Sunday, November 19, 2006

Best City Ever!

Location: Rome, Italy
Local Ruins: Ruined

This is the big one. Rome, the city where all roads lead. When here, you do as they do. The center of the friggin' world. I must destroy it.

November 16

My train out of Florence is quite early, and I almost miss it due to my ludicrous insistence on a morning shower. See, as a backpacker, a good shower is something to treasure, a rare and beautiful beast that might vanish it not clutched tightly to one's breast. My Florence hostel, Albergo Paola, happens to have great showers, and I can't just abandon them without saying goodbye. However, on the tail end of some intense power-walking and no small amount of fantasized witch-burnings, I manage to get on the correct train.

Arriving in Rome - at the correct station, I might add, I realize that I completely forgot to get directions to the hostel I'm staying at. Clearly this is the fault of our languishing American education system. Fortunately, my Daring Commando skills come to the front, and I am able to dash into a nearby internet cafe for a couple minutes to obtain directions without having to pay. Ha HA!

The hostel - known as The Yellow - is a scant four blocks away from the train station, and is extremely large and well-organized, though expensive. Arriving, I find one bed in my room occupied by a hungover Canadian named Dan, with whom I make a quick aquaintenceship, then head out on my own. There is barely any daylight left, and I have ancient structures to wash with my drool before bed.

I'm out the door and speeding down the road to the closest piece of badassery I can find, the Colosseum. I did not get to explore it very much tonight due to the late hour (4:30 PM, yikes!), so I'll save the description for tomorrow, when the real delving begins. I was treated, however, to the rather hilarious sight of a Roman legionaire - "You, take picture?" - tucking his sword under his arm and lighting up a cigarette. Does the tobacco remind you of the fragrant fields of blood-soaked Germania?

Heading home, I manage to get thoroughly lost through a combination of my own absentmindedness and poor maps and end up backtracking all the way to the Colosseum to try again. Second time's the charm, and I'm good to go. Before settling in I head to a local grocery store for some foodables, enabling me to construct a delicious chicken curry in-hostel for the next several evenings. Meat, good.

And I'm done.

November 17

Upon rising this morning, I find myself confronted with the - yet again - hungover presences of Dan the Canadian and his new drinking buddy, Greg the South African. As we are getting up at about the same time and all quite hungry, we join forces for the day for food and sightseeing. Setting off to hit the Colosseum, this time at a reasonable hour, we stop on the way for cheap pizza and some hair of the dog at an Irish pub, the only apparent qualification for "Irish" being the presence of Guinness somewhere in a 3-block radius.

Ok, the Colosseum. Let me put my impressions here in context, because it's important that everyone be on the same page here. I don't want to overstate anything here, but the Colosseum is the single most hardcore structure ever to be erected by man. Nothing - nothing - beats this place. You could have Santa Claus beating the shit out of Teddy Roosevelt inside the Kremlin, and it would not be as badass as the building once called the Flavian Amphitheatre, now simply Russell Crowe's ellipse-o-biceps.

As evidence, I submit the following: this building was constructed for the sole purpose of putting up to 70,000 asses in various seats for the pleasure of viewing millions - yes, millions - of men and beasts tear each other to pieces in as many different ways as the very creative sporting minds of the day could conjure up. Ignore the pretty-boy posturings of the NFL; a football field is not a battle ground. This is a battleground. The men who fought, lived, and died on these stones were the craziest cocks in the civilized world, and it shows. You can just feel your blood boil here, and more than once I confessed that I looked about, hoping to find someone who was about to die, saluting me. No such luck, though. Needless to say, I had a good time wandering around, pointing out that the Emperor sat there, that the lions entered here, and such. It is times like these that I am quite certain I was born in the wrong century.

So that gives you an idea about that.

We are delighted to find that nearby (as in actually inside the complex), the grand, royal Hollywood is shooting a movie. Specifically, the movie "Jumper," set for release in 2008. In the particular sequence they're shooting here, the principle players are Hayden Christensen - known for his absolute butchering of the Evilest Man Alive - and Rachel Bilson, better known as the O.C.'s 32nd most eligible vixen, Summer. I took great relish in standing nearby and doing my best to foil the production assistents' best attempts to stop us from spying on the shoot. At one point, my compatriots and I were actually in one shot or another, which was pretty neat. A few impressions: Rachel Bilson is not only tiny, elfin, and miniature (our concensus was that she can't be over 80 pounds), but not that hot in person. Her makeup artists and airbrushers are very, very talented individuals. If she and Jen were at the same party, I would be much happier going home with Jen, a realization that resulted in no small amount of self-high fiving. Also, Hayden Christensen is a giant dick. One can tell this just by looking at his drawn, lifeless expression. I would estimate - and now, I cannot think of a way to prove this theory - that most people have more light on their faces while wearing Darth Vader's mask than Hayden Christensen has just standing around normally. Between this observation and my general disdain for the pain he has wrought in his dual Star Wars experiences, I felt the need to flip him off. Several times. And yes, it did make me feel better.

