The Seige of Troy... Troy is visiting from Tuesday September 14 til early next Wednesday the 22nd. He's promised to contribute to the journal too, altho I am sure in his own bizarre sort of way. Me First! I know I've been a shameful journal contributor for the past few days. Please forgive me. I was relishing my down time by sleeping endlessly and writing a few more chapters of my book. I'll do a quick wrap-up tho and then get you straight into Troy's seige of Rome (or Rome's seige of Troy - as the case may be!) After Dave left on Friday, I did pretty much nothing. On Saturday, more of the same. Sunday I did pretty much nothing too, except I did return to Circus Maximus to do a couple more laps. That was fun. I do like to pretend to be a chariot racer! On Monday I did basically nothing all over again, except that I did leave the building to go to dinner with my upstairs neighbors. We had more wine and snacks in their gorgeous garden and then wandered back a few blocks, near the St. Peter in Chains church, and had dinner at a restaurant where they're obviously regulars. We were welcomed by everyone at the place, given the run of the 3 tiered antipasti buffet and then served tons of wine, fresh ravioli and then finally a good shot of grappa. And all for only 15euros each! Quite a happy bargain! Archies! Troy got in yesterday. We did the immediate victory tour of the Colosseum and Roman Forum. That's where we saw these ancient primitive people, captured in this rare photo to the right. Up to this point we'd only heard about them in magazines and history books - but for the first time, we actually saw them in the flesh! You see these people are called "archeologists." They are known to hide out in holes in the ground where they do strange primitive dances with brushes and tiny little shovels. Every now and then they pick up some remnannt of dirt or stone and hold it up in the air and worship it in unison. Quite a bizarre species, but absolutely fascinating to watch! Troy and I stood in the distance observing their unique habits and behaviors for a little while before taking off to partake in a cultural ritual of our own: lunchtime drinking! We drank much (mainly because we sat down around 11:45 and Romans don't serve food until 12:30) and then we ate some pizzas and finally crawled our way back to the apartment for afternoon naps. Troy's really into doing things the way the native inhabitants do. Napping from 2-4 is exactly how the Romans do it! He adapts well to new surroundings. troy makes a friend Finally we dragged ourselves together and went out around 7:30. Our first stop was at this Scottish bar off Nazionale where we had peanuts and gin-n-tonics. (In Italy they call peanuts "arachidis." That is way too close to "arachnids" in my opinion and whenever I eat peanuts here I have a silly image of tiny spiders in my nut bowl.) On our way out Troy made his first Roman friend. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was just a statue. We made our way to Piazza Navona for dinner. Navona is crowded with cafes and restaurants and so Troy wanted to make up some sort of decision-making criteria before committing ourselves and our euros to any one specific place. The criteria started out like this: We'd sit anywhere that had either twins, a freshly married bride and groom or a gaggle of HariKrishnas. We looked around quickly but our immediate skimming of tables didn't turn up any of these inidicators. Then we stumbled, literally, upon a guy dressed up as a statue. He wasn't standing on a box like your typical statue person but instead was napping against a lamp-post (hence the "stumbling" part). In appreciation of his unique performance, or lack-there-of, Troy wanted to ask him for a restaurant recommendation. That didn't work out either. Finally we just sat down at the place right next to us. Not wanting our delicate hunt to be all for naught, we claimed we were woo'd by their torches and topiary. It was that or the cute blonde girl who offered to seat us. Not sure. Anyway. We had dinner, sampled some different olive oils and gargled with our oversized carafe of wine. Finally we were off to Campo de Fiori to meet up with my pal Dario. This time we drank at Sloppy Sam's, where the slogan on the back of the waitresses shirts is "If you're not drunk, I'm fired." or something like that. Troy said he wanted one of those shirts.. and then changed his mind and decided he actually only wanted the shirt our particular waitress wore. While it was a noble goal, he proved unsuccessful. With Dario was his friend Paul who I also met about 10 days ago. Also with them were 4 Italian gals who