« Anti-Bush Protest in Rome | Main | The Palatine And The Colosseum »

June 13, 2007

Roma

So I'm finally starting to put up some of my real Rome pictures. It's definitely going to take me a while to catch up, but hopefully I'll be more "on schedule" soon.

As I began my descent into Rome's Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, there was some pretty terrible turbulence. I don't do well on airplanes, especially when they're moving too much for me to pretend I'm on a bus (you know it's serious when it's preferable to pretend you're on a bus). As we were descending, we hit some "bad air," whatever that means, and the entire plane "dropped." Literally, if we all hadn't been wearing our seatbelts, we would have hit the roof of the plane. Everyone screamed and I turned to the man next to me and almost grabbed him but in an unprecedented display of self-restraint, I held back and quietly turned back towards my window.

Once I landed and waited for two hours for the Italian airport crew to discover the luggage from my plane, Brent and I discovered that the choppy air I had been landing in was a thunderstorm that spawned a tornado right as our train to central Rome pulled out of the station. I was to excited to 1. Be on the ground and 2. Be looking at a tornado to get my camera out in time, but I did get a shot of it pulling back up into the sky. You'll just have to take my word for it that it was a legit. tornado:

Train to our temporary home:

A bunch of pictures from around the hotel we're staying at:

There are cats roaming around everywhere in this city and they're all so sweet and friendly:

We go to school in a convent so we see a lot of nuns, priests, and monks wandering around:

Right up the street from us there's the famous "keyhole." It's a keyhole that you can look through that perfectly frames St. Peters and lets you see three countries at once, Italy, Malta, and The Vatican. Here's Brent sitting by it:

View through the keyhole:

This is a park up the street with one of the most beautiful views in the city:

Wedding with St. Peter's in the background:

The water fountains in Rome are really awesome. There's constant running water to rinse off your hands, but then when you plug the faucet with your finger, it springs up on top to drink from. They're also just really pretty:

The cars here are all ridiculously small for better maneuvering, gas mileage (gas is 9 euros here!), and easier parking. Personally, I think the Italian government, in light of the driving skills of most of Italy's inhabitants, decided to have cars made as small as possible to give pedestrians a fighting chance:

If we saw a car like this at home, heads would turn... but here, when people see a random Range Rover driving around, that's what people stop to see.

Our hotel and school (the convent) are in a really beautiful residential neighborhood with Connecticut-style real estate prices, so we definitely got really lucky with our location:

I was definitely expecting for some reason to come to Europe and have everything be so inexpensive. I was wrong. The US dollar is nothing compared to the euro, and everything is priced here the way it would be in America in dollars... so my money is disappearing at an alarming rate. That's probably one of my biggest problems here in Italy, remembering that 1 euro is not 1 dollar. I keep seeing prices and thinking "Okay, 10 dollars is a little expensive for getting into the basement of some random church, but not ridiculous..." but of course it's 10 euro which is more like 15 dollars. Oh well, at least it's not as bad as when Kristina and I were in Mexico and rather than learning the conversion rates for things, chose to tip 100 pesos for someone to take a picture of us.

A lot of the stuff in Rome is really old looking in an awesome way, which shouldn't come as a surprise since Rome is quite old:

I was about to say something lame about Rome being like the grandmother of the world, with a lot of world culture originating here, but then I decided that was dumb because, if anything, Rome is just a dirty old man walking around pinching girls' butts. Just how we like it!

Our hotel at night:

The cats at our hotel are especially mangy. Brent and I want desperately to shave this guy and give him a bath:

This is what all the city streets are paved in which isn't much fun for girls in high heels, but is definitely a lot prettier than pot-holed pavement:

Everyone here drives around on little Vespas, hopefully not melted from some sort of fire/explosion like these:

Next to the Tiber River:

An extremely unflattering view of the Tiber (better pictures coming soon):

Cool fountain (one of many here in Rome):

Willy Wonka graffiti (Brent's picture):

There are lots of horse-drawn carriages around the city:

I hate all the graffiti:

There's so much ancient stuff here that places like this restaurant sometimes have random old arches sticking out of them:

Apparently, most of ancient Rome is still buried, but no one cares enough anymore to dig it up. That's not entirely true, but apparently Rome keeps trying to dig a subway system but can't get far because every direction they dig in, they run into underground ancient Roman stuff. If I owned Rome, I wouldn't be able to resist, I'd want to see it all, but that's just me.

Cute pink house near our hotel:

This is the mangy cat that Brent and I named Fizgig. We feel bad for him too and really want to give him a bath. He's really grumpy and will snarl at you if you don't pat him enough, but once you start rubbing behind his ears he just melts at your feet and will follow you around if you try to leave. What a face:

Here's the common area inside our hotel where Brent and I read sometimes:

Out the window:

The place that we live in is very tropical and we're all always laughing about the noises we hear outside. First of all, the seagulls here own the place. They're the most terrifying birds I have ever seen or heard in my entire life. They spend the entire night SCREAMING. Not like normal seagulls, but literally screeching to the point that on the first night here, my roommates and I actually checked out the window because we thought some little kid was screaming for help. Once the birds get started, they get the dogs all riled up and, as Brent pointed out, the dogs sound a whole lot more like wart hogs than anything else. Of course when the dogs get going, the cats start howling and we all lie in bed wondering what kind of terrifying other-worldly rainforest we're living in.

Last, but certainly not least, the vending machines here at the hotel sell beer; something new to most of us Americanos:

That's the end of the beginning but I'll try to update more regularly so that I can catch up! I'm off to dinner now (It's 7:45pm here). Goodnight!

Posted by lauren at June 13, 2007 12:40 PM

Comments

Posted by: M&D at June 13, 2007 02:31 PM

Posted by: Jocelyn at June 13, 2007 02:34 PM

Posted by: G at June 13, 2007 02:54 PM

Posted by: Amanda at June 13, 2007 05:53 PM

Posted by: Lauren at June 13, 2007 06:09 PM

Posted by: 'Tree' at June 13, 2007 07:18 PM

Posted by: Alexis at June 14, 2007 08:33 AM

Posted by: Jenny at June 16, 2007 12:22 AM

Posted by: Lauren at June 17, 2007 05:36 PM