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hi ho, hi ho, it's off to rome i go
so i haven't really talked about it much before hand, but here i am at 4am on april 2 waking up to catch a plane to rome with mai and her sister jessie. there's just so much going on this month, and this year, that i just deal with things when they happen. so waking up at 4am is me being like "holy carp, i'm going to rome!"
my friend steve comes down to new orleans to house sit for us and gives us a ride to the airport. we make it through security with minimal fuss (they took my yogurt though, they classify it as a liquid and it was more than 3.5 ounces) and patiently awaited our plane at the gate.
to get a cheaper fare, the agency we booked it through flew us into laguardia in new york but then transferred us to a flight out of jfk airport. so since we had to sort of drive through the city anyway, we had lunch with our friend sheila in between.
she met us a place called zoe that is in soho and was really good. we actually beat her there since our cab driver asked if he could take an alternate route into the city that was longer mileage-wise but would be shorter time wise due to less traffic at this hour. we told him yes, lets see what you can do and thus began our near horrifying break neck speed dash into the city. true to his word, there was very little traffic, thus he had very few reasons to ever slow down. i'm a fan of roller coasters, and have been known on occasion to push my car through a turn or two, but this guy's weaving and darting and quick braking was almost more than my stomach could take. thankfully, he got us there in record time before my nausea rose to "i'm about to embarrass myself in the cab please pull over" levels.
being the gluttons for punishment that we are, we called the same cabbie after lunch and he repeated his performance while getting us to jfk airport, again in record time. thankfully we got there so early that i was able to sit and eat a cookie and let my stomach and other various innards resume their usual positions in my abdominal cavity before our flight took off.
the flight passed essentially without notice, except for a bit of turbulence in the beginning. once that settled down, we hunkered in for our 7 hour flight. i closed my eyes a lot but didn't sleep very much. we were in coach and i'm a sort of big guy and i just couldn't get comfortable. we toyed with upgrading to business class but the flight was over booked and we felt lucky to be on it at all. now a 7 hour flight isn't such a bad thing to stay awake for, however in new orleans time, we left new york at 4:30pm and got to rome at 12:30am. in local time, we left at 4:30pm and got there at 7:30am. we had already been awake for about 20 hours and suddenly it's morning again. ugh.
however, we're suddenly in rome, italy and not about to waste the day, so it's up and at'em and off we go.
we passed through customs with barely a nod from the customs agent. even my attempt at saying "buongiorno" went unrecognized. which i suppose is just as well, i'm sure customs agents are on that list of people you really don't want to be too highly recognized by, somewhere between the dea and the fbi.
mai had been reading some of her italy tour book and it suggested the train was a cheaper and potentially faster way into the city than the usual taxi cab. so we headed off into the direction nof the train tracks, bought an express ticket to "rome termini", which sounded fairly like the roman version of grand central station, and then followed the ticket agent's helpful instructions of "platform 2 on the right" and entered the train which as far as i could tell was on platform 2 and on the right.
of course, as you may already be guessing from the phrasing of that previous paragraph, we were not on the express train to roma termini. about 10 train stops later, as the two business looking men across from us, whom we completely assumed looked like they would be going into rome, started to gather their belongs at a stop that looked to be between "the middle of no where" and "lord only knows where", i did my best italian impersonation and asked (in italian) if they spoke english (which they did) and asked if we were on the train to rome, to which they immediately replied "no, you're headed to orta."
dang it.
so we get off the train, get back on the next train going the opposite direction (which i verified by watching the flashing l.e.d. sign on the side said "airport") and, about 3 hours later, ended up back where we started, not really any worse for the experience, but certainly very much hungrier. as we walked back up the platform, i scanned the signs and saw where my critical mistake came from. when the ticket agent said "platform 2 on the right", she meant "go to platform 2, which is on our right". i thought she meant "go to platform 2 and take the train to your right". when standing on platform 2, if you take the train to your right, you are actually taking the train on platform 3, which we all now know is not the train to rome, but in fact is the train to orta. having figured this out, and apologizing to my two weary and equally as hungry traveling companions, we boarded the actual express train to rome and finally, about 3ish hours later than we should have, actually made it to rome, italy.
