Days 37, 38, 39, and 40

So before you can start reading all the excruciating details of my European adventure (and trust me, they’re excruciating: especially the amount of gelato I ate), you must first wade through the three days before I left. But as I am a kind and benign blog author, I’ll keep it short.

Day 37: Saw War Horse at the National Theatre and cried like a hungry, angry baby all the way back to the flat. Yes, the horse and the boy live through the war and find each other again despite the fact that the boy’s blinded by tear gas and the horse has gone lame, but this play pushed all my heroic sacrifice buttons with a vengeance. And my animal buttons (activated especially by that damned SPCA ad with Sarah McLachlan music over pictures of sad animals in cages and text like ‘I’m a good dog’ and ‘I’m scared’), and my World War One buttons, and anyway the puppets were amazing and the actors were amazing and the music (done by folk singer John Tam) was also great.

Day 38: Went to the Apollo and Victoria Theatre and saw Wicked with Erin, Mandi, and Kate. Our Elphaba was fabulous, a rival to Idina Menzel herself, and her rendition of ‘Defying Gravity’ about scorched the paint off the walls. Our Glinda (or Galindia, to use the playbill’s name), wasn’t quite so good; her voice was too deep for Glinda.

Day 39: We had our exam with Dr. King in the morning, then took the Underground and National Express buses to Stansted Airport to the north of London, which is an airport intended for budget airlines like Ryanair. The flight was unmemorable. I don’t know why people think of budget airlines as some sort of Great Satan of aviation; the seats were the same size as American Airlines, the windows had shades, and you didn’t have to pay to use the bathroom. The only drawback is that you are part of the most captive audience known to man not currently incarcerated in the penal system, seeing as you are trapped inside a metal tube whizzing at ridiculous speed high over the earth, and so Ryanair takes full advantage of this fact by forcing you to listen to infomercials on the flight. These aren’t interesting infomercials, like the ones with Shaquille O’Neal taking an hour to demonstrate the amazing properties of the Flavorwave Oven; these are infomercials for perfume, drinks, and the execrable food served by Ryanair. As we landed at Ciampino in Rome, the Italians aboard erupted in clapping and cheering, as though the fact that our pilot had succeeded in performing his job by not crashing headlong into the earth was some sort of momentous event.

Anyway, Chase, Nick and I took a shuttle from Ciampino to Termini Station in the heart of Rome. Along the way I saw prostitutes making deals by an abandoned gas station, the massive walls of what looked like some medieval fortress, and off to one side, in a field, Roman ruins reared out of the darkness and gleamed red and white in the spotlights. We arrived at Termini, devoured pizza in a fast food place in the station that was on the verge of closing (but put our chairs up ourselves, as we wanted to be the good type of American tourists), then confronted the problem of getting to the hostel. Finally we decided on a taxi.

So began the most sketch cab ride of my life. The old man led us away from the station into an alley and an unmarked white car, where I squished in next to Nick and realized that I had no seatbelt. Ill at ease to say the least, I drank my Fanta and pretended that my head wasn’t running with visions of the driver delivering us to the Mafia to have our organs taken out or my brain ending up on the sidewalk following a high-speed collision with one of the many insane moped drivers screaming down the city streets. So I wasn’t happy, if you get my drift.

Then he turned on the American blues music.

I imbibed my Fanta faster, determined that if he was attempting to lull us into complacency with sad American music about the many ways in which one’s wife, dog, or house can leave you, I would go with a full stomach.

But as you can tell from the fact that I’m writing this, he turned out to be a legit (if unlicensed) cab driver, and dropped us off at our hostel. The hostel turned out to be more or less a Mecca for drunk people, and our sleep was interrupted every night by the sounds of carousing. Erin was already there, and Chase, having decided that he didn’t want to sleep in a tent with unknown people, bunked on our floor in what I’m sure was a contributing factor to his illness later in the week. After getting unpacked, we all went to sleep.

By the way, the massive walls turned out to belong to the Vatican, and will play an integral part in my last day in Rome.

Day 40: We woke up, purchased our Metro tickets from a kiosk down by the bus stop, and took the thirty-minute bus ride to Cornelia Station. The Roman underground is a weird dichotomy; the stations themselves are horrendously seedy, with graffiti splashed across dark cinderblock walls, but the trains are sparkling and equipped with televisions. The televisions only show the same four commercials and the video of the small dog walking on his front legs in order to pee on the curb, but it’s still quite a step up from the London underground. We arrived near the Trevi Fountain and stopped at a fruit stand for breakfast, where I purchased an apple and a plum to munch on contemplatively as we wandered through narrow alleyways towards the Trevi Fountain. The plaza around the Fountain was filled to bursting with tourists taking photographs, Roma shilling cheap kitsch (and it was all the same cheap kitsch), and Italians zooming through every once in a while on mopeds and motorcycles. I thought about my Latin teacher, Dr. Schilpp, and his students, sitting at cafes by the Fountain and throwing things at the tourists, and imagined I felt the ghostly fall of change on my head.

