I was just walking through the dinky little country market when this little young boy comes walking up behind me and taps me inquisitively on my hip. "----" he babbled in Italian, making crazed hand motions in the air. I look helplessly over at his dad, standing back a few feet, replying, "Ummm, I don't speak Italian." The boy keeps up his crazy waving and his insistent babbling and, with an apologetic shake of my head, I continue walking down the aisle. A second later, I feel that same tapping on my hip and look down at this ridiculously cute child. "Beautiful," he says in struggling English, pointing at me.
OH MAN, I LOVE ITALY!!!
The dad laughed and said something like "Italian baby," like there's nothing you can do with these children. The kid followed me around, gabbing like a chipmunk the entire time, and I didn't mind at all. The only other word in English he knew was "yellow," and the rest of it was just a bunch of nonsense words to me. But I understood the "beautiful" part and I'm grinning like a fool even now, back in my bungalow.
That's right -- bungalow, not hostel. And I'm quite a distance from the center of Rome right now. I had to take a suburban train for 40 minutes, and then a shuttle bus for another 10 before I got to this place I'm staying at for the next few days called Country Club Castelfauno. It's pretty rad, I gotta say. It's something like a campground mixed with a youth camp mixed with a bunch of old people (...like 50 years old ^_^) in pretty sturdy looking shacks. There are families here, tons of little kids running around, and apparently an influx of German teenagers here for a few weeks of summer camp. They've got two pools, a "supermarket" (the selection is pretty bad), a restaurant, a pizzeria, grills, shuttles to a beach that's about 2km away, shuttles this to the train station to get you back to Rome -- like I said, it's really, really cool!
At least it is right now. It's only about 9pm here. This place also has two "chill out" spots which are just really shabby dance clubs with bean bags to couch on. One of them opens earlier and closes earlier -- around midnight -- and the other doesn't have a closing time as far as I can tell. Guess which one is riiiight next to my bungalow?
The dorm I'm staying in houses four girls. I've met two of them, both of them Polish girls who are traveling in a group of about a dozen Pollocks. She immediately asked me if I had any earplugs to sleep with and then went on to describe how nightmarish her first night was: German teenagers screaming and partying all night long, the noise keeping her awake, and someone even pounding on one of the windows in the dead of night, waking everyone up. When she looked out to see who the heck was outside, the person had already run off. Also, there's absolutely no AC in our room, something that hit me as soon as I walked in the first time and felt like a physical blow. Also, there are no sheets on the bed. They're available for rent for another 2€.
...I still love it! I'm going to use my beach towel as my sheet and rough it for the next four nights. Now that it's evening, I wouldn't have wanted the AC on anyway. And the last girl, the one I haven't met yet, is a Russian who's prepared with bug-be-gone candles and spray, meaning that my mosquito nightmares are over! (By the way, I woke up with another four bug bites, pretty impressive considering I only slept for three hours. One of those bites -- and it's definitely a bite, because pimples don't itch like this! -- is right on my right eyebrow. Smooth, mosquitos. You win this round.)
My day was very awesome. Last night, everyone in the hostel was hyped up about some beach party and I distinctly felt like the loser of the house because I was going to bed at about 10pm. Or at least, I tried to. The place was too noisy until everyone finally piled out of the hostel at around 11pm. I got a few hours sleep, jerking awake at about 1am when something outside went off like a tire exploding and then getting up at 2am to catch a bus to the airport for my flight. I hit a panic moment when I realized that the metro, which I was counting on to reach the only bus running to the airport, was closed until 4am; luckily, luckily, luckily there was a nitbus stop right next to the metro exit and I was able to grab one heading in the right direction.
The "yea, you're old" feeling that I've been having during my entire stay at this hostel returned in full force when I noticed that, aside from a few other people on the bus also packing some suitcases and heading off to travel, everyone else on the bus was one massive crowd of young partyers loudly living up the night and only catching the bus on their way to the next big thing. I shook it off, caught my flight, and took to the air just in time to watch the morning sun rising. It's exactly the second time in my life that I've seen the sun rising from above the clouds and I gotta say it's quite the seat!
When I landed in Rome, it was still hours before I could check into my hostel -- excuse me, my bungalow. I'd found out about a series of free walking tours that a for-tips company offers for Rome and figured that I'd make my way to where the tours start, find a good nearby park bench, and take a much-needed nap before the tour started, which also wasn't for a few more hours. On the bus ride from the airport to the nearest metro station, and the on the metro ride to the station near the tour starting point, the only thing I could concentrate on was just how exhausted I was, how little sleep I'd gotten, how easy it would be to just fall asleep here on public transportation.
That all changed as soon as I got to my stop and stepped out into Rome for the first time. I was at the Spanish Steps!
