Roman Table of Contents

Editor's note- I wrote this in the Roman airport. Life gets cheerier, I promise. 


People talk about how something feels like a month ago and it was just yesterday. This unidentifiable sensation is increased tenfold when you are living out of a backpack that is only slightly less crammed with clothes and books than your days are with sights and scenes. To counteract this feeling, a person may think that their only chance is to rid their days of these masses of activities, but this solution becomes tiresome within a few days of its enactment, and so a return to the hustle and bustle of a traveller in a city is required. A routine is formed and then, just as quickly, the restless need to break a routine returns, so that one is grateful for the call of the train station or airport that carries oneself to new lands and experiences, escaping the familiar unfamiliarity of a foreign country and language.

In short, I am ready to leave Italy.

I realize that I am travelling in the summer and that the heat and the tourists are the most serious deterring factors to a desire to say, but cost is also a serious competitor. Italy is expensive. Leaving Italy has turned out to be more expensive than intended, due to the difficulty of getting to the Rome airport from the center of town. But you sigh and pay more because you know that you're still saving in the long run, given the prices of the trains and the expense of staying another night in an over-priced hostel. And all this time, as you're considering all these factors, you know that really, it's time to move on.

Ten days doesn't seem like a substantial amount of time. Take away a travel day and a recovery day (I'm finding them more and more necessary), and you've got eight left. Factor in two touristy days (they're required in a city that has an independent country inside of it) and you're down to six. Given that the beach is a (totally more than an hour but they tell you that it is a half hour train ride from town, it is required that you spend a few days there, cutting the total to four days, one of which must be taken up with laundry and other chores. And if a friend suggests that you go to Pompeii for a day, how can you refuse? So two days out of the ten spent in Rome were spent doing what I came to do. Maybe I need to change my definition of what I came to do.

But a substantial amount happened in this insubstantial amount of time and thus my time in Rome will be broken into four parts (excluding, of course, the obligatory church posts):

1) Ancient Rome- the Forum, Palatine Hill, the Colosseum and the Pantheon
2) Vatican City- The Vatican Museum, St. Peter's and the Night Walk Around Rome
3) The Beach
4) The Adventures of My Time After the Beach (including Corpus Christi)

Pompeii was an true adventure of its own, full of the charm of dead people, stray dogs, possible peril, confusion, trains and the Italian police, not necessarily in that order, and a story of that magnitude, of course, deserves its own post.

So please excuse the possibly prolific amount of writing that induces a substantial amount of reading over the next couple days. When your days are full, it becomes difficult to make your blog that way as well.