we, unfortunately, neglected through the evening. Not our fault. We don't speak Italian. (We did try to act like goofy Americans tho and that at least made them laugh some.) What I also learned is that Dario and Antonio, who was not in attendance last evening, have both been reading my Italian journal! I did not expect that and so when I returned home last evening I had to check what I wrote about them and make sure I didn't call them any fruity names or anything. Fortunately I did not. So now I can write all sorts of things about them and know that they will be reading and holding it against me. Fun! Troy liked meeting these two guys. While Dario continued with his claim that he traffics canoes for a living and while Paul held up his claims to being a train conductor of some kind, Troy joined in and claimed to be a bus driver. Who knew that I had friends with such lofty blue collar aspirations? As for me, I keep sticking to the whole "I'm a writer" story. It sounds so much better than "I'm a self-spoiled Internet geek going through her 29-year-old midlife crisis." It's around noon now on Wednesday and Troy is hungry. Guess it's time to feed him. He is anxious to try the cheap fold-up pizza from a stall someplace, so we must be off. I'll have him write when we return and he is well-fed. Ciao! Troy's Two Bits "Tiny Bubbles... In The Wine..." -- Don Ho troy snifters It was one of the cats that woke me first, mraw, mraw, scratching in his box in the closet, seven a.m. Where am I. My head hurts. I feel like I mixed red wine, vodka, rose wine, red bull, gin, champagne and beer. Oh. I did. A couple hours later came a thunderstorm, a real banging crunching crackling spectacle of a thing, sounded like an explosive packed knight in a full suit of armor falling down a flight of stairs. Scared the hell out of the cat, hid in the bottom of the closet. The thunder is gone, there is just a regular tapping of rainwater draining off from the roof falling three stories onto a piece of corrugated metal out between the buildings somewhere. It's one of those rhythmic noises that you're sure has a pattern to it, like every third one is louder, tick tick TACK tick tick TACK, but then you listen carefully and there is no pattern, it's random. The fibonacci series, perhaps? TACK TACK TACK tick TACK tick tick TACK tick tick tick tick. Nope. Mao the black cat has reemerged. He creeps along the baseboards with his elbows and knees bent, tail low and belly along the ground, and has now made a cat-sized lump under the covers near my feet. "We have no shortage of calcium deposits." troy is "drainman" The pipes coming from the sink and shower in the bathroom of this Roman apartment meet one another in a kind of resevoir in the floor, about the size of a large soup can with a lid that probably is supposed to be securely fastened and watertight. I shaved my face, in the processs filling the sink with water, and concluded that no one has done that here in a while when I drained the sink and the lid popped off the resevoir, and it and the drain in the shower both regurgitated blue-black dirty shaving water mixed with decomposing pipe schmutz, hairs, calcium deposits and clotted soap from the time of Caesar. The shower drain thereafter didn't really drain, the shower sat there with an inch of primordial ooze standing in it. A bottle of "draino" failed utterly to solve the problem, it was some kind of biological stuff that was in two parts, one very syrupy and the other very runny, and it wouldn't go down the drain. We ended up plunging it, and we appear to have fixed things for the most part, and in the process we found (much to our amusement) what appears to be the last two knuckles from the index finger of a two year old. The cat urgently wants to play with it, but we've elected to keep it refrigerated and serve it in a Martini alongside an olive to some unsuspecting guest on saturday night. The Laura Segment So, yes. Yesterday Troy and I had quite a time. I think we probably should win some kind of award for braving the most kind of alcohols in one day, without actually giving in and drinking a single Long Island Iced Tea. It all started with us waking up and finally going out for food. We had the cheap square pizza near the Trevi Fountain and then kept walking, despite the rain and our lack of "ombrellos," to the Pantheon. From there we wandered home and began drinking. After we ran out of wine and beer, we figured it was time to go out. Went to Trastevere, drank gin&tonics at a bar called Judas. Then to dinner where we had another liter of red wine over pizzas. Then to another bar for gin&tonics and shark&vodkas (some