Since Tina already covered the "cultural" and "intellectual" parts, I thought I'd share a few things that make American students (specific ones anyway) the laughing stock of Rome.
Our artistic determination. At the Villa Borghese there was this beautiful fountain with an arch behind it. We decided to take a picture of us within the arch with the fountain in front. It was a beautiful shot, but it consisted of someone pressing the button on the camera, sprinting across a busy street, climbing up a rock, and striking a pose before the camera's 12 second timer went off. We tried it 5 or 6 times. The first few weren't even close. After we had perfected our rock-climbing/jumping technique, we got a wonderful shot of Andy just coming over the ledge, out of breath. Not quite satisfied, we kept trying, trading off runners when one got tired, and finally got a picture of the three of us, except Andy was turned towards me, telling me to hurry up. We were frustrated, but the tourists walking nearby were thoroughly entertained, and finally a nice Dutch lady offered to take the picture for us.
We are goal-oriented. For dinner we went to a new part of town, Trestevere, across the river, because Andy's guidebook had a nice looking restaurant. Unfortunately our guidebook did not have a sufficiently detailed map to find it. We easily got to within 2 blocks of the place, passing dozens of wonderful restaurants. From there, it was trial and error, mostly error, as we systematically searched a street, returned to the starting point, then developed a renewed faith in our original direction and re-explored the street half a block further. After a number of iterations, much discussion, and probably 15 minutes of walking after a long day of much more walking, Andy finally talked us into turning one more corner and we found it. It looked kind of lame and over priced, lots of American tourists, so we scrapped the plan and returned to this wonderful outdoor place that we had seen earlier. The people who were positioned to see us trek back and forth 5 or 6 times probably have a good story abut these lost American tourists they saw. Which brings me to the next point:
Our impeccable sense of direction. Tonight, in search of a specific monument, we decided to take a back way, so we walked along the river, and I led us right into a fenced off ruin. We wandered around a bit when Andy (also known as "Fearless Leader" to half of the group) walked beneath a scaffold beneath a giant ancient temple ruin, and somehow managed to find an alleyway to get through. We didn't really know where we were (our map seems to be missing a lot of the streets) but we choose a path each time the road forked, and maneuvered our way through nearly-deserted back alleys until we pop out of the street with the statue of Marcus Aurelius we were searching for pointed right towards us. Tina was impressed, Andy and I were more surprised. We all were pleased.
Our immediate immersion into the culture. We practice our Italian every chance we get. Unfortunately we only know about 3 words (which is better than it sounds, "Prego" is used for just about anything) so we end up having entire conversations on the street consisting of "Mi scusi", which always gets a smile out of the Italians nearby.
One last fun thing about Rome is the traffic, the drivers are crazy, but the pedestrians are insane! Crosswalks often do not have lights, but the tourists are intimidated by the fast moving honking cars. What it usually takes is for some brave or possibly suicidal Italian to step out in front of oncoming traffic and slow the cars down enough so the rest of the meek tourists can swarm across. The drivers always seem to slow down, and we just follow behind the crazy Italian pedestrian leader, use him as a human shield to get across. We're finally going to get the hang of it right before we leave. We need Deepa here to hit cars for us and put them in their place.
Having fun, Vatican tomorrow, Serbia after that. Woohoo Europe!
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