After this little adventure, we tried to head up to the old Roman Forum, but found it closed for the day. On the way up there, we were stopped by a Gladiator in a purely mediocre costume who seemed from the start to be obsessed with his long, poorly-dyed blonde hair. He greeted us from a distance by shouting, "Where are you going?" Confused, we stopped. Is he a strangely-dressed city employee? As soon as we stopped, he continued, looking me right in the eye and yelling, "You! You are not normal!" I am still unsure as to what prompted this, but I felt it was both interesting and appropriate, so we stopped to talk to him. We had about a 10 minute conversation about his work and where we were from, typical small-talk stuff. His name was Claudio. He hates tourists (but not us, he assured us). When asked why, he addressed a passing hot girl. "Where are you from? Paradise?" She laughed off the line and kept going, leading Claudio to explain, "See? One kiss. Give me one kiss!"

Leaving Claudio, we headed back to the hostel for a night of chilling out. Dinner is chicken masala cooked in-house, and the night passed quite uneventfully.

November 18

Early rising today because, for reasons we have been unable to determine, things around here close ridiculously early, especially the things we're off to see today.

Dan, Greg, and I metro down to the Roman Forum and do some poking around there to start us off. This place is awesome. Essentially it's an area of town about the size of downtown Chapel Hill (no small area, given the premium price of real estate in downtown Rome) that's chock full of Roman ruins and has been completely left alone. This is some really good stuff. For example, the Curia is here, which back in the day was the seat for the Roman Senate. That's right. I have now stood in the building where the Roman Senate met to set policy and have slumber parties. It's pretty near when you consider that this is the place, in time immemorial, that laws were drawn and from which the mighty hand of an empire crept across the world. Oh, and there are temples and stuff, too.

After that, we metro up to Vatican City, because we had heard that there might be a quaint little church there, or something. We find the line to get into the Vatican Museums (and thus the Sistine Chapel et al), but it extends literally 8 blocks, so we decide to wait on that until later. St. Peter's Basilica, however, has a much more manageable line, and there we enter. First off, the Piazza San Pietro is immediately in front of the Basilica and acts as sort of a Wonder Bra for the whole place: it lifts, it enhances, it separates. It really is enormous, a giant circle of marble surrounding a cross-topped obelisk and framed by two massive colonades that are 4 columns deep and lined at the top with statues of people who I can only guess were religious by profession.

We enter the church giggling mercilessly at the expense of the Swiss Guards watching over the Pontificus Thresholdus, and quite by accident get into the line to see the Tombs of the Popes. Hey, though, it's all good. The line is quite short, and after all, who wouldn't want to go see the Toooooommbbbssss of the Pooooppppeeeessssss.... Heh, that looks like I wrote Tombs of the Poops.

The Tombs are quite neat, not least of all for the frothing, rabid crowds kneeling in supplication at the grave of John Paul II. I was glad I hadn't intended to give him the finger... the bum's rush there would have been brutal and final. I was also surprised to find the sepulcre of Saint Peter himself. My surprise is ridiculous in retrospect; after all, he was the first Pope, and besides, the friggin' church is named after him. The graves are quite plain and stone, for the most part, except for that of Peter, which is about as golden as a magical goose's vagina. I was crushed that they didn't have the grave of Urban II, because it was he who truly deserves my middle finger's wrath (for starting the Crusades, duh). I guess they foresaw the public's wrath and kept him in the lesser known 'Tombs of the Really Unpopular Popes.'

The exit from the Tombs leads up into the Basilica proper. Holy.... I find myself at a loss for an appropriate term for how crazy ornate, huge, and downright freakish this place is, so I am forced to invent one. Snagglecracking. Saint Peter's Basilica is snagglecracking in its freakishness, and scrumtrulescent in it's beauty. It is, hands down, the most balls-to-the-wall religious structure ever. After this, I am sure that no other Christian monument will impress me. Since, I have found myself walking into other cathedrals - that short weeks ago would have blown my mind - going, "Ho-hum, another masterpiece of retina-melting magnitude."