After the Fountain, we emerged onto a main street and sighted a sign for the Pantheon. The Pantheon not being something to miss, we went stomping off down that alley, talking to each other about how cool the Trevi Fountain was and blocking the impatient Italian drivers behind us: the quintessential American tourists. The Pantheon was surrounded by Roma, many deformed, begging for money; carriages with angry-looking horses attached; and of course, the omni-present tourists. Entering the Pantheon was sadly not as much of a historical communion experience as I hoped; there were just too many people milling about and taking photographs for me to get a real sense of the place, or of its past as a Roman temple and Christian church. The roof was beautiful in its austerity, though; the Catholics had left the roof plain white and confined themselves to decorating the bottom sections, and where they decorated they did so with a vengeance. Gilt and marble and gold encrusted every section like we'd stepped into some sort of freakish Lady Gaga nightmare. But we saw the tomb of Raphael, which was, I must admit, quite cool.

After the Pantheon, we went to the Monument of Vittorio Emanuele II. Referred to by Romans as 'the typewriter,' this incredible edifice (incredibly ugly) looms over the Forums and the entire city, a colossal monument to a country's bad taste. Designed to honor Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a united Italy, the monument is so large that an entire medieval neighborhood had to be bulldozed to give it space. It's also a blinding white that does nothing to blend in with the surrounding area, and it's so large that one can see it from almost any rooftop or hill in the city. It is like, in the immortal words of Prince Charles, "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an old and much-loved friend." Or, in the words of Seth McFarlane, it insists upon itself. The Monument also holds the tomb of Italy's Unknown Soldier, although (and I have to admit I found this surprising, and not a little offensive) they've buried his body inside the pedestal for the giant equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele II, like the king is somehow better than the people that die for him.

After the Monument, we wandered down a bunch of side-streets towards the Fountain of Three Rivers, and happened upon a square with Roman ruins in the center. They were unassuming (although there was an incredible population of feral cats lounging around on the Roman brickworks), and it was only when I started reading the sign that I realized where we were. This forum was the place where Julius Caesar had been stabbed to death, forever changing the face of the Roman Empire and the course of history. The rest of the group was ready to move on after a quick glance around, but I could have stayed there forever, gazing at the grass-covered stones where Caesar had fallen.

We went to the Fountain of Three Rivers, admired the personifications of the rivers and the subtle sculpting of the animals emerging from between the personifications, then went to lunch at a cafe down an alley. Lunch was delicious: a mozzarella and marinara pizza folded over into a sandwich-type thing. After lunch, we wandered back towards the Pantheon and ducked into a church, the Church of Saint Ignacio, on the way. The ceiling had an incredible fresco splashed upon it, and there was an interesting altar dedicated to the iconography of the Sacred Heart that had innumerable hearts on the wall like, I don't know, some sort of really demented surgeon's office.

After Saint Ignacio, we went back towards the Monument and past it down into the ruins of the Imperial Forum. The sun gleamed on the red Roman bricks, on the Temple of the Vestal Virgins and the green-rusted door of the Temple of Romulus, mythical founder of Rome, and I could hardly contain my exuberance at the fact that I was walking on the same stones, in the same path, as some of the greatest names of the ancient world. And some not-so-great names, such as Caligula, who was actually quite a good emperor for the first few months of his reign. It was only after he had a terrible fever that he turned into the psychotic overlord that wandered the dark halls of his palace commanding the sun to rise. My good mood was spoiled a bit by watching two utter asshats climb over the ropes onto the ruins, so that the girl could pose herself like some sort of Cosmopolitan cover model on the stones of the Temple of the Vestal Virgins while the guy took pictures.

Anyway, after that we went up onto the Palatine Hill. This was prime ancient Roman real estate, the home of emperors, consuls, and senators, the Roman Beverly Hills. Again, I could've stayed there for hours, gazing at the House of Two Griffins or the pre-Roman huts, or the beautiful mosaics crumbling off the stone of the stadium, but as my traveling companions weren't quite as rapt as I was, we left after two hours, ravenously hungry.

We went to a cafe called Bibo by the Monument, where I had the best spaghetti with olive oil, garlic, and chilis I've ever had in my life. This food was like an explosion of flavor, although I suppose a less violent metaphor might be appropriate, considering that these were only Ancho chili peppers and not the feared Ghost pepper. After that, we went back to a gelato shop by the Trevi Fountain, where I got some gelato (it begins). Eating our respective amazing desserts, we took the train and the bus back to the hostel, where we fell into bed, exhausted.

Pictures:

The roof of the Pantheon, illuminated by light.

The colonnade of an art museum we saw on the Via Corso, but didn't go into.

The 'typewriter,' or Monument to Vittorio Emanuele.

Part of Trajan's Forum. The building on the left is part of Trajan's Market, the world's first shopping mall. The building on the right is the back wall of the Temple of Mars the Avenger, built by Augustus Caesar to house Julius Caesar's sword. If you look closely, you can see the marks where the roof once was.

The crazy feral cat population in the forum where Julius Caesar was assassinated.