Home sweet?
Jan. 18th, 2006 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fictionalIt was quite odd to see Rome in the wintertime. Somehow I wasn't expecting the streets to be empty, with one lone guitar player in Piazza Navona, only a few scattered students in the Campo dei Fiori, the turtle fountain in Piazza Mattei boarded up. It seemed like a different world. Even odder to come back to the states and see first hand all the mechanisms for fingerprinting and photographing tourists like criminals. Guilty till proven innocent.
Pompeii was spectacular, Naples was a hole (neither had changed much since my last visit), the best moment was, I think, on the #62 bus from San Pietro back to Largo Argentina where we got on the bus (no one paid, of course, including several old nuns, which annoyed my parents greatly, as we had most law-abidingly validated our tickets) and then midway down the street, the bus-driver stopped the bus, without even the small nod of pulling over to the sidewalk. As vespas beeped and circled around us, and old ladies cursed furiously in Italian, the bus-driver, twenty something, cute, long curling hair, jumped lithely off the bus, stood in the street, calmly smoked his cigarette. Then finally leaped back on the bus, and continued to Piazza Venezia.
"!!!!" say my parents.
"Welcome to Italy," say I.
We sputtered with laughter the whole way back to the hotel, which charmingly turned out to be on the very same street as the apartment I lived in a few summers ago.
Now I'm back, with one somewhat alarming and wholly inexplicable (yet excruciating) injury to the knee, and one completely understandable, yet somehow still terribly annoying injury to the shoulder-neck area, a very bad cold, and jet lag. And an apartment to move into. Very soon.
Pompeii was spectacular, Naples was a hole (neither had changed much since my last visit), the best moment was, I think, on the #62 bus from San Pietro back to Largo Argentina where we got on the bus (no one paid, of course, including several old nuns, which annoyed my parents greatly, as we had most law-abidingly validated our tickets) and then midway down the street, the bus-driver stopped the bus, without even the small nod of pulling over to the sidewalk. As vespas beeped and circled around us, and old ladies cursed furiously in Italian, the bus-driver, twenty something, cute, long curling hair, jumped lithely off the bus, stood in the street, calmly smoked his cigarette. Then finally leaped back on the bus, and continued to Piazza Venezia.
"!!!!" say my parents.
"Welcome to Italy," say I.
We sputtered with laughter the whole way back to the hotel, which charmingly turned out to be on the very same street as the apartment I lived in a few summers ago.
Now I'm back, with one somewhat alarming and wholly inexplicable (yet excruciating) injury to the knee, and one completely understandable, yet somehow still terribly annoying injury to the shoulder-neck area, a very bad cold, and jet lag. And an apartment to move into. Very soon.