Friday 10.9.10
Got up and went to breakfast, which was at the bar where we’d been hanging out. There were these cream-filled rolls, and these crunchy bread things and this bland cereal and orange juice. Also we all got a cappuccino, but it didn’t taste like it had much espresso in it, if any. I’ve heard that Italians normally have really light breakfasts anyway. I met my German roommates and explained to them how I showed up to the Spanish Steps after they’d already left. They were really nice; even though they probably speak better English than I speak German (most young Europeans do, especially Germans) we conversed in German. I like it when people understand that I’d rather practice German and use that. Also they weren’t mad or anything that I hadn’t met them at the Steps, though I said I would. So I met up with the Swiss girl and we set off together. We went by this place called Campo de’Fiorni, which I think used to be a Roman camp but now is this big open air market. People were selling various things, among them furs and fruit. Myrjam went into a clothing store to look at stuff. She asked me I got bored walking into clothing stores with girls, and I said a little but I was used to it from travelling around with Martha. The cool thing about hanging with Myrjam all day was that, firstly she’s a really cool person, my age, and interesting to talk to, and not bad-looking to boot, and second we were speaking German, and she’d always correct me when I messed up the grammar, which as I said was helpful. She was amused that I carried a compass around, but said it was useful. We also went into a bunch of churches, and went to this little island in the middle of the Tiber River, which turned out not to have much on it, really. We went to the Vittoriano, the giant classical structure with the equestrian statue of Vittore Emmanuelle II, the first king of Italy. Inside is a free museum dealing with the wars of the last few centuries. We went to this café on top of the Vittoriano and I got an espresso doppio (double espresso, i.e. two shots. Also I think café and espresso are interchangeable in Italian, because they, like Viennese, drink only espresso drinks and never what Americans think of as regular coffee) to get some more energy for the day. Myrjam was writing a postcard to her best friend in Swiss German and asked me to try to read it. She laughed a lot at my attempts to pronounce the Swiss words. In my defence, her handwriting isn’t super legible, though it’s not bad, but that added to my inability to read it. Anyway I did get the basic gist of what she was saying, because it was similar enough to High German. Myrjam wanted to return to the hostel to take a nap; she was staying in Rome for a few more days and wasn’t in a super big rush. I, however, was planning on leaving the next day, so I wanted to go see the Colosseum and other stuff that day.
So we parted ways and I headed to the Colosseum, waited in line for a bit listening to Flogging Molly and paid my €15 to get in. It is a cool feeling to be standing inside the famous Colosseum, which is about two thousand years old. It’s all ruinous, too. There are old ruins lying around everywhere which you’re not allowed to touch, in fact you can be punished for it under Italian law. I’m not sure what the punishment entails, but knowing how much Italians value their history I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it. So it’s this big falling apart ring with multiple levels. On the ground there’s this kind of labyrinth where I guess the gladiators ran around trying to find and kill one another? There is also a new-looking stage. Makes me wonder if they ever have concerts or performances there today? That would be cool as hell, to attend something in the Colosseum. They also had some exhibits showing old gladiator armour and weapons and stuff, and giving information in Italian and English about old Roman and gladiator life. One cool thing that happened was that this old German couple said, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ and I tried to give them instructions as to how to get onto the ground level. I’m not sure I helped them much, but it was cool to meet yet more German speakers in Italy. I’m not sure if I look like I speak German or if they just decided to ask a random fellow. The second cool thing was that I was wearing my UCSD John Muir College T-shirt that day, and these three guys accosted me and said they were UCSD alumni! Two of them were from Muir and one from Sixth or ERC or one of those unimportant colleges. Anyway, how fucking cool! To meet UCSD alumni in the Colosseum! What an insanely amazing coincidence. So we talked about UCSD and Muir College for a bit. I think they’d graduated a few years ago; they looked maybe late twenties or thirty. So that was really cool. After the Colosseum I think I just walked around the forum a bit. I found the Circus Maximus, but it was just this field where they were doing some sort of earth-moving or construction. It didn’t even look like a race track. I’m pretty sure that was it, anyway. I heard it was unimpressive. Think I saw a few more things before heading back to the hostel.
Went up to Myrjam’s room, and she said to meet in the bar, and I worked on my paper a bit and then went down and got some wine, Myrjam was talking to this French dancer who was in Rome to study dance. Then we ended up talking to these Japanese guys. Apparently there are Japanese travelling all over Europe right now. They spoke varying degrees of English, but they were fun to talk to. Myrjam kept trying to learn Japanese words. I guess five languages isn’t enough for her. One of the guys asked me if I watched Full House. You know, that show from the early 90s, where Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen are like 3 years old, and I think Bob Saget’s in it? Well he really liked it. I have no idea how a Japanese guy my age ends up liking an American sitcom from twenty years ago. It was totally bizarre and unexpected. Maybe American producers recycle their shows to foreigners once American stop paying for them? I don’t know. Another amusing thing is that they had this little pocket computer thing that would translate Japanese to English. One thing cool about that is that it had only English letters, but they type with those. Certain combinations of those letters are used to type Japanese characters, I guess. I’ve heard Japanese has over 2000 characters, so of course it’d be impossible to have a keyboard that large, but I didn’t know they typed with English keyboards. That’s interesting. (Side note: I later saw a German keyboard in Vienna and I totally want one now.) Anyway, so they pulled out this pocket computer and typed something into it, and the translation was ‘get drunk.’ They then showed me and pointed to it and pointed to their friend, I guess telling me that he was drunk? I’d been wondering why he was speaking less than the others. Also the Japanese guy who likes Full House has bright orange hair. Also he gave Myrjam and I his email address, and it contains an l, so he made this little diagram where there was a circle next to a capital L and an x next to a 1, so we’d know it was the letter L and not the number one. It was cool and efficient. Anyway so they were pretty cool to talk to. Eventually some of them went to bed and this Dutch couple came by with a South African guy they’d met. They all spoke pretty good English. Eventually the Dutch girl decided she wanted to dance and Myrjam also liked dancing, so they made us get up and dance with them. One of the Japanese guys who was still up danced really enthusiastically; it was fun to watch him. Eventually we stopped dancing; I talked to the South African for a while. He was pretty cool and also like, kinda built. He said his native language was Afrikaans, and English was a foreign language for him. He was pretty good with it though. He said South Africa has 11 official languages, but Afrikaans and English were the only ones he spoke. I asked him how similar Afrikaans was to Dutch, since South Africa was settled by the Dutch, and he said if he spoke Afrikaans and the Dutch couple spoke Dutch very slowly, they could kind of understand one another. But it was easier for them to converse in English. Anyway he was a pretty cool guy, I think he was in Rome for an electrical engineering conference or something like that. So after we’d talked for a while the Dutch and Swiss and Japanese came by and decided they wanted pizza and ice cream. It was like, 2 am by this point, so we set off looking for stuff, but the only things still open were those shady food stands. They got some food. Myrjam got this popcorn that turned out to be horrible, I mean just horrid. It was so bland and kind of staleish. It was the worst popcorn I’ve ever had. No one really liked it and she kept trying to get me to eat more of it, because she didn’t really like it either and wanted to get rid of it, but despite liking her I refused. After wandering around for a while having fun and talking with a bunch of foreigners (I swear it is the very coolest thing ever to be in a group of people hanging out and be the only American there, or even the only native English speaker), we headed back to the hostel. I slept.
The gorgeous Fountain di Trevi!
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