When in Rome

I hate to brag, but I'm pretty much at the peak of awesomeness on this trip. How, you may be asking, could I possibly reach such a peak? Well, it's 8:30 PM and I just left my dad to come back to the hotel room so I could blog and watch a Kid Rock concert on MTV Europe while he went to find a bar to have drinks and meet people. That awesome. Let me start from the beginning.

I flew into Rome from Amsterdam last Saturday and had a night to kill before meeting up with my dad. My intention was to find some cheap food and get an early night's sleep. However, that didn't happen - as it rarely seems to over here. I met a few Americans in my hostel room who were on their way out to dinner, so I figured I'd join them. They were a few years younger, all college kids studying a semester abroad in Holland. They were just visiting Rome for the weekend. They were all pretty fun, so after dinner we went out for drinks. Then a bunch of drama went down like you only see in bad sitcoms. The guy there had a bad combination of too much wine and an unrequited crush on one of the girls. Somehow it ended up being just the 3 of us at the table when it went down, and it just got messy. Gotta hand it to the guy for laying it out there, because he definitely made his feelings be known. He just wasn't doing such a good job at hearing that the feelings were not being returned. This conversation went on for about 30 minutes, him telling her how much he liked her, etc and her saying how much she didn't. With me there. He even tried pulling me into it a couple times, which I just refused to allow to happen. I excused myself to go to the bar and get the hell out of the convo and when I came back all I saw was him storming off towards the hostel with his glass of wine in hand. Ah well. We had a few more drinks, awkwardly laughed off what had just transpired, and eventually made it back to the hostel. I was kinda thankful that group had to take off early the next morning, so I didn't have to see any more of the awkwardness.

So on Sunday I killed a couple hours and went to the hotel my dad had booked. Note the lack of “s” in hotel. A real hotel. As in no sharing the bathroom or room itself with anybody else. As in other people make the beds. As in they provide you with soap and towels. As in the room was actually at a respectable level of cleanliness. I felt like royalty! After 2 straight months in hostels, I had definitely forgotten how the other half lives. I took a quick nap (without having to hide all my valuable shit!) and waited for my dad to arrive. It was great seeing him when he got there....that's probably the longest I've gone without seeing any family, so it was very refreshing. We quickly caught up and then hit the road in Rome. It is a beautiful city. We walked to the Coliseum, which is incredibly impressive in person. Pictures don't do it justice, especially when you consider how long ago it was built. But then again everything in Rome seems to have been built a couple thousand years ago. It's pretty safe to say Romans took their churches seriously back in the day. You can walk by any old looking church on the street, and pop your head in, and they are usually breathtaking on the inside. Later, after dinner, we went out for a drink and found a bar that happened to be attached to a hostel. My dad just loved this, chatting with everybody, asking all sorts of questions like where they were from, etc. I think that interaction gave him a bit of a glimpse as to the type of people I've been meeting and how I've been socializing. And I'm pretty sure I did my best to not act embarrassed, which was admittedly a little tough at times, like when he asked about 3 or 4 Americans in a row why their English was so good. This was after a couple bottles of vino, to his credit.

The following day we did a hop on hop off bus tour of Rome which was cool. I often see the tours in the cities I visit, but don't usually do them for budgetary reasons. So it was nice to see the city from a different perspective, and get taken to all the different sites. We did some more site seeing, and then had another nice night of dinner and a couple bottles of wine. The following day we did the Vatican. Talk about your impressive churches. St Peter's Basilica is jaw-dropping. We went in the morning and luckily it wasn't too busy. We took our time exploring the Basilica, and then visited the tombs of all the popes, which is slightly less creepy than it sounds. Then we did the Scavi tour, which I recommend for anybody who is visiting the Vatican. I had never heard of it, but my dad had booked it a few weeks in advance. Apparently they only let 200 people in per day, so it's kind of a big deal I suppose. Basically, the Basilica is built above ancient tombs. The rumour was that St Peter's bones were buried beneath the alter of the Basilica, but nobody really wanted to try digging them up. Eventually an excavation was commissioned in secret, and sure enough, St Peter's bones were found. So you go underground through these very narrow streets that are thousands of years old, and you see lots of tombs, and eventually at the end of the tour you actually see St Peter's bones...so they say anyways. Our guide said that whenever Pope JP II would come back from travelling, the first thing he would always do is come down to pray with St Peter's remains. Like I said, it was a very cool tour, and if you get the chance, take the tour. If for no other reason that you can act snooty and say you did the exclusive tour.

So the next day we figured we'd move on to our next destination and head to Naples. I'm sure most backpackers can relate to this problem... when I tell people of my journey, they often ask “what's your favourite place”? This is such a difficult question to answer since so many cities have so many different things going for them. One may have great history and museums, but the people leave something to be desired. Some may have great culture, but the prices can be prohibitive. Well it hasn't happened yet, but if ever I get asked what my least favourite place is, I'll be able to say Naples without hesitation. I'll admit part of my reason isn't Naples' fault, but I have nothing good to say about my time there. My main 2 reasons for this are: 1) I was struck with food poisoning within about 3 hours of being there and 2) Naples was kind of a hole. No offense.

I'll start with the latter. When we were there, there was a garbage strike on. Not a great way for a city to endear itself to any visitor. Our hotel was in kind of a dumpy area, and the piles of garbage certainly didn't improve anything. My dad would say this next point a lot more diplomatically than I would. He would say that “Naples is a city that hides its charms well”. Here's how I'd say it if I was talking to you straight - everybody we encountered in Naples kind of seemed like a dick. I'm not generalizing and saying everybody from Naples is a dick. I'm not even saying we encountered enough people to represent a legitimate sample size of dickishness. I'm just saying that the people who we crossed paths with in our particular journey were, with very few exceptions, dicks.

Onto the former. I'm not sure what I ate (we've got it narrowed down to a few suspects), but by our first evening in Naples, I was feeling ill. I couldn't even make it through dinner without being sick. I'll spare you all the gritty details, but I spent the majority of the night assisting my stomach in making sure it was rid of whatever it was that it didn't agree with. I was very thankful to have my dad there to help me out, as he made a couple trips to the pharmacy for me, and grabbed me a few bottles of water, etc too. I was also very thankful to be in a hotel room rather than a hostel, the biggest reason being an en suite bathroom. I slowly started to feel better the following afternoon, finally able to keep water down. By the next morning dry toast was doable, so I definitely made strides. I stayed in for the most part, and my dad did a lot of site-seeing on his own. I think he found some nice parts of the city, despite the dicks (those are my words, not his – he'd never say something like that about people, no matter how many dicks there were). He'd probably have nicer things to say about the city since he had more exposure to it, but I'm pretty sure he'd agree that he enjoyed Rome more too.

So finally, today (Saturday), we left for Sorrento. We probably would have left a day or two earlier, but I just wasn't physically up for it unfortunately. Tomorrow we'll likely try to catch a ferry out to Capri, which is supposed to be a cool scenic island. I'm looking forward to the next week with my dad, where we'll both hopefully be healthy and able to do this trip all-out for the rest of the way! That's why I'm back in the room early. I'm still feeling pretty fragile from the food poisoning, so I'll rest up for one more night and hopefully be back to my old self.

Here are some pics of Rome, taken by my dad for the most part.