Since I lack the means to express in words the grandeur of the this mighty deity's palatial estate, let's move on.

I lost track of Dan and Greg inside the Basilica due to a difference in touring speed (they're pretty blazing fast, whereas I like to linger and soak things up), so I wander outside trying to find them. On the way I manage to flip off the Basilica and am treated to the delicious sight of a Catholic cardinal texting someone on his cell phone. Is there a slumber party tonight, padre?

I find my guys again in the line for the Vatican museums, which is now significantly shorter. I had wavered on whether or not to shell out the 12 Euro entry fee (since that represents essentially a day and a half's worth of food) but ultimately decided to damn the expense since it's the friggin' Sistine Chapel. One does not stumble upon this every day. Inside the museum, I am surprised to discover that the signs pointing to "Sistine Chapel" do not in actuality lead to the Sistine Chapel. Oh, no. Rather, they lead into a rat's maze of art galleries, each more elaborate than the last, that comprise the ancestral chambers of the Popes. Honestly, which is more impressive? First, that the walls themselves have been painstakingly rendered into elaborate scenes that comprise the bulk of humanity's finest artwork? Second, that this jury-rigged museum was once the great pontif's palace, housing the most powerful man in one of the world's most dominant faiths? Or, third, that just wandering through the thing is a process spanning hours of time and kilometers of walking? It's a mighty achievement, no doubt, and even an untrained eye like mine is suitably humble in the face of it. Not too humble to give the finger to Raphael's "School of Athens" or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, mind you, but still humble.

The Sistine Chapel is... well, it's exactly what you think it is. It's a big chapel with really good paintings on the ceiling. I suppose you have to be into painting to really understand why it's such a big deal, but the work is high quality, no doubt. The Last Judgement, on the wall above the alter, is positively crazy. So, yeah, big pretty paintings.

Note: I did take a great pleasure as I walked through rooms decorated by Raphael and Michaelangelo of repeatedly busting out in the theme song to "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," startling and confusing a number of my fellow tourists.

Once again I had lost my companions (rather early on in the museums), and this time I was unable to relocate them. I headed back east, making my way to the famed Spanish Steps after some minor navigational difficulty. It's literally a big staircase at the end of a small piazza. I'm not entirely sure why they're such a big deal, but in spite of my never having heard of them before they're supposedly pretty famous. I hung around the square for a bit, then up the steps where I was greeted with the sight of numerous paparazzi and onlookers crowding around the front of a very nice hotel. It didn't take long to find out that this is apparently the hotel that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are staying at while they get married this weekend. Oh my God. I stick around and play paparazzi for a few minutes, enjoying the atmosphere of pathetic insanity, but get bored after not too long and head on. I did get to see Will Smith as he emerged under a halo of camera flashes, all shaven-headed and smiley, but that about did it for me.

I had intended to go see the Trevi Fountain now, but the sun set faster than I thought it would, and to be honest, I'm tired. I decide to head back to the hostel, but encounter severe navigational problems due to no one outside American understanding what a damn street sign is! As such, I end up about a dozen blocks off course and... huh, what are all those riot police doing in the middle of the road? Ok, I can take this side street. Wow, those guys have body armor and automatic weapons. Is there something going on around this corner? ...Holy Testacle Tuesday, there's a Free Palistine Rally!

That's right. Right in front of this gigantic monument in the middle of Rome (which I originally mistook for the Parliament building), there are thousands of what I suppose are Italian Arabs engaged in a full-on political rally. They've got a flatbed semi truck with a sound system, they're burning flags, chanting, the works. Surrounding them are perhaps hundreds of Italian riot police in full form. It's not going to take a lot to send this whole party into the screaming abyss. Needless to say, I'm on it like white on rice. It's here that, by some form of Afro-Magic, I run into Greg in the crowd. We poke around for a while and have a good time. Though I can't understand whatever language it is that the protestors are speaking, I can clearly identify at one point the words "American" and "discrimination." It's at this point that I - clearly recognizeable as an American by a blind man at 500 paces - make turtle tracks for safer ground.

Tired and a bit shagged out, Greg and I head back to the hostel and chill for a bit. It is around the dinner table that I make a few new aquaintances: Fe (FAY, Australia), Rich (Canada), and Nile and Seamus (Ireland). After no small amount of eating, talking, and drinking, we (the above plus Dan, Greg, and myself) decide to head out to get yet more to eat and drink. This 2nd supper we eat in a nearby Italian restaurant over a bottle of wine that Nile insisted we buy ("Come on, you tight bastards..." By the way, Nile is quite perpetually drunk) and a whole slew of bad ethnic and religious jokes that the Irish start by telling, of course, Irish jokes. After dinner we lose Nile (he'd been drinking for about 7 hours already and was a bit gone), but the rest of us soldier on to hit a couple of Irish pubs across town. The following mini-pub crawl is full of very lively international conversation, exactly the kind of thing that I love beyond all else after a day of sightseeing in a foreign country. By the time we get home, we're all quite happy and pleasantly exhausted, and I sink down into bed grateful for the opportunity to close my eyes.

