La Vie Chérie: Vacances de Toussaint: Roma

I can't believe how long I've been putting off writing this post. So here it goes:

The last stop on my trip with my parents in November was Rome.

We arrived late at night, so I didn't have a grand first impression of the city. We got to our hotel, which was located a block or two from the main train station, Termini. There were a lot of weird people hanging around, so we got out of there as quickly as we could.

We went to a restaurant down the block from our hotel that was in our Frommer's guide book. It looked like a typical Italian restaurant, except none of the waiters were actually Italian. The owner was young and couldn't have been more than 28 years old (in my notes I had described him as, "unfairly beautiful"). We engaged in a brief conversation with him in which he grumbled about globalization and cross-culturization and how the Chinese are producing everything for everyone now. He then proceeded to introduce us to his Mexican/American girlfriend in his restaurant full of Bangladeshis (that term sounds weird, but I look that up and it's right). Talk about crossing cultures.

On the way back there was a server standing outside a different restaurant trying to lure in customers and for some reason mistook me as German and kept saying "Guten nachten" or "Guten tag" and other German salutations depending on the time of day. I saw him almost every time we left the hotel and never bothered to correct him.

I don't know why, but I wasn't as enthralled with the 'Eternal City' as I thought I was going to be. It was my first time in Italy and I had really been looking forward to it but I think I built it up in my head so much that when we got there I was under thrilled.

Don't get me wrong, it's a really cool city and amazing to see the ancient ruins that predate Jesus by hundreds of years and art history landmarks that I had studied in class like the

Pieta, Sistine Chapel, Arch of Constantine and (of course) the Colosseum.

What amazes me is that all the ruins are just plain in the middle of the city. The Forum is next to one of Rome's busiest roads and local citizens just go about their business passing by these thousand-year-old ruins.

We were in Rome the night of the election, so my mom got up about every hour or so in the wee hours of the morning to see who won. And then when our waiter at breakfast the next day commented on Obama's win, my mom told him that Obama was my dad's boss. Which technically is accurate, but with many hierarchial layers in between.

One aspect I felt let down on was the food. In general it wasn't nearly as good as the famed, authentic Italian food I had heard of. We found a couple of really good restaurants, but there are so many tourist trap restaurants we had to be careful.

For some reason there's a large number of Bangladeshi immigrants in Rome. They work in the restaurants, they own bakery or convenience shops and they're the annoying guys ruining the major attractions by flinging the glowing toys up in the air or shoving key chains in your face.

A haunting old friend joined us from the last time I traveled around Europe with my parents: Rick Steves. He was the bain of our Spain trip. We had to do everything the way Rick Steves said. Man that guy is pretentious. Although he does have some pretty good tips and self-guided walks and museum tours.

I'm really glad we were there during off-peak tourist season because I can't even imagine what's it's like in the summer. We were harassed incessantly when we were within a mile radius of the Vatican Museum and St. Peter's Basilica by people trying to sell us "advanced" or "exclusive" tickets to skip lines. People tried telling us we would wait 2 hours to get into the museum. Not true. I think we waited 10 minutes and we didn't even reserve tickets in advance. We ignored everyone pretending we didn't speak English, but one guy saw the book and shouted, "I know you're American, you've got Rick Steves!"

Here are some highlights of the trip:

Our first day we wandered around the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. The Forum was the heart of ancient Rome, where many important government buildings still stand (in ruins) and where the hustle and bustle of everyday life took place. There's a temple now dedicated to Caesar in front of which he was betrayed (I think..). The Colosseum is just enormous and it blows my mind that what stands today is only 1/3 of the original structure. Much of the layering is still present, so you can see where they used to hold the exotic animals or gladiators before they were led up to fight.