Roma The Details

So, expectations reduced, I was very glad for the dolls the girls packed. They took care of them for the whole flight. Dolls and three candies, and they were pretty well entertained. Very different from travelling to Arkansas with infants and toddlers a few years back. Olivia doing silly kid tricks with her hard-boiled egg. For all the complaining she does, she stays pretty well-humored. We are learning to block out the words. "I know, I'm sorry you hate it, sweetheart." A few of those and she's skipping along to the next thing to complain about. It's as if she needs to register her opinion with karma police or something. In case anyone's keeping track, I'm officially not enjoying myself here, and would prefer to be doing something else.


Okay, so it's not exactly Disney Land. We decided to spend the first day in our neighborhood visiting the Forums and the Coluseum (I'll have to check the spelling on that). The Forums, I guess, were once the market center of town. I have not read enough to understand why there are so many of them. Each Cesar or Emporer had to build their own? It's clear these people like to build things. Here we were able to walk around and through the pieces you see in the background. This is just alongside Palatine Hill. I didn't realize Palatine was a name from Rome. I think I also saw something about Ravenna (places I know as being from Seattle).

This is the kind of thing we would walk past in the Forums. A random piece of carved marble or granite. It's like an art graveyard or a museum graveyard, or just an acheological site. The whole city feels like an archaelogical site. Every few blocks there would be a fence surrounding smaller versions of this scene with signs up describing what they think it is, and how old, who built it. Eventually I stopped taking pictures.


From here we walked down the road to the Colusseum. The kids pointed out we ended up walking around the whole thing looking for the entrance. We had our first Italian panini right out front in one of the many snack stands. No prices anywhere, one of the many joys of being a tourist. As usual, I was lagging behind the group and looked down to see Bruce and the kids in the middle of it, if you look closely you can see Sophia dancing around in her green pants.

The picture on the right is of the girls standing next to what they called masks in the top floor of the interior part of the Colusseum. Apparently there was theater in the Colusseum. Not just various forms of killing for entertainment. Can't imagine these were actually used as masks, however. Not sure what the actual masks would have been made of, but it looks like they did put them in front of their face for performances.

After about fifteen minutes of walking around the Colusseum, Bruce suggested we hurry, that the kids were getting bored, not sure how much longer they were going to last. So I had my standard talk with them. We came all the way here, we paid to get in, we're going to spend some time checking it out. If they complain, no treat. Etcetera. They were surprisingly understanding. Said okay and we were on our way. Bruce found a seat in the corner, and tried to contain the impending headache he was getting because he refused to pay the tourist price for a coke. Ah, the truth.


As we were finally heading away in search of caffe, even with a headache, Bruce said we had to get this picture. We narrowly escaped the attention of the couple behind them dressed in costume for just this photograph. The kids have become experts at avoiding eye contact with peddlers of all kinds.

We made it back to the apartment relatively unscathed. Bruce took a power nap as only he can do and managed to avoid a full-blown migraine. It got late, we decided we really needed to venture out once more before the grocery store closed at 7, and we walked right by an Internet Cafe that served Gelato and cashiers that spoke English! Jackpot!!



All at once we knew we were going to be able to survive this trip. Whatever happens, we can remind the kids that we'll go home and have gelato and everything will be alright. If only they had pizza, we wouldn't have needed to go anywhere else.

The View from Piazza di Popolo down Via di Corso towards the Colusseum just below the park

We decided to make the next day the trip to the one park in town. We had been told by everyone there really wasn't anything else for kids in Rome. We took a very small electric bus with standing room only, after surviving the ticket-purchasing exercise at the local tobac. (Had to make sure they worked on the bus, and were good for the whole day.) To make sure the girls had some fun on this trip, we decided to rent one of these bikes for an hour.


Bruce was reluctant. I, of course, talked him into it. Not realizing that this would mean I would be riding in what turned out to be alot like a four-wheeler with Bruce at the wheel. You would have thought it was a roller coaster with all the screaming. But it was good screaming. The locals didn't even seem to mind.

This was looking like a great success until, just as we started back to return the bike we heard real screaming from Olivia who had taken Miranda's place in the back. Apparently she had taken a break from pedaling and her right foot dangled a little too close to the wheel. Somehow her foot was taken into the wheel and through the vertical bar to the wheel that you can see just behind Miranda's foot. We (Bruce) managed to get her shoe off while she was screaming and backed her foot out of the wheel. I managed not to faint, though I wasn't sure for a minute there. Something about things being bent and crushed in ways they shouldn't. Fortunately, the foot seems to be okay but the day was cut short. Bruce took Olivia on his back, I took the backpack, and we headed back to the room for a quiet afternoon.


This happened to be the day Bruce had accepted an invitation for our family to meet Pepe's (Alice's dad) for drinks/wine. We asked for a recommendation for where to eat dinner, and they ended up deciding they (he) would fix us a better dinner than we would be able to find without planning ahead. It was a nice day for a relaxing dinner in a family home, just a half-mile walk from our room.

Snapped this for my cousin Shelley and her (recently passed) dog Keats