Category: italy

2nd June is Festa Della Repubblica here in Italy and it is a national holiday.

A week before, Cart and I noticed some temporary seating being constructed near the Colosseo and he deduced that there will be a parade going on on the day itself. We didn’t have any intention of going to see the parade though as we were not looking forward to be crunched by the huge amount of people that will be expected there. But this lady was there though and lived to blog about it.

Cart and I were having lunch at L’Insalata Ricca when I suddenly remembered that I was watching the Amazing race season 1 where one of the legs was in Italy. There was a detour challenge where contestants have to head to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument or to go to the giant foot.

Excitedly, I asked Cartcart, “Lets go see the giant foot!”

The only thing is, being totally unplanned, Cart started to ask me which giant foot I was talking about, which made me a little stunned since I assumed that all Italians would have known where it was. But we did a quick online search on the dinky little screen of my Nokia E72.

After we’ve finished our lunch, we were off.

It was extremely crowded with tourists when we reached the Piazza Navona area. The pantheon itself was crawling with people from all over the world as if there was a congress going on. Such a contrast compared to just a few months ago. The touristy season has already started.

We did the touristy thing to do – snapping pictures, looking at interesting buildings, walking around and appreciating where we were.

We walked to places where were lesser known to tourists. Like this elephant statue and the church next to it. Cart, being the proud Roman man, explained to me every detail that he knew about the place.

Like the name of the road where these men were playing checkers, had an actual fig tree like its name sake.

Eventually we reached a corner of a road where we found a giant foot.

This wasn’t what I had in mind. The shape of the foot was different. It wasn’t smooth and it was wearing a sandal. We must be in the wrong place. But it was interesting to see anyway.

I looked at the statue and wondered if it could be part of a larger statue while Cart was postulating that this statue could be a sign from a shoemaker, telling that his shop was nearby.

I found out later that the giant foot from the Amazing race was actually located in the Capitoline Museum. So that’s something for us to discover for another day 🙂

Hello!

Cart and I were at the Rose Garden in Circo Massimo last weekend. It has been slightly over a year since we’ve last been there, so we thought that we’d pay a visit before it closes its entry in mid June.

The rose garden, or the Roseto Comunale in Italian, is a municipal rose garden here in Rome which is open to all from the 10th of May to the 10th of June. There are a huge variety of roses here and personally for me, is a lovely place to visit if you are in Rome during these times. The temperature is comfortable and being spring time, flowers are blossoming.

The Roseto Comunale is probably not a very touristy destination, but like Parco Laghetto, it’s another side of Rome which I find very charming.

Unfortunately, we’ve been having a rather bad weather for the past few weeks with it raining incessantly. And I think that it affected how the roses looked. For lack of a better word, they didn’t look so “fresh”. Nevertheless, it was very picturesque here with the huge variety of roses of different colours and kinds and with the iconic Vittorio Emanuele Monument and some Roman ruins in the background.

One of the easiest way to get here is by taking the subway and exiting the “Circo Massimo” stop. One of the first thing you should see, is this large FAO building. Follow the road, have a slow stroll and before you know it, you’re already at the Rose garden.

There were a healthy amount of people already there when Cart and I arrived. I spotted out families, groups of kids, even monks, priests and nuns.

All of them looking around excitedly, smelling, touching each rose. Many of them camwhoring with the roses. There was a couple who snapped pictures of themselves before we arrived there, and they were still camwhoring when Cart and I left the place. There were even people picnicking and making out. Which is understandable, since it *was* a romantic looking place.

There were so many kinds of roses here, it was quite mind boggling! The area is divided into several segments, one part where there are the original roses as well as the modern cultivated ones.

There were signs every few steps or so where we could read up more information about the roses. And there were a lot of things which I didn’t realise till now.

Like, did you know that there is no such thing as blue roses? Even with modern cultivation, roses do not have the right cells to carry the colour. The closest colours that it could carry are lilac and purple. So even if you do see a blue rose, it was probably dyed.

And it was interesting for me to read that in ancient roman times, the emperor would have frequent orgies where one of the highlights were a false ceiling would open to drop down rose petals. And there was once, a drunk guest who got trapped and suffocated under the rose petals.

