known for the Fountain of the Four Rivers

And also for having lots of restaurants. We were hungry but mostly hot, and here we had our first experience with water in Italy. The tap water in Rome was awesome, tasted great and ice cold, they still use some parts of the original aqueducts to bring in spring water. But you can't get it in restaurants, or it's very rare, at least. When you order water they bring you a bottle of it, a liter bottle, and pour you about 2 fingers width in a little glass. You can pour more, but still, not exactly what we're used to. Also, no ice. I think we saw ice twice while we were there, and both times in an iced tea, which we also saw about twice (it's my drink of choice, I'm not a soda person.) We asked for ice, but the waiter told us the water was cold, it didn't need it. Well, the water was "cool", it had been in the shade, but not, by any means, cold. To us hot and thirsty tourists, anyway.

I had prosciutto and melon, yum, then gnocchi for lunch. I don't remember what everyone else had.

After lunch it was time for, yes, more walking! We walked to a bridge next to the Castel Sant'Angelo, which was apparently the pope's panic building. When you're the pope you get a whole building, not just a room. We walked down and I got to touch the Tiber!

I touched it! I did not fall in, but I slipped a bit and got some Tiber mud on my jeans, but it came off eventually. Upon reflection I think I used the bidet cloths to clean it off in the hotel later, oops.

It was quite nice next to the river though, nice to be out of the crowds for a bit.

This is the Castel Sant'Angelo, though it looks like a barge to me.


It may not be a surprise to hear the pope's panic house is not that far from the Vatican, which was our next stop. Unfortunately the only day we had in Rome was a Sunday, and so the museum, and thus the Sistine Chapel, were closed. But we could still go into St. Peter's Basilica.

Walking there we passed an aqueduct!

You might be able to tell I'm an engineer, huh? I love aqueducts and the Roman skill at engineering amazes me.

Ben attacking the Vatican

It started raining just after I took this picture, so we hide under a colonnade for a while, then went through security and inside the basilica. Apparently we were lucky actually, it only took us about 15 minutes to get it, and we heard later that the line can be 4 hours long on weekdays.

I did not take any pictures inside because I considered it a church, though I think other people were. Oh well. We saw Michelangelo's Pieta, one of his early masterpieces.

It's now behind a glass wall since someone I can't even think of words terrible enough for took a hammer to it in the 70s. I actually really disagree with this, I think a railing or something would have been a better idea. The glass wall is rather far from the sculpture and really cuts you off from it, it's rather remote, especially compared to the David, which has a railing but isn't enclosed, so you can feel much closer to the work, like you're actually seeing the actual piece, not just a picture of it. But then, there are a lot of things the Vatican does that I disagree with.

The rest of St. Peter's is large and in your face saintiness. It was worth much more time than we gave it, but our feet were killing us by then, it was hard to even stand and concentrate on anything else. So we left after about an hour.

On our way back we decided to make one more stop and saw the Trevi Fountain! We threw in coins because his parents told us to, but apparently we did it wrong, or something. Whatever. It was fun.


Aww. Then we took the Metro back to the hotel. I guess we ate dinner at some point in there, but I don't remember now. Hmm.

After that long day, we slept well on our rock bed!