The Island

The city of Rome is just outside the walls of our hotel property, but the hotel itself does not seem to belong to the city. I shouldn’t be surprised that this hotel is a little sanctuary of North America in the middle of Italy, nor is that a bad thing after 3 weeks of traveling, its just a bit strange to walk off a crowded Roman bus into a spacious, quiet hotel where the vast majority of people seem to be native English speakers.

The place has actually been great. Indoor pool, saunas, Turkish baths, restaurants and bars. They’ve also been very accommodating to tourists. They have shuttles to the major attractions and provided us right away with a good map of the city and information on how to find the hotel on public transit.

Our time here has been fairly well spent. Our first day we did a quick tour of the city and saw some of the major highlights (many of which we’ll end up looking up to see exactly what all our picture are actually of). There is a children’s book here that I might have to pick up before I go home. It has pictures of how buildings currently look (ie, 3 standing pillars and a few scattered bits of wall) with a plastic overlay of how the place probably looked hundreds of years ago. I think I’ve picked this book up at about 15 different locations across the city. Maybe I should have had Mel making a photo diary of all the places in Rome I read children’s books.

Our second day was scheduled to be a tour out to Pompeii, but I think we’ll have to settle for Google street view on that one as we woke up feeling terrible and decided to sleep in, do some shopping, and make use of the hotels spa area instead, which brings me to the one bone to pick with this place. In the spa area it is compulsory to wear slippers and bathing caps. Not so bad for people used to that who bring a proper swim cap and flip flops. But for us, we ended up wearing hotel shower caps with little slippers like my grandma used to wear. I can understand the caps might be to keep hair and hair related chemicals out of the pool water, but I’m pretty sure the slippers were just for the comic relief of the spa workers as they watch people grease their way around the slippery tile floor. Or maybe they just screwed up the Italian/English translation of “Slipper”. Instead of being a little shoe you slip ON it is a little shoe you slip IN. Once wet (so about 2 seconds into the spa) walking around on the tile of the spa was about like walking on icy roads in the spring when you get that layer of water to really make you slide around. We tolerated the rules though, but could not tolerate the place after about 5pm when the business men here for meetings decided it was time to slip out of their suits and into their speedos for a quick dip. Gah! I’m sure I don’t look great in my new Italian grape smugglers, but at least I don’t have to look at me. (JK, I did NOT purchase a speedo, but sure did threaten to on occasion).

Today we went to the Vatican. Big thumbs up for purchasing tickets online with a reserved time in the Vatican museums. It saved us about 3 hours of waiting in lines. In fact, we didn’t wait in a single line all day for more than about 5 minutes. I think by about noon the line to get in was closing in on a km long and 4 people wide! The tour guides were circling the end of the line like hungry sharks: “Skip the line!”, “No wait, tour with us!”, “Only 45 Euro to save 3 hours waiting!”. I think these tour guides are carnies during the summer, they made me hopeful to see a Skee-ball game nearby.

We’re now all packed and ready to come home. The only thing left to do is decide if I want pizza or pasta for  my last supper here.

TTYL,
Ryan