Did you know that it takes 900 kg of rose petals to make about 5 grams of attar of rose? That was one of the reasons why ancient romans decided to cultivate their own roses rather than importing it from Africa since it was such a lucrative business.

To me, what was interesting was that there were a lot of roses which didn’t look like how a “typical” rose was supposed to look like – multiple layers petals, starting from a long bud. Like this flower below.

So I was quite surprised to see these flowers below categorized as roses too. They don’t look like roses since they had only one layer of petals. But Cart pointed out that they had thorns which was a strong sign that they were.

The name of this rose below is “Queen Mother” by the way, and I like the shade of pink. It doesn’t look very rose-like but the shape of the leaves and the thorns are a dead give away!

And speaking of names, there were loads of interesting named roses, like ‘Aspirin’ (!) ‘Aladdin’, ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Isn’t she lovely’ and others you could check out from the video at the end of this post. I really wonder how they named their roses. some of them are really curious.

Here is a video I took while in the rose garden. Check out the crazy names that the roses have! And please excuse my ramblings.

So if you’re in Rome during springtime, don’t forget to visit the lovely and charming rose garden near Circo Massimo and get lost in all it’s beauty.

Just in case you were wondering, my favourite flowers are yellow roses 🙂

If you liked this post, you might enjoy

• A day Circo Massimo
• The rest of the Italy category

Sidenote : Sha’s post totally reminds me back of my days in IRC. I used to spend hours in them and my nick used to be |rose| and then spyrulina. A little corny huh?

After visiting a couple of museums in Rome during the last week of April, Cart and I were looking forward to visiting more museums. By chance, I got to know about the La Notte Dei Musei event through a friend.

La Notte Dei Musei is held in conjunction with the international museum day where there will be events in museums along 40 other participating countries worldwide. Cart and I were browsing through the Rome museum website, where we finally decided to visit the Musei Strumenti Musicali.

It was a dreary and cold Saturday in Rome. It has been raining the entire day and it felt really cold despite the fact that it was already the middle of May. I was amazed to see that temperature dropped down to 13 degrees celsius as if winter was back again. Nevertheless, that didn’t seem to stop the throngs of people, including us, from visiting the participating museums. When we reached the museum of musical instruments at about 10 pm, there was a healthy crowd walking around already.

There was only one floor that was being displayed, but there were loads to see anyway.

One of the first displays that I saw was the harpsichord. It was interesting to see how it evolved from a harpsichord to the modern piano that we have today. What I noticed was that all of them looked very ornate and richly decorated – probably meant for upper class society.

But what was more intriguing to me was how tiny it was. The size of an 18th century harpsichord looked as if it was meant for children instead of adults.

We then walked past the harps, the stringed instruments and others and we found ourselves in the musical box room.

This is very old. It goes back to old technology where they used parchments with holes in them to create the sound. Not sure if you could see in the picture, but there is a roll with little metal bit that looked a lot like staplers which is part of a music box too. But regardless of it being old technology, it was decorated very beautifully.

Later on, Cart and I walked over to the area where there on display were instruments from all over the world. It was interesting to me how instruments were influenced. Much like the display from the medieval times that impressed me, like Sawfish sword and the puffer fish hat, I was amazed at the use of accessible items. There was a Chinese Er Hu wrapped with snakeskin, a South America horn made of Donkey jawbone and then we saw this.

Guitars made of Armadillo. Its kind of bitter sweet that a cute armadillo ends up as an entertaining device.

There were also other segments such as the military musical instruments, hunting musical instruments and art based on musical instruments but the highlight of the night was the concert.

I thought that we could be smart and head there about 10 minutes before it started so that we’d have seats. But when we reached the performance room, it was almost full house and we realised that only those pre-registered with a blue sticker had priority.

Fortunately for us, the caretaker looked at our pitiful faces and found two empty seats for us at the back.

It was impressive how beautiful and full the group sounded like, even with just three instruments – There was a pianist, a violinist and a horn player. And they were so good! It was so lovely to see how expressive they were.

