Written by: Danielle
Photos by: Alicia, Kari, Cori and Danielle
My three friends, Alicia, Kari, and Cori, and I (Danielle) decided to go to Italy for spring break. Kari had the brilliant idea several months ago when she found out her brother and sister-in-law would be in Italy around the same time as our break. She wanted to see them, but didn’t want to go by herself, so, she invited the three of us along, and we accepted, of course. We set off for Italy on the third day of our spring break, eager for pizza, adventure, Italian men, and a brief escape from Africa.
(Incidentally, we almost missed our flight, because we thought we were leaving Wednesday morning, but actually we left Tuesday morning. Fortunately, we checked our flight information...it’s always good to check your flight information.)
While on the trip, we decided to keep a group journal of our travels together. Alicia was the note taker, Cori was in charge of keeping us on task, I (Danielle) was responsible for writing up the journal after, and for some reason Kari didn’t have a job.
So, what follows is a day-to-day account of our travels in Italy—mostly Rome with a day in Naples (actually, Pompeii), and 2 days in Venice. To not overload poor BlogSpot with the-longest-blog-entry-in-the-world (because I cannot—nay, will not be concise: it’s the inner Dickensian in me), I’m going to divide it up day-by-day and also to keep the readers coming back for more, and to make my blog look incredibly popular. Maybe I’ll even get more than 9 followers on my blog.
But that’s just my selfishness coming out. It’s really not about how many followers, but who the followers are.
Whatever. I want as many followers as possible. I was on this other blog that had 40,000 followers, and I thought: “Well, I have 9. And I know every single one of them.”
I want 40,000 followers.
But, I digress.
So, I was elected to write the journal. I apologize to those who have tolerate the travels in Italy through the filter of my thoughts and sense of humor. However, this is a group journal, and all the experiences were contributed by the whole group. So. There you go. No more disclaimers.
Although, I do love disclaimers. I feel like they cover a whole multitude of irreverence—insurance from lightening bolts, or something.
But I digress.
Disclaimer: I tend to digress. Have you noticed? Get used to it. It’s the price you’ll have to pay for reading the group journal.
Okay, Day One:
Day One was a very, very long day. Actually, Day One started before Day One actually started, but I’m going to include going to the airport as a part of Day One, because we didn’t really sleep—especially Cori—more on that later.
Mr. McLane took us the airport that night. Apparently, the only reason he took us the airport was because Kari and Alicia brought him saffron from Spain at Christmas. Kari was slightly “offended” when he lifted her bag last, and let her know it was the heaviest. She felt like it was only the heaviest since it was sort of the biggest, and the last to be lifted. We’ll let heaven be the judge of whether or not it was the heaviest, since Alicia’s and Kari’s bag were weighed together at the check-in.
Mr. McLane gave us some advice as we drove to the airport. He told us that “The coliseum and the forum—they’re nothing.”
Right.
He also told us to beware of the pickpockets. Especially: “Watch out for the Gypsies. They’re everywhere.” And, he told us to go the catacombs, because they were awesome. And they were—Thank, Mr. McLane!
We arrived at the airport, checked in with no problems, and headed through security. I was indignant because some French people budged us in line at the check-in—I felt like they should know better (I mean, really, shouldn’t they?).
At passport control, the customs official asked me for a piece of gum. I didn’t hear him correctly, and thought he was offering gum, which I thought was weird, so I said: “No, merci” as sweetly as possible, because when talking to passport officials, always, always be sweet. Cori was next in line, and he asked her for some gum, and she did actually understand him, so she said yes, she had some. He asked for the whole box of her precious Canadian gum. She said: “How about two?” and went on her way. Fortunately, they did not put her in lock-up for her insolence. That would have been a bit inconvenient.
So, we waited in the lounge to leave and talked about the coming trip. Someone had to go the bathroom. This was the beginning of my little plan that I had all throughout the trip. See, as it turns out, I am a bathroom snob (one of the reasons why I’m a bad MK—that’s a whole other blog entry, though). So, my ploy was to let others go to the bathroom. If it was clean, I would go. If it wasn’t, well, I wouldn’t. But I’d let them scope out the place, or even clean it up a bit. I didn’t know this would turn into my ploy, but it ended up being that way.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I feel like I need to be honest about my problems. I just mostly hate it when the floor is wet, and you’re wearing trousers, and then you have wet trousers that are wet from who knows what—but one can only guess.
