Okay, first things first with Roma. Out hotel is beautiful--would def stay here again. We have a nice, big room with closet space and a little fridge, stove, and prep sink. There’s a hall that leads through a vestibule to the bathroom, which has a huge sink and a shower with a glass door and a head that changes water flow. It’s the nicest shower that I’ve seen in months. There’s a toilet AND a bidet, and let me tell you, Ryan and I both want these little suckers in our homes. I cannot begin to explain to you how handy they are when you’re menstruating.
It’s my blog, and I can write what I want.
Also, they help me solve the problem of never feeling clean when I use Western toilets. They’re pretty much miraculous, at that. Sometimes at night we wash our feet in it before bed, and sometimes we freshen up but save water. We could even give a bath to some of the babies that we’re planning on stealing. I want one. In each bathroom.
Our bed is supportive and comfortable, and we both sleep very well when we’re not being woken up by various things going on with out bodies, like feeling sick to his tummy or menstruating. Also, there’s no cock to wake us from four hours until ten hours, and there’s no call to prayer around four or five hours, although in three weeks, I never once woke up for that call to prayer.
Ha! Your god isn't great enough to reach me… It just goes to show you how much I love sleep.
We have to use three keys to get into our room, and we take turns doing sets. One opens the door to the annex part of the hotel, which is separated from the main building but only two doors down in the little alcove-thing (there are no words coming to mind to describe it properly) on the street. From there, we walk up the stairs and use the wicked awesome key to our hallway, and then the skeleton-key-like key to our room. The last one’s my buddy; I can always get it to work. The first two take some brute strength at times.
Even the ceilings in our room are beautiful; they’re dark wood expose beams, and the ceiling height has to be almost four metres.
The location is perfect as well. We’re within walking distance of everything, seriously. I’m glad that we’re staying at a hotel in the heart of Roma rather than a hostel on the outskirts. Yay Ryan’s idea! Walking back from a small spaghetteria at night, you can see il Colosseo at every intersection on the back streets. We walked to another country and back yesterday, even, and it felt like we were walking on Mass Ave (down a main thoroughfare where things were loud and a little dirtier, across a bridge over the city’s major river, to a different republic…).
We’re about two blocks north of il Colosseo, and our road dumps out at Augustus’s forum. Roma is interesting in that everything is important to someone or something, and you never fail to take a random corner and end up at a huge, important basilica or la Fontana di Trevi. As mentioned, the first day, I had to stop taking pictures because everything was so overwhelming.
Overall, we both decided that we could live here.
I’m so much more relaxed here than I was on any other part of the trip. As much as I hate to admit it, I may be a city girl. Don’t get me wrong--I’m totally at home barefoot in wild grass, meditating with mine eyes closed under the sun, but as far as travelling goes, I feel much safer and much more in control in a major city than I do in the countryside. It’s not even the language thing; everyone knows that I can get along (me la cava bene) in other languages just fine. Part of it is transportation: in Fethiye, we relied upon sleazy dolmuş drivers and bus and taxi drivers quite a bit, and sometimes you were accidentally kidnapped to Asia. I hate taxis. Here in Roma, we can walk to wherever we’re going, no problem. We also took the express train and the metro from the airport and had no trouble whatsoever and saved ourselves some Euro, because spending money on transportation feels like a waste. We’ll do the same thing back, but we might even walk to the train station instead of taking the metro that one stop.
I feel less out of place travelling in a city, even when I could get along in the countryside or a small coastal town just fine. I could barter and order meals in Turkish with no problem, but being in this big city, where I know that I’m not the most out of place person (and certainly neither look nor act like a tourist), I feel much more comfortable. The funny thing is, though, that we get English as a language guess much more often. Maybe people here are more used to our accent or something, but in Turkey, Turkish, Russian, Polish, and German would come up (usually in something like that order) before English almost every time (this made me very happy). Here, too, I’ve found the one association with America that I will not mind to take:
We were sitting at dinner one night. This means that we were across from each other at a little table, almost in the dark down a small alley a few streets from la Fontana di Trevi. The two Italians sitting at the end table to my left (the tables were only two deep from street to wall) bumped elbows with us. As the woman got up to pay, the man asked us if we had a cigarette, to which we replied that we were sorry that we didn’t, and he said, ‘O! You must be American. In America, you no smoke! No one smoke!’ and we laughed. That, itself, is an interesting phenomenon, but for another time.
Right now, I think that I’ll pictography before we head off to become completely enveloped in a world distances separate: two thousand years, and about five metres lower… (This city is dusty; Ryan’s nose was stuffed the first day. Things get buried faster here, I suppose, because the amphitheatre in Fethiye didn’t seem buried at all, but all of the ruins here look like they’re on display and you’re walking on bridges through them.)
On second thought, I will update the sightseeingy pictures at a later time. It's time to see le rovine...
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