after spending the afternoon and night of april 29th in florence alone (post on that later), i hopped an early train for rome and got there around noon.
i decided i had to do ASMUCHASPOSSIBLE since everything would be closed the next day, may 1st, day of the ascension. i visited the palatine (above), roman forums, and capitoline museums all before 5 pm.
which was kind of silly, because the palatine would have been a great place to hang out for a while and climb rocks.
the next morning, i really wasn't into dealing with roman traffic, so i took a walk along the tiber. i think this man was taking a break from swimming in his tightie whities.
i ended up at the castello san angelo, one of the few things open. they wouldn't let me take pictures of the pretty frescoes. so i went to st. peter's, where the line was really short for some reason. my pictures won't do it justice... i was quite moved by it, in a way that's difficult to express in a photo blog... except to say, it didn't really have to do with religion.
but anyway. after drinking a cheap, foul beer on the steps of the piazza, i hopped the metro to go to a music festival i'd heard about at the hostel. turns out that about everyone between the ages of 16 and 25 in rome had the same idea as i had (the picture from yesterday's post is from the station where i got on). the metro wasn't even stopping at the piazza where the concert was, or even at the next stop, because the crowds were so bad. so this is the view from two stops away, where i finally got off (concert is behind that arch waaaay down the street):
so yeah. lotsa kids. i like crowds, and there was some awesome people watching. even the music wasn't bad (that kind of growly vaguely industrial sound that all euro pop that isn't swedish or french seems to have). but i was really not feeling it that day. when i kept getting nearly pulled into the mosh pit, i decided to leave.
so i bought myself a cheerily colored pastry
and went to watch the RIBBON DANCERS
and pretty much called it a day.
it says something that this was pretty much the most eventful day i spent in the city. (pics of ostia antica, which i visited the next day, to come...) i'm really glad i went, because i saw so many new+beautiful things, and didn't just sleep and bum around in my pjs like i would have in paris. but my social interactions were pretty much limited to the free hostel-bonding pasta dinner at 7 each night; the city was crowded, and dirty, and overwhelming; and not speaking the language, or being with a person who did, made me feel really insecure.
especially when it became apparent how often we tourists were getting scammed. in florence we went to one cafe for breakfast two days in a row. i bought the same exact thing both times, and the second time they entered fake prices so that the bill was 4 euros more. and i couldn't do anything about it, either, since i didn't have the first receipt and prices weren't posted. and if they had been, i wouldn't have been able to read them.
another girl i met at the hostel got tricked by some guy posing as a police officer, who made her give him her credit card pin number and then stole the card and withdrew the $800 remaining in her account, leaving her with about 10 euros cash to survive on the rest of her vacation. admittedly, she was really stupid to give him her pin, but what really struck me is that he had the balls to even *try* that scam. probably not just this once, either.
i mean, my family expected that kind of thing to happen when we were in mexico city, but it never did. and i think that's because half of us spoke fluent spanish, not because mexico city is safer for tourists than rome. speaking the language makes such a difference in how people treat you... i never really noticed it before.
inevitably i came back from the trip with a strong desire to pick up another romance language. (when? who has the time? don't you still need to learn japanese, nat?) but we'll see.
but being back in paris (a day early) has been *so pleasant*. it's warm and sunny and all the little kids are playing in their undies in the fountain of the public park. the guy behind the counter at mcdo's understood my lunch order. cars move in a sane and predictable manner.
it's funny how paris got to feel so quickly like *home.*
Libellés : foul beer, home sweet home, personal epiphany, policeman poser
