Day 12: Saturday, May 3, Rome

What 5th Avenue looked like 2000 years ago.

Today we had a lazy morning and then headed out to Ostia Antica, the ruins of an old Roman port town just outside of Rome. We had planned to go to Pompeii, but the trains ended up being more expensive and on a different timetable than we were expecting. Ostia’s ruins were extensive and really interesting. The old forum was surrounded by shops; each shop had a mosaic describing what the shop did/sold for those who couldn’t read, and many of those are left. (One shows a guy riding on a dolphin. Maybe that was the 2^nd century B.C.’s thrill ride.) As we were walking from the train to the old city I saw a gas station. It suddenly made me realize that I had only seen one gas station in both Paris and Rome combined. I guess all of the gas stations are in the suburbs. Gas was about E1.50/liter.

Back in the city we went to Hadrian’s mausoleum, which is now a church called Santa d’Angelo if I remember correctly. The Catholic Church built upon Hadrian’s fortress-like structure and turned it into a genuine place of refuge for the Pope during crises.

One nice thing about Rome is that it still has a lot of the piping for the old Roman public water system. There are random water spigots located around the city that are perfect for filling up a water bottle or getting a quick drink.

Rome is a much more colored city than Paris. While there still isn’t the range of colors you would see in the states, clothes come in more than the starkly black and white color scheme of Paris. Weather here is also significantly warmer than Paris, so that might be a bad comparison.

We cooked dinner again tonight, and like every other night the menu centered around pasta. Pasta takes up an entire aisle at the grocery, with olive oil and tomato sauces both getting a significant chunk of an aisle. We had run out of peanut butter and hadn’t found it during our first shopping trip, but this time we found it. It was with the imported exotic foods like Mexican salsa, couscous, and soy sauce and was E3.50/small jar.

As we were headed home there was a huge commotion on a nearby street. Trash was everywhere in the street, police had blocked it off, and lots of people were watching. It looked like a colorless parade, but when I asked someone they said that it was a “strike” (I figured out it was actually a protest) against the government. I got two accounts; each said that the protesters wanted to smoke marijuana, but one added that they wanted it for free.

When I was in China I found that my Spanish improved – I was trying so hard to think of how to say something in Chinese that my other foreign language surfaced. That has occasionally happened here, but not much. I’ve found that I can get very basic stuff done in Italian, but I also found out that if I ask something in Italian (like directions) I frequently get a rapid stream of Italian back. Unfortunately that means that it is usually better to be the monolinguistic tourist and ask in English.