so having already had a big adventure and not having even really been in rome yet, we decided to forestall any chance of a second big adventure occurring in the near future and borrowed a friendly person's rome street map while on the express train. we started the whole trip not really knowing where our hotel was (other than somewhere in rome) and even if we took a cab to it from the train station, we wanted to know where it was. as it turned out, it was about 8 blocks from the train station, and it being a beautiful day out, we walked it instead of getting a cab.
an appropriate amount of time later, having discovered where rome's china town is in the process, we entered our hotel lobby and for the first time in about 24 hours, were able to set our luggage down and not drag it along with us. that was just about my personal highlight of the prior 24 hours.
freshly shed of baggage and wearing a fresh shirt, we walked back towards a corner cafe and gelato place we saw. we had a meal, trying out two of the three main food groups of italy (pasta and a panini, we were saving pizza for later) and also got a salad, a cappuccino, a mojito (just to see how italians made one) and a campari soda (since i had never had one and it was an italian apertif).
the fettuccine pasta with pesto sauce was ok (though the pesto really tasted fresh, very basily and romano cheesy it was a bit dry), the panini was good (really nice bread, not enough prosciutto) and the salad was very tasty (it was grilled steak with porcini mushrooms, both of which were very flavorful, though the steak was a touch tough). the mojito was bad, the compari soda tasted like fizzy cough syrup (and not the tasty kind of cough syrup, the antiseptic nasty kind your crotchety old aunt would make you take when you were off visiting her as a kid and you happened to cough just once while in her presence) and the cappuccino was actually really good.
we also discovered something the tour book warned us of and we ignored and that is that when you sit down at many of these street side cafe places, you get charged about triple for "eating in" as opposed to what you would get charged if you just walked inside yourself and ordered all the same stuff to go. so we decided to not fall into that trap again and to make sure we found more local, out of the way places to eat from there on out and not big, touristy oriented places that were looking to gouge the tourists for all they could. in our defense, the restaurant didn't look like a touristy place when we first sat down, but as we ordered and ate, the signs all appeared. oh well, live and learn and we were really hungry.
a quick trip to the gelato place after we ate and it was off to the colosseum with us. it was about 8 blocks away so we had a nice little stroll getting there, again made all the more joyous by having no luggage with us). we found it with no problems at all and found it to be very cool. there were huge lines so we didn't take the tour inside, but just being on the sidewalk looking at it gave you a sense of just how big this thing is and many blood thirsty shouting romans must have been having the time of their life watching some poor gladiator getting mauled by a tiger. i know i would have been there watching the show.
next, we decided to stick with the "big old places people used to gather at" theme that we started with by seeing the colosseum and we walked to the pantheon. again it was about 8ish blocks (more like 10 really but who's counting) and we had a nice little stroll there. on the way, mai was really starting to feel the lack of sleep and the time shift and i offered to get us a cab once we got there and head back to the hotel for an afternoon nap.
we made it to the pantheon and unlike its combat sport oriented big brother the colosseum, the pantheon was completely free to go inside and so we did. for considering when it was built, it is a dang big domed room with no ceiling supports at all. that alone makes it impressive, but then looking at all the marbles and statues and frescoes and everything else that is inside of it, it's definitely something you must see if you're in rome.
having accomplished our days only real goals (aside from eating more food for dinner still), mai was lucky to still be standing she was so tired so i said lets get a cab and go to the hotel. she said she was good enough to walk still so off we went. although the distance from the pantheon to the hotel was shorter than the distance we covered from the hotel to the colusseum to the pantheon, it still took about 45 mintues to walk back. mai was barely awake and looked more like a zombie than anything else.
we retrieved our room key from the front desk, put mai to bed and then me and jessie took a quick walk to get some more bottles of water for the room and a cup of ice for her. once back in the room, jessie quickly joined mai in sleepy-time land while i sat down to chronicle the days events. part of me thinks a nap would be a good thing (at the risk of messing up my sleep schedule towards an italian point of view), the other part of me thinks i should just tough it out through dinner and then crash and wake up in the morning and be all adjusted to italy time. after thinking about it for a moment, i opt for staying awake and play some solitaire waiting for the girls to wake up for dinner.