November 19

Rome, as noted first by my traveling colleague Jo (in Florence) is a bit of an architectural oddity. See, Rome is really old, right? Really old. Quite literally older than clean drinking water. And over a course of several thousand years of being one of the world's primary beacons of power and culture, you accumulate a lot of buildings here and there. The surprising thing is just how many of them are still around. I'm glad that I had various other cities to warm up with on this concept (remember my brick-shitting at seeing the old city wall melded into an office block in Brussels?), because Rome is almost certainly the world capital of ruination. It's not like they're all in one place, either. Every block goes something like, "Restaurant, ruins, bicycle repair shop, gelateria, ruins, ruins, ruins, church, ruins, restaurant, jewelry shop, Prada, Gucci, ruins." It's uncanny.

The morning is a bit too drizzly for anything really fun, quite uncharacteristic of Rome. I had really been enjoying t-shirt weather in November, and this just ruined it. After a few hours lounging around the hostel, however, I had to get out there and see some stuff, precipitation be damned.

First stop is the Trevi Fountain, which as you might guess, is a big, important fountain. Ever seen the movie "La Dolce Vita"? It's that one. Truth be told, the fountain is really cool. It's huge, taking up the entire side of a massive building and filling fully half of a small piazza. The carvings are all big, muscular mythological dudes fighting horses with fins, band geeks with girlfriends, and other mythological creatures. The legend (if you haven't noticed the trend, there's a legend with pretty much all these things) is that tossing a coin into the fountain (salt style, over the shoulder) means you will return to Rome, and some versions say that a second coin grants a wish. More on that later.

The really neat thing about the fountain this particular day is that, in the piazza where it is located, the international Free Hugs campaign is in full swing. I didn't know about this until today. Apparently there are a bunch of people who go all over the place with signs announcing "Free Hugs," and spend hours a day offering hugs to passersby as a sort of pick me up of positivist anarchy. I'm attracted to this immediately for two reasons: First, by the four hot American girls who are taking part. Second, by the idea itself. For those of you who don't know me at all, I love hugs. If I could go through my day doing nothing but hugging people, I probably would. I'm a big hugger, literally and figuratively, and I can't look this gift horse in the mouth. After hugging various people, I strike up a conversation and find that anyone can take part in this little endeavour. After that, it doesn't take long until I've got a sign of my own and am accosting confused locals and tourists alike as if possessed by the fevered soul of Tenderheart Lion. Let me tell you, I had a ball. Of course many people thought it was a scam, or were just party poopers, but you'd be amazed the kinds of people who actually got into this and gave us hugs. I encourage you to try it sometime if you never have. After about 45 minutes I realized that I was supposed to be meeting Greg at the Pantheon, so I said my goodbyes and left, spirits about as high as they'd been in months.

It was only a couple of blocks to the Pantheon, but find Greg there took a few minutes. We eventually did and set about exploring the thing. The Pantheon is generally considered to be the best-preserved building of ancient Rome, despite the fact that it has been converted into a Christian church and most of it's original decorations and things were removed to make, say, the canopy over the alter at St. Peter's. It was orginally the greatest temple of ancient Rome, dedicated to all the planetary gods. It's a pretty good one, as temples go. Essentially it's just one giant room covered by a giant freestanding dome, which I'm given to understand was a pretty significant architectural achievement in the 1st century B.C. Like many of the monuments in the city, part of it has been taken over by construction/restoration work, but much of its beauty is quite unspoiled. It's not very big and thus doesn't take long to see, but I'm suitably appreciative. I did get a kick out of the fact that they have a big sign urging quiet in this "sacred place," when the people who posted that sign belong to the same organization that had no qualms about stripping the original temple of its treasures, defiling its alter, and converting the structure for their own purposes. Who decides what's sacred, anyway? At one point this building was sacred to the Romans for worshipping their pantheon. Does the fact that no one ascribes to that religion any more make it any less sacred to that purpose? Can you really determine sacrosanctity as a matter of degree by how many people believe in whatever something is dedicated to?