Here is recording of one of the pieces that the played. I hope you stay till the end of the video, it’s worth listening to 🙂

Concert in Rome

Don’t they sound lovely? It didn’t seem too long after that the concert was over. Nevertheless Cart and I were thrilled to have been able to have the opportunity to watch it and we are looking forward to visiting another event such as this.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy :

• Visiting Rome’s museums during her birthday

During the week, museums was free to enter due to Rome’s birthday. I didn’t know about this till I was surfing through a couple of links through Italytutto. I looked at my calender and saw that we only had a few days left! But better later than never!

Tthe first museum that we stepped to was the ‘Museo nazionale delle arti e tradizioni popolari’ – translated, it means Museum of folk arts and traditions.

One of the first things that I saw was a huge display called the Giglio di nola. One of these are easily more than 5 times the height of an average human and was extremely heavy. For the rest of the year, it will be kept in the church but once a year there is this tradition to carry and parade it.

But it was a symbol of devotion and honour to carry these. Men who carried them were considered an equivalent of rock stars.

Another version of this is the Ceri di gubbio. It’s smaller sized but it’s heavy anyway and they race across the square to be the first person to reach the church.

I’d love to see this in real life. It must have been an experience 🙂

We then stepped into another room where we saw potteries and clothes worn by ancient Italians. This one for example, was worn by a married woman.

I really liked this outfit. I’m not sure if you could see it in the picture, but the design looked beautiful and I really liked the jewellery.

There was a room where we saw different types of traditional outfits according to the regions in Italy. Regions up north looked more Nordic while the regions down in the south looked more Mediterranean.

This was what traditional Rome outfit looked like.

Cart said that the biggest way to recognize it was through the square buckle on the shoe. It was a very recognizable trait.

There was another room where we entered where there were a lot of traditional toys like these ones. The marionettes below were called ‘I Pupi siciliani’. I think this devil puppet looks pretty cool with his three fingers up like that.

Cart said that these puppets were Mediterranean inspired. Personally I thought that they looked quite Indian instead.

I think that being quite close together, Southern Italians and Indians share a number of similar traditions. For example, the L’infiorata. It’s a same tradition of using coloured grains to make a pattern of the floor while there is similar Indian tradition too during Deepavali.

We walked to another segment where there was a diorama where Italians traditionally used to live in. This was one of them. The people took advantage of the materials from their region to make their own unique houses.

This was probably the biggest nativity scene that I’ve ever seen.

I liked seeing the buildings in them. It was like a really huge doll-house. Cart tells me that it was a reflection of how the people used to live in the times. Not sure if it is clear in the picture, but you could spot the baby Jesus even from far on account of the flying angels above it.

This display below was interesting to me.

Traditional street food sellers. It’s quite fascinating to me how similar the tools are like with the street-food utensils of the Singapore past. Like the first item on the left totally looked like a satay burner complete with the fan.

Later on we then passed by a room where there was a Korean display on how to make their intricate boxes with decorative patterns made of shells. It just seem so out of place in an Italian museum, but it was interesting to see anyway.

We scoured through 3 floors full of exhibit and at the end of the day, we were quite tired. But it was so interesting going through the exhibits.

Day Two, Sunday

The next day, Cart and I headed to the Museo Dell’Alto Medioevo after visiting Parco Laghetto Eur.

This is a museum that showcased medieval things. I was keen to see what was inside there. The unfortunate thing is that when we reached there, it was closed for the day!

In any case, we then headed to the museum which was right next to it. Thankfully, the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico was open.

At the moment, the exhibits were divided by different continents.

The first that we headed to was Africa and we saw different types of masks, weapons, outfits and such. One of the unforgettable ones was an African mask which was about 15 stories high. According to Cart, the higher it was, the easier it was for them to reach to heaven.

I took this picture above because I found the story interesting that there was a Muslim influence in Africa. This was one of the artefacts and Cart was translating to me that the long piece of wood at the back, which had verses written on it, and it was used to dip in water and the water was used for healing.

This was how a Somalian woman looked like on her wedding night. It just struck me because Somalia is one of poorest countries in the world. But the woman in the picture looked decadent. So much has happened between then and now.

