Roman in the Rain

Pictures from Baux de Provence (last weekend) can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010307&l=f2955&id=1158900089

Pictures from Rome (this weekend) can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010423&l=d34b6&id=1158900089

It is 3 PM on Easter Day, and in the past 32 hours I have slept one half hour. Thus, it is entirely possible that absolutely nothing I say here will make any sense at all. Also, given my state of exhaustion and simultaneous crankiness, this entire entry may come out very bitterly. I will be sure to edit it tomorrow after I sleep a lot (I’m going to bed immediately following supper, and no one can stop me) and gain some perspective. The last time I went without sleep for this much time was when I first arrived in France, and then it wasn’t even that long because of the time change.

I lucked out when I went to England. I was in the rainiest city in the UK (Swansea), and I had sun the whole time I was there. It drizzled one night in Bath after we were already in for the night, but I made it through my time in England with spectacular weather. Clearly, the weather gods had it in for me as I headed for Rome this week. My friend Norma and I had been following the weather for several weeks ahead of time, and though we held out hope for change, it always seemed to forecast rain for the two days we would spend in Rome. And oh, my, did it ever.

We left Avignon Thursday afternoon after packing sandwiches to bring along for dinner. The train ride to Nice was uneventful—I made friends with the woman next to me, who gave me her trashy magazine to read when she was done. I was glad for the mindless entertainment, and I was amazed that I understood almost the entire magazine. Apparently poring over Capitalisme Contre Capitalisme or translating policier (thriller/mystery novels) into English or reading Jacqueline Remy’s essays on what it means to be French have actually improved my vocabulary. I hadn’t realized that l’Institut was doing this, but they have very sneakily been making the vocabulary and work more challenging as time goes on so that we don’t realize we’ve learned anything until we try and read trashy French magazines. We had about two hours in Nice, during which we searched (unsuccessfully) for bathrooms, ate our dinner, and decided that the Nice train station was really not our favorite in the world. It looked considerably nicer upon our return, however, when the presence of French and blue skies won us over.

Our train ride from Nice to Rome was, in a word, long. It was a 12 and a half hour ride, and the Italian trains are definitely not as nice as the French TGV trains that we’ve all gotten spoiled by. Our tickets there were only €15 (€40 for the trip back), so taking the train was clearly cheaper than taking a plane, but I definitely figured out why it was so much cheaper: no one with enough money to fly would’ve considered it. More maddening was the fact that the train ride could’ve been cut down to approximately 8 hours if the train had been going TGV speed or even train normale speed (the normal speed in France), and if the train hadn’t stopped for up to an hour at various train stations. Norma and I developed a little bit of a French superiority complex while in Italy—ironic considering that last time I went to Italy I was convinced that everything Italian was better than anything French. I think it all depends on the weather. We shared a compartment with another group of American girls and one Italian guy. The other girls slept almost the entire train ride, and I was quite jealous. The Italian guy seemed a little sketchy at first, but at one point I asked Norma in French if she had any mouchoirs (tissues). She didn’t, but the Italian guy overheard me and gave me his mouchoirs, and at that point Norma and I decided he was a good guy. I probably slept about 4 or 5 hours total, but they were definitely not consecutive hours, never more than an hour and a half at a time.

When we finally arrived in Rome, we wanted to dance upon getting off the train, but instead opted for wandering around lost for about 40 minutes as we attempted to find our Bed and Breakfast. Turns out the map I’d printed off from the website mistakenly made the street look like it was North-South instead of East-West, so after pulling out a map from a guide book that another girl had lent to us, we finally found it. The B&B was quite nice, quite clean, with lots of chocolates around for us to eat, but one small problem: the owner spoke no English. First thing I do upon getting internet on Tuesday is review it online and say that the claim that the owners know English is a lie. Norma’s taken two years of college Italian, so she was able to communicate, but she just as easily could’ve not spoken Italian, and then we would’ve been in trouble. The owner was quite nice and offered us coffee right away, but still. She didn’t speak any English.

Once we had gotten settled at the hotel, we set out on foot for the Vatican (which was on the other side of the city from our hotel). We had decided in advance that we were fine with walking most of our time there. I feel like I see a lot more of a city when I have to get around it on foot, plus we were really not in the mood to figure out a new transportation system in just two days in a language that neither of us spoke well. We found our way without getting too lost, although a general lack of street signs did make our journey complicated, and some of the streets would arbitrarily change names without any warning (or any notice on our map). Once we had found our way through the complicated part of our journey, we found a cute pizza place to stop and eat at. We were able to get delicious pizza for only €1.50 and the price made it that much more delicious (as did the fact that we hadn’t eaten in about 20 hours). After eating, we continued on our way, valiantly ignoring the darkening skies. I really loved just seeing the Vatican, and St. Peter’s square in particular was really powerful. We weren’t allowed in St. Peter’s Basilica, since they were getting ready for the Good Friday mass, but the Vatican museums were open. One random British lady tried to get us to pay some €35 for a ‘semi-private’ tour of the museums, but when she failed to give us a card or offer any other information on the tour guide besides the fact that she was “the second-best tour guide in all of Rome”, we were a bit dubious and instead paid the €8 student fee to get into the museums.

