When in Rome

Yes, I have been waiting this entire trip to say that.

We've made it to "the eternal city" (well, we made it again since Whitney and I were technically here before we went to Paris) and were reunited with Susie Q, also known as Susan or Mom or life giver, among others.

The plan is for us to spend the night here, move Whitney into school tomorrow and then take the train to Naples/Capri until Friday when we will be back in Rome (and will then have to come back to America).

We had some of our characteristics travel shenanagins throughout the day, but we got through them with an unending supply of Lizzie McGuire quotes and movie references.

After we'd gotten situated -- and after my mom had become best friends with the hotel manager, Fabrizio -- we set out in our neighborhood, Trastevere. One thing need to note before I can continue is that my dad's barber, Gene Franco, is from Italy and gave us lots of recommendations of what to eat, see, do, etc. and visiting Trastevere was one of them, so check! (Gene Franco shall be a recurring theme in this post, sorry not sorry).

While my mom says that she has followed my blog "religiously" these past two weeks, she doesn't seem to understand that stopping everywhere we see food is not frowned upon but actually encouraged on this trip, so navigating the next week might be more difficult than actually navigating through Rome.

After walking around for a while, we eventually decided to really hunt for some dinner; since my blog is really a food blog and I just pretend that I do other stuff, here is the low down on our first meal in Rome:

First of all, my mom's Italian is bad. Really bad. Watching her try to communicate with anyone while Whitney also tries to use the half dozen phrases she's learned is kind of painful -- at one point, our waiter brought two fish to our table, and these were real fish, like Nemo fish, as in they still had scales and eyeballs and I'm still not sure why that happened!

Following Gene Franco's advice, my mom ordered carciofi alla guida, which is an artichoke thing, and linguini cacio and pepe, which is a pasta thing. Whitney decided to ask our waiter's advice (in first-grade level Italian obviously) and got what she described as "linguini of the sea," which was linguini cooked in tin foil with all sorts of little sea critters. I got fettucine alfredo with shrimp, except I don't think there was actually any shrimp in it. With or without shrimp, it was still delicious. Whitney dubbed it our best meal yet.

One awkward thing about dinner -- other than my mother and sister -- is that I've never managed to figure out how to effectively twirl pasta around a fork and Whitney says that this means that I look like I'm in pain when I try to eat, so I'll be working on this before I leave.

Another awkward thing for me -- and this is all the time, not just at dinner and not just in Europe -- is that both Whitney and my mom feel the need to tell absolutely everyone they meet their life story. Whitney has spent our whole trip telling anyone who looked our way about the American University in Rome, her art history class, how she only has class four days a week from 8:30-11:30 and everything in between... After dinner, Susan was telling (or trying/failing to tell) our waiter about Gene Franco and all sorts of other things that I don't even care about so they must have been totally lost on our waiter with his questionable English skills.

After dinner, I hoped the awkwardness would end, but we still had time to embarrass ourselves on the walk home, where Whitney and my mom told me that I was stupid for liking Benjamin Franklin because Thomas Jefferson was "better looking" and wrote the Declaration of Independence. Their (incorrect) opinions remained unchanged even after I said that the only reason Benjamin Franklin didn't write the Declaration of Independence was because his colleagues were worried that he would hide dirty jokes in it. We also got gelato.

I'm not sure about the WIFI situation in Capri, so that might make blogging a little difficult in the upcoming days. In Rome, we have to pay for the internet but I couldn't get it to work on Susan's computer tonight so I used Whitney's, which will be with her and not me in the hotel when we get back to Rome. That means that this is the last absolutely-assured post for the near-future, although I'm sure it will not be the last. Peace and love until then. Ciao!

The Great Pizza Marathon of 2014

Whitney and I finally figured out why we've been carbo-loading for the past two days! It was to prepare for the Great Pizza Marathon of 2014 that took place tonight.

After the rainstorm that sent us indoors had passed, Whitney and I were looking for something to do. Whitney had had gelatto before dinner, but the rain had meant that I couldn't get any afterwards, so we decided to go out and hunt for some dessert.

Well, we went out for gelatto and came back with pizza. A lot of pizza.

I've had pizza twice in the past two days and again for dinner tonight, but I still didn't think it was enough, so we went looking for other pizza places to try. We walked from our hostel to San Marco and back looking for the best specimens of take away (our stipulations were that a slice needed to cost less than three euros, be take away and only plain cheese) to try.

Mid-hunt

We returned to our hostel (with only a few bug bites to speak of) and the real fun began. It was a Pizza Marathon, not a Pizza Sprint, so naturally we took our time eating an insane amount of pizza (not).

Like all good things, this needed to be snapchatted

So, I've had five different varieties of pizza in 3 days and am I complaining? If you really need to ask me that, you need to go and reevaluate your life choices because you can't seriously be thinking that. My favorite was actually the pizza I had for dinner tonight which was not technically a part of the Marathon, but pizza is heaven in eight slices and this was all really good pizza.

I know three things to be true at this point: I like Italy, I love Venice and pizza is good.

Goodnight, everyone. I will see you when I wake up from my pizza-coma.

Well, the sky has decided to open up here in Venice tonight and we are experiencing severe thunderstorms. Updates will be given if necessary.