The Polish girl who warned me about the German screamers also very accurately that sightseeing here is different in that, for most things, we've all seen a picture of the site somewhere before, that we've all long grown accustomed to images of the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps. For her, that meant the sightseeing was more of a bore; for me, though, it's the difference between seeing a pizza and having a bite (of course I'm going to include pizza! I'm in Italy!)
I basically had a ball and nearly destroyed my camera in the process, taking pictures like a madwoman, like the stereotypical tourist who oozes and gasps over every little mundane thing. Any thought of being sleepy disappeared completely; the only thing I was focused on was what was right in front of me and where to go next.
In most hostels, they have a book exchange set up. I had, er, procured a cheesy book from my hotel in Kos; in Santorini, swapped it in a series of book changes as I sped-read my way through their collection, ending up with Russian Dotochsky (still can't spell his name right) work that I took with me to Athens. In Athens, I was delighted to find an in-depth tour guide to Rome that someone had left behind and have been lugging that book with me ever since. It's over a decade old (and still deals with the old currency, how to operate a public telephone, and has no information on Wi-Fi hot spots) but in the last few hours I've been here, it's been amazing to have. Streets haven't changed, nor have the monuments and their histories, so I feel like I have the secret "in" for Rome.
'The only thing,' I thought wistfully while wandering through one of the gorgeous parks here, 'is that I wish I had a regular, complete street map with the important monuments conspicuously marked. This book has very good maps of Rome, but the city is too big to fit on a single page so they're all in pieces over a few pages and it's sort of sucky to have to try to mentally stick them all together -- well, well, well, what have we here?!?'
There, on the ground, lay a complete tourist street map. Just for me.
Like I said, I had a ball in Rome. I love it, and it seems to love me. I don't know where I got the energy from, but I didn't stop walking from 8am until almost 4. I got to see the Spanish Steps, the Roman Pantheon, St Peter's Cathedral (from a distance; the line to get in was unbelievably long and I didn't want to wait for the four or five hours it would take to get in only to be told that, since I was wearing a tank top I couldn't go in), tons of fountains and pillars and obelisks, plus a freaking pyramid.
Some emperor built a pyramid to himself right in the middle of Rome. Because that totally goes with the rest of the local decor.
My tour guide for the free walking tour was this really boring lady who recited facts out like they were boring her, too. It was nothing compared to the very lively guy in Seville who talked like the history was his one and only passion and who sprinkled in plenty of jokes to keep our attentions focused. I ended up gabbing with an Australian girl for most of our walking, getting some good advice from her about what to do since this was her fourth and final day in the city. We walked from the Spanish Steps to the entrance to Vatican City and she left us there to get lost in the rest of the city for ourselves.
I grabbed some pizza for lunch, and it tasted delicious. It was very simple but I savored every bite. I also had more pizza for dinner -- hey, I'm in Italy! Today was pizza day! Tomorrow will be pasta day! And then Italian ice day!! Italian meatloaf! Italian lasagna! Italian salad -- no way! More like Italian cookies!
Finally, around 4, I made my way to the nearest suburban rail station, following the directions that the hostel/campgrounds had sent me when I'd booked. I went to check in and...for whatever reason, they only charged me about half as much as I'd expected to be charged! The total cost of the next few days will be less than a single night cost in almost every other place I've stayed at so far. (Which might be due to the sheets/AC/screaming, but still! I'm happy with it!)
The main thing I wanted to do at that point was to jump into some cool water and give my slightly-burnt shoulders some relief from having carried my bag around all day on tender skin. When I got to the pool, I was just in time for a free class of water aerobics, led by a guy who was wearing a dress, a wig, a plastic flower luau, and lipstick. While he was getting jiggy with the funky music playing, he would give us directions on what to do. It was some of the most fun I've had this far in my trip! He gave me a shout out, something he did to everyone else at random too, and when I said I couldn't speak English and wasn't Italian but American, he groaned and rolled his eyes but kept saying to me "are you ready?" after that whenever he changed the move we were doing.
It's past ten now and I haven't heard any screaming Germans yet. I'm ready for them, though! Tomorrow, I plan on getting up early and going for a run throughout the dirt paths they have here and then getting back to Rome, starting in the opposite side of the city and walking around like a crazed devil once more, trying to see all the sights I can. There's no way I'll be able to make it into the Vatican on a Sunday so I'm going to save that for Monday; there's so much to see here, I'm going to need to just keep walking nonstop for the next few days to feel like I did the city justice.
My Polish roommates are out celebrating their last night; my Russian roommate is taking a shower. My energy is beginning to droop towards "exhausted" and I'm pretty sure my speech is dropping towards "rambling." I love you all and miss you and I hope you're having a good day too.
Location:Viale del Circuito,Rome,Italy
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