It was hard to find our way around the museums, and we ended up making a lot of decisions on where to go based on where the crowds were pushing us. I loved seeing all the artwork at first, though after about an hour everything started to look the same. However, we told ourselves that this was a good time to be inside since it had started to pour outside. We figured that this way we could get the rain over with and enjoy the rest of our time outside (ha). The Sistine Chapel was the culmination of the museums, and I really liked seeing that—it was incredible. We stopped at the Vatican post office to send some things, but discovered that the post people there are not as nice as the post people in Avignon (we keep lists in France of where people will be nice to you and where they will not be. The bank ladies are not nice at all, but the post people and the train station people are very helpful). On our way out, while paying too much attention to what was around me and no attention to what was in front of me, I managed to trip and step on my ankle sideways, which wasn’t a whole lot of fun. At first I didn’t think I’d injured it too badly, but it started hurting more the next day, and it’s bothering me quite a bit now, enough to keep me from running this morning. I don’t take well to being injured (especially when it interferes with my workouts), so I’m holding out hope that it will be miraculously cured tomorrow. Even though I was holding out that hope last night, too.

While in line to get into the museum, we’d seen a gelato place called Old Bridge that was recommended to us by my cousin who was in Rome for a semester last year. If she’s reading this right now, thank you very much for the recommendation, Erin, we absolutely loved it and went back again the next day. The rain had let up a bit by this point, but the temperature had dropped (plus we had just eaten a bunch of gelato), so we decided to head back to the hotel and put on some warmer clothes. It started raining again during our walk back, and when we left again to go to Trevi fountain, it was pouring. I’m sure Trevi fountain was quite nice, but my feet were soaking wet and we were just a little bit miserable from the pouring rain. Norma and I joked that we probably wouldn’t recognize anything in Rome if we saw it without the rain—we’d assume that it was from some other city. We got dinner on our way back to the hotel (delicious pasta), then collapsed with exhaustion for the night.

We got up fairly early (around 8) the next morning to eat breakfast before we left for the day. Breakfast wasn’t too spectacular (lots of packaged items), but the coffee was good and appreciated (we were pretty tired), and we also got a bunch of free packets of Nutella that we took with us for use at lunches. Hard to argue with free Nutella. We then set off for the Coliseum. It poured on the way there. Really poured. I’d even gone so far as to wear my not-so-cute-but-very-sensible shoes for the day, and even these shoes got soaked through. We had a pretty funny umbrella system figured out for taking pictures—one person would hold both their own umbrella and the umbrella of the person taking the picture. It was complicated. I did really like seeing the Coliseum, and it was a lot of fun to just take it in while walking around it. After that, we set back off for Via Nazionale, a street with a lot of stores on it where we hoped to do some shopping. We had the most fun at a grocery store (I love going to grocery stores in different countries). Despite my begging, Norma told me that no, I could not buy a huge hunk of parmesan cheese to take back to France with me, because we had nowhere to refrigerate it for another 24 hours. She was probably right, but I have a huge addiction to real parmesan cheese and I was sorely disappointed to not be able to bring some back. I also looked for non-UHT skim milk, but apparently the Italians are like the French in this area and I was unsuccessful. Maybe when I go to Norway? I did, however, find plain M&Ms, and that made my day.

A short note on M&M’s: I love M&M’s. They have been my favorite candy since I started eating candy, and nothing makes me happier than a handful of plan M&M’s (other than a handful of plain M&M’s and a good book). However, imagine my amazement and shock when I came to France and discovered they only sell peanut and crispy M&M’s! The horror! The panic! I have a terrible grudge against peanut M&M’s. Why ruin some perfectly good chocolate with peanuts? When I was little I used to try and just eat the chocolate, not the peanuts. As for crispy, aside from being newfangled notions, they also remind me of a summer camp I went to that I didn’t like a whole lot. The only thing I did like was that (unlike my ice rink) that rink had candy in the vending machines, including a ready supply of crispy M&M’s. However, having finally finished that summer camp, I refuse to revisit my old days. Thus, I was most happy to find M&M’s.