(Sometimes I call pants trousers. A shout out to my British friends.)
The bathroom was pretty clean, much to my surprise, for I remember well the days when it wasn’t, and using it scarred you for life. Or infected you for life. (For anyone who uses the Dakar airport women’s restroom—watch out for the first stall, though, because the light bulb was burnt out, and it was very, very dark in there).
The flight wasn’t terribly eventful. Which is good, because this is already long enough, and we haven’t even arrived in Europe yet.
We got into Lisbon with no troubles, we didn’t have to wait in the longest line in the world, as one normally has to wait in, because our plane was actually on time (a rarity with Air Portugal), and we settled ourselves in the food court area to wait a couple of hours. We were happy to find McDonald's, and we indulged in the wonders of a fattening American breakfast.
Please don’t judge us. We live in Africa. We don’t usually eat McDonald’s in America.
I should say that we ended up eating at McDonald’s a lot throughout the trip, and I feel like there are food snobs out there that are going to judge us. Well, I really have nothing to say to you except for two words: “Festival de Glace.” Which is actually 3 words for the math snobs out there. And I don’t care.
Cori can’t sleep on planes, and by this time, she had been up for almost 24 hours, since our plane left in the middle of the night from Dakar. Cori is funny when she’s had no sleep. I’m just going to put that out there. Yes, we did mock her a little bit. But, actually, not because of the no sleeping, but because she attached her airplane travel pillow to her belt, and walked around with it in public.
We got our flight to Rome—no stories there. I don’t think any of us remember the flight to Rome because we were so wiped out. Oh, wait, the flight was delayed, but, we got there, eventually.
We wondered about the man who was coming to pick us up. See, we rented an apartment for the week, and Marcello (pronounced “March-ello” which Cori actually pronounced “Marshmallow” to be funny), the owner, was coming to pick us up. In our “planning” meetings (quotations to indicate that not much “planning” actually took place, much to poor Alicia’s dismay), Alicia called Marcello Mr. Rome. So, we wondered what Mr. Rome would look like—I guessed that he’d be an older man with a white handlebar mustache. We walked out the gate, and there was Mr. Rome—he was indeed an older man, probably over 60, but he did not have a handlebar mustache, and I was extremely disappointed..
But, oh, Marcello. He was a little old Italian man with tight pants, sunglasses (that he wore in the house) and a scarf. He was holding a sign that said: “Karin Ford”—the first time Kari’s ever had her name on a sign at an airport before—quite the rite of passage, I must say. So, pretty much Marcello had eyes only for Kari, since she had been the contact person. He greeted her, but not really the rest of us, took her suitcase, and let her out of the doors of the airport—we followed obediently and quickly. His car was right outside.
And it was a little, little two-door Ford Fiat. And we had 4 American-Canadian sized suitcases with us. He looked at our luggage with dismay:
“Karin—you said small luggage,” He chastised poor Karin.
“No, no—I said “good-sized luggage,” she pleaded.
Note to all travelers in Italy: “good-sized” in America does not mean large in Italy.
We piled two bags in the back, which still left 2 suitcases, our carry-ons, and 5 people to fit in the cab. He offered to take 2, and come back for 2—but we vehemently protested we would fit. So, three of us piled in the back, he passed the 2 “good-sized” suitcases in to our laps, and Cori, Alicia and I sat very, very closely and snuggly in the bag while Kari got the front seat and the awkwardness of talking to Marcello.
He told us that we could ask us any questions that we wanted. The three in the backseat were mostly silent, and so Kari was stuck with the questions and the talking. She handled it well, though. It was funny, because she’d ask him a question, like “What’s your favorite restaurant?” and he’d answer with “Well, the kitchen is fully stocked. You can make spaghetti, or whatever you would like, you can make. And you can go to restaurant and take out pizza, if you like.” Not quite what she’d asked—but still helpful!
We got to the apartment, which was in a building in a courtyard that looked just like Italy.
