Roma

Way back in March (2011), Dana and I took a trip to Rome. Dana had a work conference and because I was tagging along, we headed down a few days early. Since we made the trek way back in March, I don’t remember a whole lot of the happenings. What I do remember is lots of rain, which included me trudging through a downpour in search of food. Unfortunately, all I made it back to the hotel with was a wet pair of pants.

But the trip was far from bad. Despite the rain, we had an overall good time. We enjoyed the usual touristy spots like the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill, and the Trevi Fountain. We also walked the better part of the city taking in all of the sites, sounds, and smells (sometimes pleasant, sometimes not). In walking from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, we did witness one of the more humorous moments of the trip.

As we are walking, I see this guy go tearing across the street through traffic, being narrowly missed by a of couple cars. As I am about to point this out to Dana, I see a small statured man, turn to run, bouncing off a well built pedestrian. The small guy hit the ground with fear in his eyes, while the well built pedestrian was clearly annoyed. Turns out the two runners were vending illegally, and when they see cops, they just run.  Into traffic or into other people on the sidewalk. Doesn’t really matter as long as it’s not into the hands of the police.

The other happening, although not very humorous, of remembrance was our trip home. We were taking the high speed train home with a scheduled travel time of 3 hours. After over 2 hours of travel, we had yet to reach Florence. As a nice little extension of the misery, I was sitting next to the most exasperated man in the world. With everything page turn in his magazine, he let out a monster sigh of pure evil. It was as if the pages were the sole cause of his every problem, and he was trying to punish them (and inadvertently, me) with the world’s worst breath (Guinness Book of World Records actually helicoptered next to the train as it limped along and presented him with the award). After what seemed to be forever, we arrived in Florence where we would switch train. As we pulled into the station, I noted that the new train had more cars than our current train. I quickly told Dana that I refused to sit next that man any longer and that we would be riding in a different car. She was worried, but as I thought, 99.9% of the Italians sat in their previous seats still crowded by one another, while we rode in our own plush seats with lovely, clean air.

Below is a gallery of photos of the weekend trip.

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