about 45 minutes later, they both stir and get up. we leave the room and check with the front desk for a dinner recommendation, some place the locals would go, not tourists. they give us directions to a place just a few blocks away and we head off.
about half way there, i realize that if he told me the name of the restaurant, i had forgotten it. i was too focused on the directions. we arrive at the place he led us to and there's two restaurants that it could be. as we walk past the first, i look at the crowd and see a big mix of people... whites, blacks, indians, europeans. the second place looked like just italians, so we get in line for that one. a five minute wait later and we're at the table.
we get a seat in the back room, the only seat that was available, and start checking the menu. we had seen a few dishes being served and tried to find them on the menu since they looked very good. about 10 minutes later, we signal for the waitor and order steak and cherry tomatoes, orrichette with clams, magliatina with mussels, pizza stracchino (prosciutto, fig and goat cheese) and a deep fried zucchini flower as an appetizer. mai and jessie split a bottle of the house red and i get a bottle of water.
as the waitor walks away, the electricity goes out and the restaurant is plunged into darkness. some customers start singing happy birthday, which makes us think that is their birthday gimic, but then when we see the wait staff starting to hand out big candles to each table, we realize it's not their birthday gimic, they really lost power. however, no other customers were getting up and they still brought out food for a table, so we figure it's a mostly (or all) gas kitchen and we just enjoy our cable lit wine.
maybe 10 minutes later, before any of our food can arrive, the lights come back on and we feel reassured that dinner will go on with a problem. the zucchini flower arrives and is ok. i was actually surprised to see any deep fried food in italy, but it was well done.
the steak dish comes next and it is sadly not the one we saw being delivered to the table we saw as we walked in. it was ok, but this ended up being more a stir fry dish, where the one we saw walking in was a nice medium rare grilled dish.
our pasta dishes follow the steak. the orichette with clams (we didn't know what either of the pasta dishes were which is why we ordered them) was our least favorite dish of the night. the clams were small and none of us like the orrichette pasta itself. the maltagliata with mussels, however, was very tasty. it was a flat pasta about 2 - 2.5 inches square with a very light butter, white wine and sautéed tomatoes sauce. the mussels were not bad but could have been bigger. we started mixing the steak with the maltagliata pasta and found it to be a nice combination.
as the pizza followed last, we decided to order the other steak dish and a salmon pasta that also had caught our eye since we weren't yet full and the two girls really wanted the grilled steak. the waiter seemed a bit surprised, but gladly took the order. the pizza itself was also very good, the only dish we found no complaint with. thin but still chewy and firm dough, really delicious prosciutto, sweet figs and a really tasty goat cheese. this was a really good pizza.
the steak dish comes out and still wasn't the one we saw being delivered, but it was a nice medium rare grilled steak. this one was on a bed of rocket (a kind of lettuce favored by all of italy it seems) with really tangy and sharp grated parmesan cheese on top. the salmon pasta ended up being the smoked salmon appetizer, served with a piece of whole fresh mozzarella cheese on yet more rocket. this was not the pasta we saw on the menu but after tasting it, we were glad the waiter goofed up since this was a very close second behind the pizza to being our favorite dish.
we finally decide that we are done with entrees and i mention the really good looking tiramisu and strawberry tart that i saw while walking in. jessie saw them as well so we order one of each, plus a cappuccino for the two ladies and a grappa for myself. the strawberry tart ended up being a strawberry tiramisu and was far superior to the traditional chocolate/espresso one. the grappa was like rubbing alcohol but the cappuccino's were delicious. since i was not downing the grappa with any amount of speed (it had been 10 years since i had tried some and got it entirely just to see what it was like) jessie asked if she could have it and then promptly dumped it into her cappuccino. she loved it and me and mai thought it was interesting. i christened it the "grappaccino" and said we could add it to our menu.
very stuffed and happy, we took the long way home to walk off a few calories. we saw some very fun blown glass bottles filled with grappa that had two little figures in them engaged in various sexual activities. we thought they were fun, but not enough to spend 95 euros on them.
we finally made it back to the room where we all promptly passed out.
to be continued...
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