room 43

monday morning we awoke in our 14 bed dormroom, sick and feverish. not a good travel day. but we made it safely from london to rome.

our room in rome was an 8 bed mixed dorm. we 2 females and 5 males. sausage. fest.

in all honesty, it was really rather relaxed. jen hung out in the room, resting from headache and sickness and i walked to the supermarket for some blood orange juice and a salad.

ITALIAN SUPERMARKETS

- usually really tiny
- not unusual to find one-way stores, with an entrance at one end and checkout at the other end, emptying out on another street
- fruits should not be touched with bare hands, put on plastic gloves, you filthy thing!
- you weigh the fruits yourself and a price sticker is printed
- it's best to bring your own bag, otherwise you buy plastic ones

our roommates had awoken from their stupor and introduced themselves - alex, christian and davin. we later met ?? (from portugal) and brent.

the alessandro palace hostel exceeded our expectations, so we booked it for our last few nights in rome as well. large room with a non-urine smelling bathroom. excellent.

after jen and i ate of the free pizza party in the hostel's bar, we took a night walk to piazza navona, jen's favorite piazza in rome. sadly, it has been much changed into a carnival-esque atmosphere (we are hoping this is simply a "buon natale" carnival).

i learned from jen about bernini's four rivers fountain and michelangelo's borromini's church of sant'agnese in agone - a myth tells that the two rivals disliked each other so much that the statues on each artist's works refuse to look at each other. sadly, wikipedia discounts this as urban legend since the fountain predates borromini's facade by a number of years.

PREVIOUS ROME EXPERIENCES

- i took a trip in high school w/ the french teacher; our group totaled over 80 people. a small group of us split off on our own for rome! it was fun, but mostly i remember HEAT and the PAIN of my feet. and really unflattering pictures of each other in the train (imagine a cramped train compartment not unlike a sauna).
- later, i travelled again to italy with my best friend michelle. towards the end, i was on my own (i was supposed to meet up with an ex, but that didn't work out) and found myself in the roma termini train station at 10 o'clock at night. hardly understood any italian and pretty overwhelmed. so i hopped an overnight train to munich; lodging issue solved!

rome was much better to me this (third) time.

in the morning we packed up, headed to the train station and met yen as she descended the leonardo express from the airport!

hurray! our group was complete. we ate, had some foodstuffs and were off to ravenna.