Next we entered the America section where we saw plentiful of old relics, some were Aztec and Mayan. Its a savage culture, where human sacrifices are expected of them. I remember a pottery where a sacrificial scene was depicted. The man wielding the sword looked even happy to do so.

This one is kind of eye brow raising because its a musical instrument made of REAL HUMAN BONE! I wonder if anyone have the stomach to play that in real life now, being aware of what it was made of.

This instrument looks adorable, with surprised face and all. But Cart explained that if you see this, you should run away as fast as you can because it is a club. And it will hit you to death!

The next segment that we headed to was the Ocean Pacific and it was interesting to see them making use of the items around them for their use.

The hat was made of a puffer fish. And the sword next to it is was  made out of a sawfish. I found it impressive.

The last area that we went to was the prehistoric segment where we walked up a lot of steps and when we finally arrived, we saw displays to see how society evolved from the first primates and throughout the different ages, bronze age, iron age.

By this time, I was feeling quite tired after walking around so much that we sit down to rest our feet in front of a display of human evolution.

After walking so much, my legs were so tired and I could hardly walk any more. The museum was actually a lot larger than I thought, judging from the outside! Nevertheless, we did enjoy ourselves and I’m looking forward to attend the next ones.

To end, I will put up a picture that doesn’t really go in the blog post.

This man was showing us how to make a large container out of clay, just like how it was in the ancient times.

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• Racing at the Singapore Museum
• Mint Museum – Singapore
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It snowed yesterday morning in Rome.

I could sense that there was something different. The colour. It seemed a lot brighter than usual. I pulled back the curtain and I was just amazed at what I saw.

Oh my! Its snow!

It was my first time seeing snow ever and as cheesy as it sounds, it looked quite magical seeing the little flakes floating down.

Having lived in Singapore all my life where there is sun all year round, the only time that I’ve seen anything close to snow was from my parent’s old icebox or the skating rink in the mall in Jurong East before it got torn down.

Excitedly, I went out to head to the park near our house have a look see.

It was really cold outside. Every step I take feels like I’m crunching the snow below my boots. That reminds me, Ugg boots are not good for snow, since the snow can seep in and melt on your feet.

Everything was covered in white flakes, it was so beautiful. I never thought that I’d ever see snow in Rome since Cart told me that its not so frequent for Rome to have snow. The frequency is about once every 10 years or so.

So even if snow might not be a big deal, seeing this was quite special to me.

I was amused to see a couple of kids trying to slide down using the snow sled. The funny thing is that the snow wasn’t thick enough.

And there were some who were throwing snowballs at each other.

I didn’t think that I could do the same since my fingers already felt like they were going to get frostbites if I stayed out even longer. I haven’t even touched the snow!

In any case I couldnt help but to take the opportunity to do one of the things that I love to do …

Camwhore!

Unfortunately the snow didn’t last too long and by the afternoon, it the snowfalls stopped and the white slowly melted away.

Anyhow, this is a quick video I took while it was still snowing just for memory’s sakes 🙂

A couple of weeks back, Cart stumbled upon a Magic the Gathering tournament and asked me a long to take have a look. Cart used to play MTG card games, I didn’t. But I thought that it would be interesting just to see what was going on.

Here we are at the Palazzo Dei Congressi where major exhibitions and conferences are held. There were people all over the world in the expo. The moment we reached there, I heard two Americans having a conversation with each other. And as soon as we entered the tournament hall, practically everyone was speaking in English.

We decided to take a look at the contestants at work.

I’m not too sure how the game goes, but I noticed that as they were playing, they’d scribble in a little notepad to tally up their scores.

There were SO many people playing. It was impressive. The hall, which was large by itself was full of contestants. And yet, there were other halls and levels that we did not manage to explore into. So many participants! A rough estimate would be about 4 thousand contestants in all.

As you see, the contestants came from all over the world. Which makes me wonder. Considering that many of the contestants are in their teens, and live overseas, how do they earn the money to come to Rome and stay here for about 4 days or so.

