Roman Holiday

Original title, eh? I know, but I couldn't resist. This is the first day since I've been back that I haven't felt like slipping into a coma at 5:00PM every evening, so I’ve finally decided to bug you all with a travel log of my 'Roman Holiday'. Here are some highlights that made me/us laugh and/or will be forever tattooed on my memories:

• Being suddenly and sharply jostled out of my perambulating daydreams by the high-pitched verbal tongue-lashing Elizabeth gave a little Roman guy that dared an attempt at pick-pocketing her. She's only 5'7" and yet she towered over this guy whilst holding onto his arm and yelling, "Excuse me sir (always so polite, even when exerting her wrath), what the HELL do you think you're doing?" Let's just say HE was stunned, I was stunned; neither of us knew exactly what to think. All I can say is that he looked afraid (I was even a little afraid for him :) ).





• Driving by some government building and witnessing the gathering of a ‘would-be-riot’, complete with a banner brandishing the threat of assassination to some poor government official—in English (were they hoping for international publicity?), police in full riot gear standing nearby and waiting for the aforementioned protesters to become unruly (actually they really looked kind of bored) and a traffic jam that gave our slug-paced public bus front row tickets to the whole terrifically disconcerting affair.
  




• Ordering dinner at a fair-to-middling restaurant (with no great expectations, mind you) and finding Elizabeth’s rice soup dish outfitted as a culinary Roman bath for a nasty floating lobster shell (not the meat, just the shell); it was a doozie of a difference in cultural preferences. Call me an Ugly American, I just don’t think lobster antennae are meant to dislodge from heads and swim around in your soup.
  




• Studying the continual and daily accumulation of ‘Roman Grime’ around the cuffs of my pants. It was like charting the tide patterns of your local coastline. Or maybe more like geological strata. No matter the weather or amount of walking, the city’s street sediment kept creeping and receding up and down my pant leg; gradually peaking at the knees before I found myself rinsing dirt, mud, rocks, twigs and other alien matter into the bathroom sink. I think it took 3 or 4 rinsings before I even thought about adding soap into the equation. Forget ‘ring around the collar’, there's a more serious epidemic around my ankles…
  




• The Sistine Chapel: not sure how to communicate my appreciation for the opportunity of viewing Michelangelo’s works and positive I can’t do it without sounding hackneyed and banal, so I won’t try. I’ll just elaborate on our activities while there—it was crowded and because of benches in huge demand on both sides of the long, rectangular-shaped room, we waited until a couple finally got up, then we made a dash to claim squatters’ rights. We had a strategy: sit and gaze until groups of people next to us leave, then slide down in order to procure a new view, repeat…As far as I’m concerned, the entire experience of visiting the Vatican can be wholly esteemed from the single observation of that one room. Plus Elizabeth had some good anecdotal tid-bits to share regarding the construction of Michelangelo’s paintings. Ask me sometime if you’re interested.
  




• Visiting the Palatine and Ostia Antica: the first are palatial ruins built by the emperor Domitian (don’t ask me how to pronounce that) in 81 A.D. and the second is the empire’s first port city (some say colony). The Palatine ruins were actually pretty difficult to discern ‘what from what’, but the day we visited was nice and sunny with a breeze, verdant grounds, and ‘romantic’ ancient rubble set up as conversational back-drop while we peregrinated from site to site. The second is a city of ruins that is much more visibly comprehensible. There is a graveyard, a gymnasium (well, where the gym used to be, now it’s just grass), a set of public baths (with much of the original tile still in tact), a theatre, houses and warehouses to view. By far, the major interests embedded in Ostia are its size and completeness. So much of it is still there. You can step back and imagine roofs and roads and niches filled with non-appendage-less statues.

• The Colosseum: okay, so I wasn’t expecting to be overburdened with awe over visiting this colossal tourist trap, but it’s hard not to be. Maybe it was my frequent, vicarious imaginings of what my second graders would think of it, but I just couldn't peal away my eyes. Actually the fun of seeing this site was matched, if not doubled in part by the satisfaction I had of showing pictures to my second graders and giving them all the wonderful gory details (don’t worry, they weren’t really gory, just factual—and descriptionally bloodless, really). They ate it up.
  




• The Catacombs: who doesn’t want to hike around ancient, underground Roman tombs led by an Australian priest with an earring, who tells other tour groups to “shut up”? It was really rather amusing. And my favorite part is when we got back to our room and Elizabeth told me she had a surprise for me—my mind automatically jumped to visions of chocolate jumping out of her pocket—but alas, no, just Catacomb dust. Sure glad the priest didn’t see; he looked like he could have done some real, old-fashioned, parochial school damage.