…catch buses, trains, walk, eat cacio e pepe and gellati, drink Campari spritzers, water from the fountains supplied by aqueducts, prosecco and vino rosso, go to the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Trastevere (like Northbridge), the Colosseum (like the Verona Arena…except SO MICH BIGGER and like nothing else I’ve ever seen), the Forum (some of the best Roman ruins I’ve seen, what a society…God bless those pagans…and although nothing funny happened on the way to the Forum, on the way to the Vatican, James was having a bad day so 2 hours into walking around holy sites in the rain, Lea gestured in front of a crowd of young backpackers to James’ groin saying, “your fly’s undone!”….et tu Leá?), the Vatican and St Pete’s shack (all of what’s good and bad about the human race in one small country), the Capitoline museum, Castle San’Angelo, Spanish Steps (kind of like the Flinders St steps…except covered in Italians….hmmm actually maybe pretty similar), Trevi fountain scaffolding (……..damn, not meant as a water joke, but none was getting through so I’ll take it), Il Vittoriano (best view of Rome from the top of “the wedding cake”), Borghese Gardens and museum, siesta and be rude to strangers…

…HOW ELSE DO YOU DO ROMANS DO!!?? And what else have they ever done for us anyway?

We arrived in Roma after our last train trip for a little while. One of the great things about catching the train over here, or being in public in general, is that going to the loo is more of a test of will and faecal management than anything else. When you get slugged €.80 – €2 per use (plus tip sometimes…?), it really makes you think “how badly do I really need this?” And of course by the time you make the decision to go, then fiddle around with the change machine to get exact coins, it’s almost invariably too late. Potty training over here must come with Economics 101 course notes. And although nobody wants to hear about bathrooms…why do all the showers here have pull chords in them??  Are they for extra assistance?  Or for emergencies? And if so, what are these people doing in their showers that we haven’t thought of to need to tug another chord? Either way, we’ve tried twice (by accident) for no result.

Our accommodation was interesting, down near the Tiber (where Romulus and Remus molested a wolf or something) and was next to an ANTI MAFIA FORCE building. Not sure if we should have felt incredibly safe or were facing imminent danger. Somehow the kids out the front with fully automatic weapons, who were texting their multiple bellas (I assume) something like “Notha tuff day fighting the #MAFIA…lol ;)” didn’t fill us with confidence. Hadn’t seen a blind eye turned so much since we were at the Vatican…burn (that’s what she, the witch, said)…are these the Roman blinds of which we’ve heard so much?

Rome, you were just like a really big Roman town. We loved your history and were taken enough by the “modern” city enough to throw 10c into a makeshift pond set up at Trevi fountain that will be collected by an as yet unknown charity such as the “Monuments Are Forever Integral Afterdark society” (not an anagram for anything cos it’s late and we couldn’t think of one…but mabye there’s another Roman blind joke there…Romans are ony blind at night?? Ok maybe not) so you can keep up with everywhere else in the world and Australians can drink around you and see you at night*…which means we will come back (cos of the coin if you can’t keep up).

Rome, definitely top three of the capital cities we’ve visited so far.

Veni, vidi, vici…vini.

*getting a bit confusing there, but for some reason none of the monuments were as well lit up as everywhere else we’ve visited.