Day 5 – Rome

Again with the bright and early. And adventures with setting wake up calls. Le sigh. (That is my signature phrase this week. You like?)

Today, we used the cruise’s tour bus to get us to the city and back (1 ½ hours each way, which they tell us would be 350 euros by taxi!). But, we are doing Rome “on our own.” Which means that Sonya, as the one who has been here before, gets to play tour guide.

Well, at least until we start trying to figure out how to use the map. Then, as navigator, I’m afraid I kind of take over. Bad husband, no cookie. Or cannoli. Whatever. Learned a couple useful tips about maps, though. First, they don’t work so well when you don’t keep a consistent scale, and mark things using big cute cartoons that only approximate their location. This is what the map for the tour bus we were using to get from site to site within Rome did. It made it damned hard to find certain things like, say, the bus stop to get picked up. Second, maps are much easier to use in the US, where we have street names clearly posted. It took me quite a while to get the hang of finding the street names on the buildings that would then correspond to street names on the map. The twisting, winding glorified alleyways that we were using as streets didn’t help much.

We did many of the big deal things. The Pantheon was awe-inspiring. The Trevi Fountain was beautiful. Of course, I’ve always heard that the Spanish Steps are right around the corner from the Trevi Fountain, and you can’t visit one without the other. But, this took us well away from the route of the tour bus, which inserted a big walking tour in the middle. A tour that was then complicated by some sort of demonstration, blocking our path, and forcing us to take a further detour. Grr.

We did have lunch at a nice little cafe with a whole bunch of Italian Army soldiers. Hey, if it’s good enough for soldiers, it’s probably cheap and hearty. And, well, it was.

We then made it over to the Colosseum. Again, awe-inspiring. They suckered us into paying $4 for an audio tour, under the concept that it was also a much shorter line. Of course, said shorter line only had one guy manning it, meaning that we might have saved as much as five minutes. Le sigh. Personally, I wasn’t much impressed by the audio tour. But, that may partly have been that we were a bit rushed, it didn’t tell me much of anything I didn’t already know, and I wasn’t crazy about the voice actor (though, he had a delightful British upper crust way of saying “common people” with a curled lip that made me laugh).

My detour to the Spanish Steps meant that we had to skip the Forum in order to get back to the Vatican in time. (Cue “Get Me To the Church on Time” from My Fair Lady.) Ray and Tina went in and looked at St. Peter’s Basilica, while Sonya and I went around, did some shopping, and got some gelatto (I had a flavor called “Zuppa Inglese,” or “English Soup,” which turned out to be a sort of rum punch).

Back on the bus, back to the boat. Huzzah! Sonya and I decided to pretty much skip that whole Thanksgiving thing, and bum out at the buffet restaurant instead. And, once again, the entertainment opportunities on the ship let us down. Second City, the comedy troupe, performed on board tonight and tomorrow night. But, they didn’t even go on until 9:45pm. By which time, on any given night, we expect to already be thinking hard about bed. There’s just not much else out there to hold our interest. And, unfortunately, the wind was cold enough out there to make just sitting on the deck or the balcony a little too cold.

I say it again. Le sigh. We are leading such a hard life, aren’t we?

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