We were hoping to get lunch along Via Nazionale, but all the restaurants there were still serving breakfast. We decided to kill some time at a bookstore Norma thought she’d seen that wasn’t too far away. Turns out, however, that it actually was quite far away—more than halfway back to the Vatican, but we kept plodding along. Once we got there, we were almost at the pizza place where we’d eaten the day before, and we were really hungry by this point, so we decided to stop back at that place for some more delicious and cheap pizza. After that, we went back to the bookstore and hung out there for a few hours. It was less exciting than French bookstores, largely because I know no Italian. After exhausting that indoor entertainment (did I mention it was still raining?), we went to get cappuccinos and tiramisu at a café nearby. We were really glad to sit down for the first time in a while, and we were also able to dry off a little bit while in there. Norma at this point just wanted to go sit in the train station until our train left (at 9PM, and it was at that time 1PM), but I flat out refused to spend 8 hours in a train station while I was in Rome. She decided she wasn’t comfortable in the train station by herself, so we decided to walk back to the Vatican and walk around there more for the rest of the afternoon. We spent a lot of time underneath the awnings in the square in order to avoid the rain. It was nice to sit and just people-watch for a while, and it was much more interesting than sitting around the train station would’ve been.

We made a perhaps not-so great life choice and decided to get gelato despite having just eaten tiramisu. However, when one has 36 hours in Rome, some of which must be spent sleeping, one must benefit from as much gelato as one can, and so we decided to do that and skip dinner altogether. My stomach was not feeling so hot from all that sugar, so I clearly would not have been able to eat dinner, anyway. Nevertheless, it was absolutely delicious. We ate the gelato back under the awnings at St. Peter’s (couldn’t let the rain melt it!), and then set off for our long trek back to the hotel to pick up our luggage. We stopped at a really neat stationary store that wasn’t too expensive on our way back, and that was a nice break from the rain. Just as we were approaching our hotel, the rain started to let up a little bit, and when we exited it to head over to the train station, it actually looked like the sky was clearing up—just in time for us to leave. Gotta love our luck. We had about 45 minutes to wait for the train, during which time some guys tried to steal Norma’s purse. They tried to distract us in order to do it, but we figured out pretty quickly what was going on and were able to keep our stuff. After that excitement, we went over to the ticket station where I was determined to get my passport stamped again. However, unlike my experience in Ventimiglia where the agent was happy to stamp my passport, the agent in Rome looked at me like I was insane and made me repeat myself three times before finally agreeing to do so in a tone that implied he was less than happy. Norma and I ended up laughing in his face because he was so melodramatic about the situation. As Norma said: “Well, I’m sorry your country doesn’t care enough to monitor who’s coming in or out on a regular basis!” We found the situation completely hysterical, probably because we were so exhausted (and wet).

The train ride back to Nice was LONG. I slept a grand total of 20 minutes, which did not make me happy. We had a crazy Italian lady in the car with us—Norma had a conversation with her that, when she translated it for me, had us both cracking up. The lady was going to France, where she was going to help children who couldn’t speak. Only catch was that she couldn’t speak French at all. She got off in Monte Carlo with all her worldly possessions (one of which was a huge box of pastries), and Norma and I have no idea what she was planning on doing there. I’m not sure if any of this would’ve been as funny as we found it if we hadn’t been so exhausted. When we finally arrived, France greeted us with gorgeous bright-blue skies and lots of people who spoke French. We were delighted to be able to communicate and understand everything around us once more, and the TGV train felt absolutely luxurious after 12 hours on the Italian train. I had a funny old French lady next to me on the way back to Avignon—she was very excited about it being Easter, and she promised me she wouldn’t bother me too much, since she was getting off in just a few stops. Unfortunately, there were also three really annoying children on the train, two of them siblings whose mother was incapable of controlling them. She kept repeating arrêtez de pousser, j’en ai marre (Stop moving, I’ve had enough), and I felt like telling her that I’d had enough, too. We got off in Avignon, took the Navette back into the walls, then I took a taxi to my place (no buses on Sundays) and collapsed. I fell asleep for three hours in the afternoon and woke up thinking I was still in Rome. I went back to bed immediately after dinner, and slept a glorious 13 hours.

Today was pretty low-key. My ankle’s still bothering me, so I was unable to go running this morning. I worked on some homework, read an Anna Quindlen book (Blessings, which was excellent), and enjoyed the fact that I was back in France. Despite all my complaining in this entry, I’m really glad I went to Rome. I loved seeing the Vatican and the Coliseum, and I loved seeing Trevi Fountain about as much as I could given the fact that I felt like a drowned rat. It was definitely hard to keep our spirits up with the constant rain, but it was still a fun trip and I got a lot out of it. However, I was also quite happy to be back in sunny France where I can easily communicate, even if there isn’t delicious gelato or pizza.

I leave for Paris for a weekend in just four days, so expect more news on that next week. And let’s just hope that the weather gods decide that I deserve some sun after what I went through in Rome!