The Four P’s of Rome

Pizza…Pasta…Panini’s….(beer)Pong

The fourth P I’ll get to. The first 3 need no explanation; I feel like that’s all I’ve eaten in my 6 days in Rome (and now that I think of it, in all of Italy).

As I'm thinking about this blog post, I realize it'll have to be split up into two separate entries. Otherwise I would be working on it for the next 5 hours (which I don't want to do), and you'd be reading it for the next 3 hours (which you clearly don't want to do).

So here's part 1:

Got into Rome last Friday around 4PM. It was too late to do much sightseeing, but I did walk over to the Colosseum to at least check it out.

And boy am I glad I did go down there on Friday because I got to see my first argument between a tourist & an apparent pickpocketer.

Not sure exactly what the argument was about, but the tourist was accusing the lady on the left of stealing something from her bag. Like the good citizen I am, I sat back & took pictures.

On night one I had to stay at a different hostel than the rest of the days in Rome based on price. I shared a room with 6 Americans, it was a Friday night, and I still couldn’t convince 1 person to come out for drinks. The hostel manager gave me directions to 2 bars in the area he thought would be good for me. And I’m sure they would have if they weren’t completely out of business. Glad I walked around for 40 minutes searching for them.

One of the American guys in my room warned me that “he’s been known to snore.” He was absolutely right, and I think now is a good time for me to mention I absolutely think we should be allowed to discriminate against habitual snorers. Put them all in 1 room and let them conduct a fucking symphony of snores all night.

On Saturday morning, I got up real early to head to the Colosseum & Roman Forum. One of the best decisions I made this whole time in Rome was to get up early on a few key days when I was doing the major sightseeing. Colosseum doesn’t open until 9, and I was there at 9:01. There was no line, but sure enough a while later when I was leaving, there was a huge line. So again, good decision all around. The Colosseum tour was great (audio tour of course), and I spent an extra 20 minutes searching for a piece of Colosseum to bring back to Neil (not really a worthy story here…just trying to return the favor of 15 years ago).

Other sightseeing from Saturday that is worth showing you:

-Roman Forum & Palatine Hill

-Vittorio Emanuele II Monument

-Fontana Di Trevi (Rumor has it that if you throw 2 coins into this fountain, you’ll fall in love in Rome. I threw 8 in just to be sure)

-The Pantheon

On Saturday afternoon I checked into “The Yellow” hostel where I’d spend the next 5 nights. I felt like the hostel bar was made especially for me for 3 reasons: 1) it opens at 7AM, 2) happy hour is from 3-9PM, 3) they have a beer pong room in the basement. After meeting 3 Americans in the bar and seeing 2 friends from Venice who happened to be staying in the same hostel, I spent the rest of the night reestablishing myself as a force in beer pong. 5-0 with the obvious handicap of having a girl on my team for all games.

The champs:

One more quick note on my partner. She got real pissed later in the night when she found out I gave her a fake name (Henry obviously), but this time I was totally justified in doing it--I told her my real name the first 7 times she asked. If you can’t remember at that point, I’m gonna try a different name, maybe it’ll be easier to remember. I believe there were some nasty words exchanged between us at this point and certainly I would be finding a new partner for my next night of Pong.

That's the end of Part 1...stay tuned for Part 2 where I'll provide details of my first European soccer game, Vatican & St. Peter's sightseeing, Spanish Steps pub crawl, and much more.