Fall Break - Lazy Day

Friday

We had all had lots of fun in Florence, and decided to basically take the next day off. We all slept in (which is to say, I did, and Mom and Dad enjoyed a quiet breakfast without me), and when we met up later I took them to my favorite kebab shop for lunch. These aren’t kebabs like you’re probably thinking of, but that’s what they’re called here. It’s a giant tortilla wrapped around (probably pork) meat with Middle Eastern spices, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, olive oil, and special dressings. I’m not a very adventurous eater, so I only get the meat and lettuce, but they are certainly delicious (and remarkably cheap, as it’s a wonderfully filling and complete meal for about 3 Euro). We hopped on a small local bus up to the top of the Gianicolo Hill to eat lunch and enjoy the view—the Gianicolo Hill has a fantastic view of the whole of “downtown” Rome, where all the major sites are. 

See? Very pretty. I had fun trying to identify the sites from above—the Pantheon is surprisingly hard, despite its distinctive dome, because it has the same brownish-gray roof as everything else and blends in well. The Vittorio Emmanuele Monument (the “wedding cake”) on the other hand, is very easy to see—it’s the giant, glaringly white structure on the far right. The actual steps of the Spanish Steps aren’t visible, for obvious reasons, but the church they’re attached to is visible on the left side, with the two bell towers.

We sat on the grass and ate our kebabs, Mom rolling her eyes at me for feeding the pigeons (who were hilarious, and as it turns out, actually can be given enough scraps to get full) and at Dad for meandering around with the camera taking pictures of everything.

And by “everything” I mean “mostly trying to get a picture of Mom and me with our lunches”.

Dad ate his kebab much more quickly than either Mom or I, so he paced around the hill for a while looking at some of the monuments—this bizarre little “lighthouse” had a plaque nearby in Italian, and Dad dragged me over to translate because it said “Argentina” on it and that didn’t make any sense. My attempt at translation didn’t make things any clearer, but when we headed home, we looked it up. Apparently Italian immigrants to Argentina donated it to Rome...for whatever reason. Cute little lighthouse though!

We walked around on the hill for a while looking at the sights, including this fountain. It’s a Baroque fountain built by a pope to celebrate the reopening of a Roman aqueduct which terminates here and is the source of the water. I wish I had a proper picture of the fountain as a whole, but given its location, I would have needed magical levitation powers to keep me from falling off the side of the hill, so there you go. Incidentally, for whatever reason neither Dad nor I took a picture of the fountain while we were there, so this picture was actually taken on the day of my very first field trip...for which I apparently didn’t put pictures up at the time because most of them are of random things which I hadn’t yet conclusively decided were interesting enough to take a picture of or not.

We saw this while we were rambling around. There are a lot of signs like this around Rome, and I know one of my friends explained it at one point but I forgot the explanation and who said it, so I’m sort of out of luck on the getting clarification bit. I just thought it was cute because it looks like one of the little aliens from Space Invaders.

...tell me it’s not just me.

Anyway, when we were tired of walking around, we headed back toward the hotel, and stopped at a cafe to have drinks and sit for a while. It was a lovely little outdoor seating area, with a trellis above our heads covered with leaves, and I quite enjoyed it, aside from the smokers nearby. Mom and Dad enjoyed it slightly less, due to the sparrows flitting around in the trellis, but I think they’d prefer it if I left it at that :P When we were done at the cafe, we went back to the hotel and decided that if we were going to be lazy, we may as well go whole hog about it, so we stopped by for the hotel’s afternoon tea and cookies, which was also lovely. We hung out at the hotel for a while, and decided that after our decadent afternoon, we weren’t interested in trying to find someplace to eat, so we trooped off to my favorite pizza place to pick up pizza, panini, and lasagna, which we brought back to the hotel to eat along with a bottle of red wine. They also had some very good cookies they had picked up at some point, so we had that for dessert while we lounged around and chatted and played Mom’s word game on her Kindle.

...I cannot tell you how weird it was to be sitting on my parents’ hotel bed, eating Italian takeout and drinking wine from plastic cups. My life is awesome yet sometimes surreal.

Mom enjoyed our lazy day:

After a full day yesterday, we decided that Friday would be another lazy day closer to home. Katie introduced us to her favorite kabob place, so we grabbed something to go and took the bus to the top of Gianicolo Hill for a picnic lunch. It was a beautiful panoramic view of Rome and a great place to take pictures as we sat in the grass to eat our lunch and throw scraps to the pigeons. They were very entertaining. Stopped at a cafe for coffee (me), wine (Keith), and hot chocolate (guess who). Got back to the hotel in time for afternoon tea and cookies and grabbed another to-go meal to eat in our hotel room with a bottle of wine and a few plastic cups. What fun!