I have directions, I had directions, but you lost them!

Don't worry about the title of this post, it makes about as much sense as the day we had, but I thought that made it a fitting title.

So, we're bad tourists and have this habit of just wandering around and not seeing what we're really supposed to see (actually, I think that this makes us great adventurers, but other people might not agree with our travel planning/philosophy) and that was our plan for today. Our first (and our only designated) destination was Campo Santa Margherita, which was just supposed to be a fun little area that we thought would be a nice way to start our day.

Note: We'd originally planned on going to visit the Galleria dell'Academia because that is the home of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man until we realized that they don't actually display it there, they just have it. Since that is totally lame and we are totally broke, we decided to walk by the Galleria, but not go in. Campo Santa Margherita, it was!

We got directions, but we also have a nasty habit of ignoring directions, so we got lost. I'd been told that I needed to get lost in Venice and we haven't had any trouble with that, but today, we got really lost. We ended up somewhere that had cars! I kid you not and Venice doesn't have cars! I still don't know where we were. We couldn't even find a sign to tell us where we were at that point, but we knew it was not where we wanted to be.

Wherever this place was, however, had signs directing people towards San Marco and we had a map and a general idea of where that was in relation to where we wanted to go, so we set off following those signs. This would also be the part of the day where I took out my iPod and used the compass app to guide us (southeast). Yup. Whitney thought that the compass was archaic, but I told her that we couldn't follow the North Star at 10am, so the compass was our best option. With a combination of map/sign reading, helpful landmarks and my compass, we finally made it to our destination. It only took us an hour and 20 minutes.

Victory!

I think we were a little disappointed when we got there; the book had made it sound like a lot of hustle and bustle and it was neither. The highlight of our excursion there was getting to see "The House of the Moor." Apparently researchers have found that Shakespeare's Othello was based on Cristoforo Moro, the son of a noble family who was sent to govern the island of Cyrpus in 1508 -- where this research was back in March when I was teaching Othello to a bunch of uninterested tenth graders, I'll never know. It was just a house, we couldn't go in or anything; they didn't even have a sign so all we have to rely on is that the information in the book is accurate, but I will be telling my classes about this if I ever teach Othello again.

Well class, Othello wrote Othello... long story

We decided that we would go back to Rialto Market because it would give us an opportunity to find some lunch (and because we apparently wanted to walk about as far away from where we were as possible without actually leaving Venice). The signage from Campo Santa Margherita to Rialto was a lot better than the non-signage we'd encountered in our first excursion of the day, but I took the iPod out again anyways. During this walk, we also found the famous bridge Ponte dei Pugni, which was the fighting bridge in ye olden Venice. It was where the clans (or gangs) used to meet up to scuffle. The bridge has footprints on it to mark the starting positions but apparently most fights just ended up with everyone falling into the canal.

Of course the hottest part of the day was when we were lost, because things had cooled down significantly by the time we got to Rialto. We found lunch there and then went to look at the gondola ferry (because a real gondola ride costs 80 euros for 50 minutes and we're not about that). It's a ferry, so we knew it wouldn't take us far but we figured we would ask just so we could say we did it if it worked out. When Whit asked the guy where the ferry went, he smoothly replied with "my house." He did not get our money.

We putzed around for a while and found some street performers, at least, we assume that's what they were. We saw them taking bows in the middle of a square with a whole bunch of people applauding them, but then they just turned on some more music and danced around and did about as well as would I do (which is to say badly and like you're participating in an exorcism).

Then it was time for our usual midday break, but before my feet could truly rest (and before I could blog), Whitney got a message from a Pfeiffer Lady Laxer who is also in Venice, so we were back out on the streets. Chalane, Whit's friend, has also been in Paris when we were there but we hadn't been able to connect then, so this was a priority.

Go Falcons!

And now I get to have my real rest time before dinner, which is looking like it is going to be pizza and Bellinis! (All we've had here is carbs and alcohol...haters gunna hate).

Also, tonight in America, Susan is boarding a plane to Rome! And tomorrow, we are going to meet her there!

Whitney hasn't really succeeded in making me "insta-famous" yet, but I was told that this photo was Facebook profile picture worthy and that I needed to put it on my blog.

Whitney also wanted me to note that one of her pictures from Berlin got 57 likes, which is her personal record and that she has upped her instagram game since she's gotten to Europe.

Winnie and I ate more pasta for dinner. Sew many carbs. Send help.

Libreria Acqua Alta

Thanks to a little website called Buzzfeed, I was able to take the book crawl to its third country! This afternoon, we visited Libreria Acqua Alta, which translates to "library of high water." It is a bit of a literary jungle, because they have books everywhere -- piled in gondolas, wedged into the corners, stacked up to the ceiling, etc. It was worth the visit because I don't think I'll ever see another store like this one again...

You can literally stand in the canal at this "fire exit."

First of all, there were cats. They were happily sunbathing outside, doing cat stuff and being all around adorable.

The best bookstores come with cats

And then they had this insanity going on inside:

Although this isn't even a fraction of it all...

And then you went outside and got this:

Don't forget the stairway of books that led up to a stunning view of the canal:

Mhm. That's a thing.

Please add this to the growing list of reasons why we are never leaving here.