Anyway, we're away from that now and on our way to the Piazza Navola, a large plaza nearby that is pretty much busker central for Rome. There we find a performing clown, an old man doing a puppet show, several kids of grade school age breakdancing, and of course numerous musicians and painters. It's a great variety of free shows and I have just a dandy time.

After that, Greg and I line up a lovely string of minor sights to see and knock 'em down one by one. First the Teatro San Marcelo, which is essentially just another ruin on the edge of the forum. Second, the Mouth of Truth, a famous face engraved on the side of some church. Legend has it that if you put your hand in the mouth and tell a lie, it will bite down on you. Needless to say, I did not insert my hand and claim that hate cheesecake. See, I love cheesecake, and I didn't want to get bitten. Whew. That was a close one. Third, we found the old Circus Maximus, which was a bit surreal. Of all these crazy ruins throughout the city, buildings great and small that have survived the ages, the Circus Maximus - the great arena where events of horse and chariot racing were held - is not one of them. It is essentially just a large elliptical park now, with a couple small ruined buildings dotting one end. On one hand it was a bit disappointing, but on the other hand, it was kind of neat to see jugglers juggling, puppies romping, joggers jogging, and couples necking in the place that was once one of the most adreneline-packed places in the western world.

Greg wants now to go see the Spanish Steps, but I've already been and decline, especially since it'll take a metro trip to get there before sunset. Rather, I peel around south of the forum and head back to the hostel. There I grab some dinner and play cards with my remaining peeps for a while. It's nothing particularly exciting, unless you count the bitter rivalry that sprang up between Fe and I in our games of Asshole. I, like I do, got increasingly boisterous and foulmouthed as the games got more heated (I think at one point I actually told one guy that he had a "paper-mache scrotum" ...I don't even know what that means), and Fe held her own quite admirably. It was a fun time, and combined with all the goodness of the day, I feel like I earned my bed.

November 20

Most people that I've been hanging out are gone by now and I've seen most of what Rome has to offer the casual traveler, so today is quite low-stress. I'm flying out to England early tomorrow, and I had intended to sleep at the airport, but I am informed upon checking out that Ciampino airport actually closes at night, which means that I will need to stay in the hostel and get up at the ass-crack of dawn. Fantastic.

By now I've realized that, in the excitement of all those free hugs yesterday, I forgot to do the traditional coin ritual at the Trevi Fountain. Oh, well, I've got time. I make my way there as quickly as I can and this time I take my time in enjoying the thing. I do my two coin throw just as it starts to rain (and no, I will not tell you what I wished for; then it wouldn't come true). Not really knowing what else to do, I head back to the Vatican. Maybe there's something I missed there. I've been coming up a bit shorter on finger givings than I expected, and I have an inkling of a couple more I can hit.

At the Vatican I revisit the Tombs of the Popes. After making sure once again that Urban II is nowhere to be found, I flip off the next best thing: Urban VI. I mean, he's a dumb pope, he never did anything, and he did take the same name, so it's kind of like flipping off the crusader by proxy. Better than nothing, I suppose. Upstairs, I find that since there is no service going on today, there is a lot more room to wander around inside St. Peter's, and I take some more time admiring the place. There is one statue of a guy on the wall that people are lining up to see and rub his feet. I'm not sure exactly what this guy's deal with, but I am in Rome, and I'm sure at least some Romans are in that line. I rub his feet without really knowing why, but get absolutely zero tingles from it. Damn.

It's at this point that I realize that the confession booths - which are legion in this place, lined up like bank tellers' desks - are adorned first of all with little green lights on the outside that light up when a priest is inside prepared to receive a confession (hilarious!), and second of all with little signs that tell what language confession is offered in in that particular booth. All they need now is a "take a number" system and they're good to go. After breathlessly running around to confirm that my eyes were indeed not deceiving me and laughing as quietly as I can to avoid smiting, I head out.

Outside, I finally manage to get a good fingering angle on the Swiss Guards that are surely the freshman hazing victims of the Vatican's policy force, and I'm good.

About this time I head back to the hostel, just wanting to spend the night relaxing and not doing a whole damn lot. I have a lot of internet stuff to take care of, so I end up making it a late night despite my best efforts, but I eventually do manage to fall asleep.

I came, I saw, I conqured.

Progress Thus Far:
Countries Visited: 9
Stupid Tourist Moments: 70
Monuments Flipped Off: 64
Free Food Ganked: 12
Free Booze Ganked: 34


they say these waters aren't what they used to be
and i've got people back on land who count on me
-Billy Joel

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