It was a tiny flat, but it worked for what we needed. Marcello continued to latch on to Kari, and Kari only, and he showed her everything—how the key worked, the doors, the cupboards, the bedrooms, the bathroom, everything with: “Karin, Karin, look—look,” he would say, over and over again. “You turn the key—look, Karin, look—you turn the key like this, Karin. Turn it twice. Not once, Karin, twice.”
He was a funny little man.
We were all exhausted, of course, so once he left, we sat and sort of stared at each other, figured out the room situations, and talked about what to do next. We were famished, so we wanted food, but we didn’t want to break social custom completely, and eat early. So, we went to the little grocery store across the way and bought some provolone cheese, ham (prosciutto in Italy) and bread for our snack and possibly breakfast.
We came back, ate our snack (which was yummy—provolone cheese is yumminess), and Alicia took a shower. Marcello warned us that the hot water didn’t last very long, and that we had to be careful, but it was okay, because no one else was going to shower yet. After eating our snack, we were ready to explore, so we set out on a walk around the neighborhood. It was a cool neighborhood—very European-city-ish, but close to the Vatican—it was almost literally right across the street, and we could see it’s walls as we walked through the streets. We stopped in a few stores, and eventually made our way to our first authentic Italian restaurant of the trip, Rustichella.
It’s important that I take a moment to talk about Rick Steves. No, no, don’t look at your watch. I know it’s been a long time since you started reading this blog post, but it’s just a little bit longer, and it’ll be worth it, I know.
So, at parent-teacher conferences, Mrs. Hampton (during a lull when there were no parents) told me about this awesome travel book writer and guide named Rick Steves. I’d never heard of him, but that's probably because I’ve never traveled using a guidebook before. So, I mentioned it to Alicia, who was the main mover and shaker on our trip to actually get us to plan to do things, and we found it on Amazon as a Kindle book, and Alicia downloaded Rick Steves Rome and Rick Steves Venice onto her Kindle. And thus began a journey between Rick Steves and Alicia, because Rick Steves became Alicia’s muse, and Alicia became our wonderful tour guide because of Rick Steves. Rick Steves was sort of…a 5th traveler with us, speaking wisdom into our trip and our decisions. We even adopted the motto at one point: “What would Rick do?”
He became our friend.
So, Rick Steves actually recommended the restaurant that was right around the corner from our flat, so we went the first night. We really didn’t know if we needed to follow all the social protocols of Italian dining—because that would mean ordering 4 courses of food, and spending a lot of money, so we didn’t follow social protocol, and if they judged us, well, we were willing to take it.
Cori, Kari and I ordered pizza—Cori got the “Funghi” pizza (mushrooms) and Kari and I both got the 4-cheese pizza. Alicia got ravioli. Alicia was on a quest for the best pasta in Italy. That ravioli, apparently, wasn’t.
Cori was so, so, so, so tired by this point—remember that she couldn’t sleep?—that by the time the pizza was delivered, Cori was barely holding herself together. We all were tired, but Cori was exceptionally so. She cut up her pizza, and then, for a long, long, long time held one piece in her hand while the rest of ate.
We were all pretty quiet, and I felt pleased that we were not being the stereotypical North Americans. Basically, we weren’t talking at all. We finally noticed that Cori wasn’t really eating. The rest of us were about half way through our pizzas, and we were almost full—but Cori had only taken 2 bites.
“I’m just…I just…I’m just so tired. And cold.” Cori said feebly.
“I hope they don’t think you don’t like it.” Kari commented.
That was all Cori needed. She finished the one piece like a big girl, and we asked for the check, for carry-out boxes, and went back to the flat.
Alicia was really cold, and so she decided to take another shower to warm up. I mention this as foreshadowing. You’ll have to read the next installment to find out why it mattered. Don’t you like how I am teasing you with little hints? I know, super exciting.
We all went to bed, utterly exhausted, but happy and eager for the next day, the first real day in Italy.
One more disclaimer: yes, yes, yes the name of these blog entries are cheesy. But, first of all, I poured all my creativity into writing the actual account, and secondly, how often in your life can you actually say "When in Rome?"
That's what I thought. Not too often. Unless you're Cori, because this was her third time to Rome.