They could be rich, or according to Oharlie, earned a lot of money from these tournaments.

Exploring a little bit more, we came across a section where you could play Magic the Gathering Online.

Walking a little bit more, I saw this very nice conference hall. Cart postulated that this was the area where the winners will be announced. I really liked the place. It reminded me of the past conferences that I’ve attended like Interesthink and Nexus. I thought that it would be the perfect place to go to for a blog conference.

Not too far from the conference hall, we came across a long queue of people wanting to get their items signed by two of MTG’s artists – Jeremy Jarvis and Aleksi Briclot. Looking through some of their illustration online, I thought that it was gorgeous and something to be appreciated.

Breathtaking!

Towards the end of our exploration, Cart and I came across a small area where contestants could challenge the creator of MTG, Richard Garfield himself.

Personally, I think that Richard Garfield is a genius to have created a game out of something that he enjoys doing and made a lot of money at the same time. It’s hard to ignore the presence of MTG in daily life. It has been around since I was in school and even during my stint as an educator the past years, you’d see kids playing it.

Anyway, if you’re interested, here is a video about the event :

To end this post, I will put up something completely irrelevant.

Apparently Italy doesn’t sell the Gold red bull. But I don’t like the blue ones!

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While I was travelling on a bus with Jerrick, I spotted a billboard.

Those were scratches on the glass on the bus I was taking if you were wondering.

I love cats, and thus, last weekend, I dragged Cartcart to take me to the exhibition hall, Nuova Fiera Roma to see the La Mostra Felina 2009.

It was such a pretty afternoon. With us being in Autumn, the leaves on trees were golden and red with many of the leaves fallen off.

Having already been to the Fiera di Roma some weeks ago, the exhibition didn’t look as cramped full of exhibition, but there were still a buzz of activity.

One of the first things that I saw was a demonstration for automated cat litter collector.

It looked very interesting at how inside turns around into a sort of filter which traps the cat litter. But it seems rather large and unsuitable for those with smaller houses.

And not too far away, there are several stalls selling a couple of cat trinkets from jewellery, cat printed bags, ceramics and others.

Initially when I was at the entrance of the the exhibition hall, I really wanted to get a cute cat balloon, but in the end, this cute cat scarf seems more practical. You like?

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There were also other segments where you could take pictures of your cats, complete with a light box.

I couldn’t get a clear shot because of the crowd though.

And there was a segment where the cat tournament was held. But I wasn’t too interested in it though as it was mostly a beauty contest where the owners show off their cats.

There were a segment for kids to watch a Punch and Judy show.

I noticed quite a number of kids having their face painted with feline decorations. And I nearly kicked myself for not having worn my Cat Hat.

Anyway, the main attraction would have to be the cats itself. There were so many cats but there probably about five times the amount the visitors. I was surrounded by a lot of people. So it was rather claustrophobic for me and at the end of it, I felt dizzy and out of breath.

At the same time, because of that, I had a number of bad shots with people’s body part in the way. But what bothered me more was that there were a number of people who took pictures of the cats with FLASH! And some were even poking the cats.

The poor cats. Being in a cage for two days with loads of people staring at them the entire time and the bright lights from the flash and the poking. I’m sure some were traumatised and confused. In fact I saw a few which were shaking. Probably very stressed out.

Nevertheless, there were a number of owners who were happy to chat with the visitors and showing off their cats.

This little girl is so cute, she held her British Shorthair for me and patiently waited for me to take a picture 🙂

I’ve never seen a tri-coloured sphynx cat before.

I quite like this picture and how happy the owner looks

One of the rare men at the exhibition, showing off his cat

Here are several cats that I think I know the breeds. These are the Birman Cats.

Some Winston looking cats :

There were some Sphynx. Personally I find them cute, even if they were mainly portrayed as pets by evil characters. So its very sad when I hear of recounts like these.

There were a number of Norwegian forest cats. They were really big and I reckon from what I saw, they are as large as a dog even.

Here are the British Shorthair. So cute!

And there were a number of interesting breeds, some of them I don’t even know their names. Can you help me out by naming them?

And I saved the cutest one for last

Isn’t she cute? I’m so in love with her.

