Eurotrip Day 13 - 2 Pizzas, 1 Gelato and 6-7 churches on first day in Rome
Rome (Roma) is defeinitely very different from many other places we have been so far. First things first, it seems to be quite hot here. The sky is almost always clear of clouds, which means even more sunlight. Second, scooters are all over the place. At times, I think that there are more scooters than there are cars. Scooters does make more sense since most of the things in Rome is really close. Cars are also very common and I am seeing more and more smart cards in Rome.One characteristic which cars and scooters drivers share is the road and respect for pedestrians. If there is one thing that I was totally wrong about is the safety of the road from the perspective of the pedestrian. Some people may ask why that is so. Before I came to Rome, I heard that cars and traffic in Rome make it difficult and also dangerous for people to cross the street. Cars would just rush by and not care if they were about the hit someone. In actual fact, Roman drivers are the nicest people. No matter if it is a red or green light for the pedestrians, drivers will stop their car or scooter in order to let pedestrians cross. From time to time, I get very scared of the cars coming at me while I am crossing the street. The drivers at first glance to seem to not notice you as I don't really notice much change in overall speed. From my point of view, if they continued their velocity (speed and direction for the geeks) they would have hit me. Instead, the drivers will almost always stop for you if they think it is safer for you. The tip we got from other people was to do the following "Just close your eyes and start walking and everything will be alright".
If you thought there were a lot of pizza restaurants in Ottawa, well, there are probably 10X more in Rome. One our way to the hostel (Hotels des Artistes) we passed by atleast 4-5 pizza restaurants. The hostel isn't even far from the Train terminal station, atmost 2 kilmeters away. Finding the hostel wasn't hard, but getting to the reception desk was a problem. One would normally expect that reception would be on the main floor of the hotel/hostel right? Well no, this one was on the highest floor possible. Luckily, there was an elevator in the building; BUT, the elevator was of the very old style where the doors were actual doors. If any of the doors were slightly open during movement, the elevator would stop on the spot even if it were in between 2 floors.
If there is one thing Steve was useful for during this trip, it would be for communication. You see, none of us knew any italian and we hadn't taken the time to actually learn any. Our vocabulary only consisted of Italian words from the Godfather. Roger knows how to speak English and Tamil, I know how to speak English and Cantonese and Steve knows English and Spanish. So why can Steve communicate? because Spanish and Italian are very similar (both are Latin-based). Though you can't say Steve can speak good Italian, it was good enough broken Italian to allow others to understand us. We had a few laughs when Steve was corrected by people when he tried to speak Spanish with a slight Italian accent.
With our bags stored safely in the hostel, we set out to make the most of our first day in Rome. Once again, most of day was already planned out ahead of time leaving only slide deviation. Our first stop was to go to the Santa Maria degli Angeli (NO! You are not expected to know all the churches I mention). As I have had no experience with any churches in Rome, I had no idea what to look for when walking around. This Basillica is very different. First of all, the property on which it was built on had stone ruins in it and was below ground level. When I first set foot in the Basillica, I was stunned by its beauty considering its age and condition. This, being my first experience of a church and basillica in Rome I would use this church as the standard for all other churches we would visit during our stay. From the outside, the Basillica seemed small, but that turned out to be misleading as the interior is larger than the cathedrals in Canada.
From the Basillica, we walked for 5 minutes to reach the Museum. Ever since the British Museum and the Louvre, our expectations for museums were very very very very very high. But seeing that the Brits and French had already taken all the good stuff, we knew that our visit would not be as spectacular. The majority of the displays in the Museum were stone sculptures. The most common type of sculture were busts (sculptures of people's shoulders and up). They seemed to have a bust of every emperor EXCEPT for Julius caesar, who I haven't seen so far in any Museum. I personally feel bad for the museum because it seems that the best scultpures have been taken to the British Museum or Louvre. The ones that we saw in this museum were mostly headless statues or basically statues that have suffered some major damages. At times, you would see some sculptures of a person they couldn't identify because of its poor condition. If there two things I liked about the museum, it would be the introduction of the mosaic style in art and the huge collection of coins dating back to ancient times. The coins were all held in a giant vault and were displayed in chronological order. It is surprising to see that currency and coins today follow the same tradition of placing important figure heads on the back of the coin.
Prior to coming to Rome, I had read books about Roman baths and seen illustrations of how they would look like during the old times. I expected to see them around the city in good condition, but I was dead wrong. We searched for atleast 1/2 hour and didn't see any signs of them. We eventually found a place that seemed to be it and went it to check it out. Bad Move! We indeed had found the Roman Baths, but it looked nothing like what I had expected and it came with a huge museum. By now, we were sick of museums seeing the same old things we had seen today and on previous days.
By the time we got sick of Museums our stomachs were howling for food, so guess what we ate? Yes that is right PIZZA!! If there was anything I was looking forward to in Rome, Pizza would be one of the top ones. We passed by so many pizza restaurants that we just randomly picked one and ordered whatever we saw. I gotta say, Italian pizza doesnt have as many toppings as you would get in North America, but the toppings themselves are very good and the pizzas seem much more authentic. Many restaurants have a huge selection of pizzas to choose from and some on display. The cost of the ones on display are based on the weight of the slices that you ask for. Whole pizzas are usually between 6-9 euros.
After lunch we started looking for the Trevi Fountain. Within 10-15minutes are walking, we were lost. However, on the way to find the fountain, we did stop by at a few churches. At one intersection, there was a total of 3 churches, one for each corner. On one corner was the Santa Maria de Vitorria (it was the Angels and Demons book by Dan Brown). These churches are actaully very small and probalby only seats at most 200 people. Each church would make any church in Canada look pretty bad. The amount of detail in art, statues and altar decorations would be the center of attention in each church. From there, we slowly made our way to the Trevi fountain taking detours all over the place because we really had no idea where we were going even though we had a map. We would pass by the San Carlo Quattro Fontane area which is an intersection where all four corners of the street had a unique stone sculpted fountain.
By the time we had reached the Trevi fountain, the temperature seemed to have risen atlesast 3-5 degrees celsius. The only solution to this was GELATO!!! Gelato in Rome is so cheap. The Trevi fountain is surrounded with competition for the best Gelato. The price for 3 BIG scoops is 2.50 euros which is really really cheap and their was atleast 30 flavours to choose from. To me, this was the best food in Rome hehe. I would gladly trade in my dinner for this.
From the museum, we walked aimlessly to see smaller attractions which we had not planned for the day. We would pass by large attractions but know what they were called nor did we have information about them in the tour book that we had bought for the trip. We walked around the hostel area to become familiar with the area and also find ap lace to do laundry. With the night mainly devoted to laundry and another Pizza meal, we only got to settle in at the hostel and meet some more Canadians that popped up here and there.
Labels: eurotrip
posted by lazypig @ 12:14 PM
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