The One about Rome

Then I went to Rome!

Aside from my trips to visit people, this was my only trip with a specific destination and not just one of the “why not” ones. While I suppose I could have crammed the trip into a weekend, I decided to take a Thursday and a Monday off and make a decent vacation out of it. I’m way too slow getting out the door, and I enjoy sitting around in cafes way too much, so I need my time...

So that this post isn’t extravagantly long (I think I had around 500 pictures, though now I’ve narrowed it down to about half), I’m gonna try a different format. Get excited.

PEOPLE

I stayed with a fantastic Couchsurfing host named Simone. He’s one of those couchsurfers that has hosted a million people and I was convinced he wouldn’t take someone with as few references as I have, but it turns out a kind, personalized request works wonders. He showed me around town, took me out, slept on the couch and let me have his bed, and put his friend in charge of entertaining me when he had to go out of town for work for a night.

This picture is from the first night, after he and his friend picked me up from the airport and we went to a bar in Trastevere.

Another night, I hung out with another couchsurfing person, Giuseppe, who was too busy to host me for four days, but I went and walked around the city and got gelato and saw buildings and whatnot with him.

Another couchsurfer that was at Simone’s for two nights (he forgot and overbooked) was this girl named Aida, who I do believe is the first Lithuanian I’ve met. It was nice to have a touristing companion. She’d been to Rome before, so she didn’t need to go in all the famous places (that I had seen in the preceding days,) but it was nice to have someone to walk around all day and explore and get lost and eat with. She knew some great places that were tucked away, so that was nice. She goes to school in France and works for one of those groups that takes pictures in bars and then gives out the website’s card. So I thought that was interesting. The day included many stops to take pictures with her huge, fancy camera when she saw something cool, like this fish statue.

And, last but not least under the heading of human contact was Simone’s friend Gabriele, who I hung out with when Simone was gone. No pictures of him, but I did take some of the stuff we did.

We went to a crazy up modern art exhibit:

And we walked around a bunch, when suddenly we got to this fancy official looking freemason building with a few people crowded around the locked door. I was confused, until he instructed me to look through the keyhole.

Very Da Vinci code esque, no?

I’ll toss this self portrait from my day of solo touristing under there too:

FOOD

In summary: delicious, but hard to avoid the touristy places, even if you walk into little back streets.

My first time eating out, I gave up looking and went to one of those places, which was of course expensive, so I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, without actually understanding what it was.

Oops:

I also got to have real pizza, thanks to a place that Aida had found. I did not know this, but in a lot of pizza places, they have the display thing filled with a bunch of differently topped ovoid pizzas. You tell the person how much you want, then they cut you off a piece, weigh it, and you pay by the weight. So you can get lunch for 2 euros as opposed to the 6 euro cracker with Spanish ham pictured above. The issue is that in many eateries, you have to pay extra to sit down.

Eating said pizza, plunked down on an oversized flowerpot in the middle of a plaza:

Gelato. YUM. Giuseppe took me to this place that is apparently famous and that Michelle Obama went to and whatnot:

And, last but not least in the food pictures, classy Italian pasta:

Other food items worth mentioning (but of which I didn't take pictures) included a nutella biscuit/cake/flaky pastryish slice of heaven, which was the first nutella I'd had since I told myself I have to stop devouring it on a regular basis. And a frozen chocolate/coffee drink that, when recommended and described to me, I thought was gonna be like a starbucks mocha, liquid with ice. But no. It was like a mix between shaved ice and ice cream and chocolate and coffee and awesomeness. Oh and all of this (and gelato) is served with a huge dollop of cream on top. Yum.

BUILDINGS/ A HANDFUL OF REALLY HALF-HEARTEDLY SELECTED PHOTOS CAUSE I’M GETTING TIRED OF THIS POST

Part of the Vatican Museums was all the gifts the popes had been given from different heads of state. Most were really fancy and impressive except for this awkward one that I suspect was ordered for two easy payments of $19.99 from the Sunday coupons. With love from Richard Nixon:

This is a crypt at a monastery that I didn't even know existed, but when I was there, Suzanne wrote me and recommended that I visit. So Aida and I did, and it was suuuper cool. I wasn't supposed to take this picture, and I did it from my pocket, so that's why it's bad. I'll paste another so you can get a better idea of what it looked like.

Good enough of a sampling, I think.

Peace!