All in all, going to my first cat exhibition was interesting – seeing all the different species of cats.

As much as I enjoyed myself though, after seeing all the cats behind the bars and coupled with the fact that there were the unthinking people with the poking and the flash makes me think “Poor things!” so I don’t think that I’d be visiting this exhibition again.

Monday arrived.

After spending the weekend with Cart, Jerrick and I had to fend for ourselves, roaming around Rome on our own. Cart couldn’t take leave and had to go back to work. It shouldn’t be difficult for us. I’ve done this before. Taking the public transportation here would be easy!

Before leaving, Cart advised us to explore the Colosseum, Vittorio Emanuale Monument, Pantheon and then the Fontana di Trevi in the order.

So I took my time scanning over Google Maps, and then poured over Atac which will calculate which busses and subways that we had to take and finally we were ready. We headed to buy our tickets and boarded on the bus before going to the nearest subway station.

Picture via Ron in Rome

When we reached the metro, I thought something was amiss when I saw the locked gates. Maybe it could be opened on the other side. But when the other side was locked too, was when I realised that there was something definitely wrong.

Turned out that there was a strike and all the subway stations were not functioning till later in the evening! All my research for nothing. And with no computer at hand, I was lost at what to do next.

Regardless, we went for a walk across the street to show Jerrick Viale Europa, where the entire road was filled with high end boutiques and shops. At the end of the road, there was a church.

It was then that Cart saved the day by checking for us which bus to take next. Luckily for us, it was just along the corner and the bus arrived very shortly after.

Our bus ride went all the way to a bus terminal which was right next to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument.

The monument was still as impressive as ever. The locals call it, “The typewriter” on account of the tall white pillars of the monument is. On top of the stairs in the middle, there were always two soldiers keeping guard.

As Jerrick and I were feeling rather peckish, and rain clouds were starting to form, we went to find a restaurant for lunch as well as to wait for the rain to subside, before heading to the next monument. Jerrick wanted pasta while I wanted Pizza. We didn’t want to go to a place which was too expensive or didn’t have the food that we want. We went to inspect the menu at least 10 different restaurants.

In the end, we decided to go to the very first restaurant we inspected. It was quite amusing.

At this point of time, I was feeling quite lucky that I knew a bit of Italian. Even if it was not very fluent, ordering food was actually quite surprisingly simple, compared to the awkwardness that I noticed across the other tables with the other tourists. I was really proud of myself.

The the skies were still unfortunately rather dark after we had our lunch. But we traversed on and headed to the Colosseum. A quick glance to the left and I noticed that the metro was still closed due to the strike.

It was so wet and dreary but we persevered anyway. There were so many tourists there. Which was strange to me, considering that it was Monday.  We reached the entrance when there was a huge crowd of people queueing in to buy the entry tickets.

That was when a tour guide came up to us and asked us to join in his group. “If you join my group, you wont have to queue to get the entry tickets and I’d give you a fully guided tour for only 20 euro each inclusive!”

That seemed quite expensive so Jerrick and I promptly left after that.

I’ve lost my sense of direction by this time and had no idea where to go to. So we walked about randomly and hoped that we were going in the right direction. We walked past a bookshop where Jerrick bought a nice Ciak notepad, several bars, a few clothes shop. But there was still no sign of the Pantheon.

It was still slightly drizzling and we huddled under my umbrella. But all of a sudden, Jerrick paused, gasped at something that he saw and promptly wandered off. Leaving me unsheltered and bewildered.

He entered a shop and I followed after him inside. It looked like a jewellery shop, with the beautiful display cases and the nicely dressed clerks. It turned out that I was in Valrhona – a high end chocolate shop. Jerrick looked enthralled looking for his favourite chocolate.

I didn’t have any intention of buying anything there. Unfortunately for me, the clerk started to entice me with some of their chocolate samples and it was so good that I felt compelled to get some.

At 8 euro for this tiny 75g box, this was probably the most expensive chocolate that I’ve ever purchased. I left the shop feeling excited and guilty at the same time.

