Rome: The Romans Hate Me... and Other Tourists

When I left home or even when I had been planning my trip I was conscious of only one thing: I wanted a radical change. I did not want to go somewhere that freely spoke English and sold American style coffee. I chose southern Europe because it was a) warmer than northern Europe, and b) it was completely unlike Canada.

Rome was where the trip really began. And although Rome is the capital of Italy it is the only place in Italy that is actually void of Italians. The streets were filled with immigrants who sold umbrellas when it rained and tripods when the sun shined. Rome was also the only place in italy that had asian restaurants.

Because I threw myself basically into the fire, I was paranoid with a feeling of inadequacy. I was very self-conscious of my language and I perceived that every shopkeeper and waiter despised me, which might have been the case. Rome is, after all, tourist central. Even in the dead of January Rome was swamped with tourists.

My first day in Rome was spent wandering around the wrong train station. I had been Trying to find my hostel, but I did not realize the train from the airport did not take me to the central station. After a couple of hours a very kind gentleman from India gave me directions. Although my pack was 7 kilos lighter than when I returned back to Canada it seemed as though the weight of my bag would kill me. I couldn’t believe how ridiculously heavy a couple pair of clothes, a camera and sandals could really be… later I would laugh at very thought of someone finding a 17 kilo pack heavy.

The police and security guards were my favorite thing in Rome. The sirens are hilariously comical and not at all menacing or authoritative by North American standards. And when you saw a group of 3 police cars scream down the road with the sirens blaring you would laugh because the police there would be police officers crammed into the vehicles little black paddles in hand waving frantically at people demanding that they get out of the way. It felt like it was a scene from an old bugs bunny cartoon. It was hilarious. If I ever were to be pursued by such a spectacle they would catch me quite easily because I would be laughing too heavily to resist. Furthermore there were police officers everywhere! On every street corner stood a police officer with a machinegun in hand listening to an ipod and typing a text message with the free hand. I was always worried that I might accidentally startle an officer and he’d tear me to shreds with his fully automatic gun… I’m not really exaggerating my concern over that one issue.

Among a great deal of other things (such as the charging people to use washrooms in public places) I found the computers especially perplexing. Every country has their own set of rules for the keyboard, and although the differences between an English keyboard and an Italian keyboard were minute, the differences were enough to butcher my use of apostrophes.

The Colosseum was huge and very cool, but I honestly preferred the forums- I wandered through the roman forums during a heavy rain shower and drank from a bottle of wine. The experience of the forums was easily one of my favorite moments I can recall on my trip. It is something that was really uneventful and there was nothing especially great or memorable that happened during that three hour adventure, but the moment lingers in my mind as I type… months later.

One particular aspect that I did appreciate very much was that the country of Italy fully embraced my drinking habits. In effect I did not feel like an alcoholic, and did not find myself the only person drinking wine like it was part of a balanced diet: 6-7 vegetables a day and a bottle of wine.

The Vatican was disgraceful. I half expected to find a pope shot glass in the many boutiques throughout the chapel. We were herded through the chapel like sheep, it was wall to wall with tourists, and it was difficult to stand and admire anything – short of the back of the head of the tourist in front of you. For a person who suffers from misanthropic tendencies the Vatican was hell.

One of the better sights was the Bone Chapel. It was a chapel decorated with the bones of 6,000(?) monks. It was very eerie especially the quote written in bones “what you are now we were, and what we are you will be”. It sure as hell beat the haunted mansion in disneyland.