We continued our search for the Pantheon. It was such a walk and at length, we knew we were in the right place with the amount of tourists conglomerating outside.

It was a little different coming here compared to the last time that I was here. For one thing, it was raining. As the top of the pantheon was an open dome, I saw little puddles of water on the floor.

There were also seats, meant for praying. But there were a lot of people sitting down, so we took the chance to rest for a moment too.

After admiring the architecture and the grand facade and wondering if people could climb up the pillars, we headed off to our next stop, the Fontana Di Trevi.

It wasn’t hard to get here from the pantheon as there were helpful road signs pointing to the right direction. We reached there with no drama.

But it was still super crowded even with the drizzle. With his back to the fountain, Jerrick threw a coin in the hopes that he will return back to Rome.

With all of the landmarks covered, I thought that it would be a good idea to head to the metro and stop by Feltrinelli, a big bookshop that had my Italian textbook that I needed for my class.

Looking at google maps this morning, made me believe that we could reach there by foot. Armed by the GPS on my phone, I confidently hoped that we could get there fine.

But then it was already getting dark at 4 pm due to sunset in Autumn. When we passed by the Pantheon for the third time, I was already getting disoriented. And tired. And feeling a quite stressed out.

Cart advised for us to take the bus at the main road.

Unfortunately for us, we took the bus on the wrong direction! I realised it as soon as we went away from Isola Tiberina. I tried to ask an Italian man who was standing next to me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fluent enough and could catch only half of what he said.

But the good thing about Italian transport is that they go in a loop and we stopped at a terminal. This time, I sat right next to the window to peer at the bus stop sign. I want to get out at the right stop!

A bit of walking after that, we finally reached the bookshop where I finally bought my book. And we took the metro which was finally functioning again after their strike. And then we finally took the transfer bus home.

By the time we reached home, I was so tired and so listless that I left the boys to fend for themselves for dinner.

They made from scratch, Ravioli with Spinach and Ricotta cheese by the way.

We’ve already seen a number of monuments in the city centre, so we thought that it would be good to have a slow and easy day. As I preparing myself to buy some groceries, Surpringly, Jerrick wanted to accompany me too.

So in the meanwhile, I showed him the neighbourhood – the duck pond, the cinema, the grocer, the supermarket. While we were in Conad, one of the supermarkets here, Jerrick looked fascinated by the different items that were there and got a couple of items to be taken back with him.

We stopped by a Pizza Al Taglio to take away some pizza and I made Pasta Al Ragu for lunch over an episode of Sex and the City dubbed in Italian. We were both feeling very very full after that.

Which meant that it was definitely a great idea to walk away the bloated feeling, so we headed to Monte Verde.

It was such a cloudy day. But the sky looked very interesting with the different cloud shapes and the sun admirably trying to burst through in the background.

We chatted trying to break the monotony in the bus, I scanned through the faces of the passengers in the bus. Eventually we reached the stop and we met my friend, Lynn, and we entered a bar for cakes and a cup hot chocolate. We spent the day having a nice, friendly chat.

Eventually, we decided to head to the area of Campo De Fiori for a bit sight seeing, like the Santa Maria Church where there was a mass going on.

And then later, we headed to Lynn’s favourite snack place, the Filetti Di Baccala to get some freshly made fried cod. It’s a very modest looking place. But its been around for a very long time.

With our hands holding the warm fried fish, we explored the area. We admired the architecture and imagined how it looked like in the past. The buildings were so old that the scene would be the same, just people in different clothing.

Lynn even showed us a little place where there was a swingers club.

Later on, Cart joined us for dinner in Trastevere for some Noms.

There was this option that you could have between two people that you can choose 3 different pasta together.

We reached home pretty late that evening and I was feeling extremely stoned out. It was about 1 am and I was about to pass out. And yet the boys were still energetic enough to whip up some Tiramisu!

Jerrick’s last day was on Wednesday

We took the treno to get to the airport. It was sad of course, to have a friend leave. And all through the train ride, I kept telling Jerrick that it was such a short time here.

But I do hope for him to return to Rome again. Anyway, he threw a coin in the fontana di Trevi, so he will be coming back in the future. 🙂