RedBull/Vodka knockoff). Then we wandered til we found a fancy bar that belongs on Sunset Strip instead of in Trastevere. Had fancy glasses of champagne there and I think that's when the Don Ho started. Since then Troy's been singing "Tiny Bubbles" nonstop. In the cab home. Over the cheap rose wine that ended our night at 2am. During the thunderstorm this morning. In the shower. And now, I think he's singing it in his sleep. It might have passed if he didn't actually have the song in MP3 format on his laptop. You have no idea how silly it is to listen to Don Ho in Rome at 2am while drinking cheap rose wine. Yet another great moment in the history of Roman civilization. Anyway. In between drinking Troy did manage to give my bathroom an abortion. The drain got stopped up and so we bought some kind of drain cleaner called Mr. Fabuloso or Mr. Wonderful or something. When that didn't work Troy asked for a coat hanger and started shoving it through the drain pipes. As you can see in the picture above, I was of no help. Instead I just drank wine and took pictures. See, as I told Troy, the drains here have always drained slow. I just figure you shouldn't use the water aggressively. Apparently though, in Berlin where Troy lives, they are into aggressive water usage. it's the ticking... Troy has also started a quote collection to help him remember our times together. Thing is he writes down almost every 5th sentence I say. I'm not sure if he's actually collecting evidence for my pending committment to an asylum or if he's just trying to help himself keep track of the conversation. See, us blonde chicks, we think fast. Sometimes it's hard to keep up. Anyway, the picture I contribute today is of one of the clock stores on a side street between the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon. It has all these little ticking clocks with eyes switching back and forth and tails ticking in unison. It totally creeps me out. What's up with all those things looking back and forth, totally in sync, like that? To help you understand my quandry, I had to take a picture. The quote Troy has from that brief conversation is "It's the ticking that makes them psycho." He loves that one almost as much as "Tiny Bubbles." For now our goal is to try and stay sober. Tomorrow Elina arrives and we'll be out making more Don Ho references then, I'm sure! Uncle Junior In da Club Despite our best attempts to maintain sobriety, the rain made us do it. We popped out to the Renault Cafe and Troy had a booze salad (a.k.a. Bloody Mary) and I had some lemon soda with gin, and then vodka when they ran out of gin. The rain wouldn't stop so I bought a yellow umbrella for 10euros and we went to the mushroom restaurant. This is when the 5.50liter of house red wine happened. I'll leave the rest to Troy to tell at some point when his hangover wears off enough for his fingers to unstick from one another. it's yer birfday.... For now, let me just share with you our dancing Uncle Junior. This is some old guy who comes to restaurants and sings Italian love songs for tips. He doesn't sing well at all and his resemblance to George Plimpton had me going. Then he came to sing to Troy and I and, upon discovering that we are American, switched to singing an English version of his Italian love ballad. At smome point we decided that either he was singing or that we should have asked him to sing (who knows which is the truth) 50 Cent's "In da Club." About that time also Troy recognised him not as a ghostlike George Plimpton come back from the dead, but instead as Uncle Junior from the Sopranos. Here is our animated version of what Uncle Junior would look like if he were to sing "it's yer birfday." Make sure you had the soundtrack going or it's only half as funny. Hrm. Okay. So maybe you had to be there. Faaggghedaboutittttttt! elina's first pizza Elina arrived early Friday. It was raining. All day long. So she and Troy made friends and then around 2 we went out for pizza. We had pizza lunch for about 4 hours, drinking much red wine and soaking up the vastness of the huge empty pizzeria on a Friday afternoon while all the Italians were napping. En route home we acquired some playing cards and that's when thep Italian Stud Pretzel Poker started. We played for hours until we finally all broke down simultaenously and fell instantly to sleep. Finally we wokeup to Rino Ceronti on Italian MTV singing "Giornatta Solare" which is my favorite Italian pop song. I turned it up really loud and made Troy and Elina wakeup to watch Rino, who I think is the hottest guy on TV next to Paulino, the MTV VJ from Milan. Anyway, that got them up and we finally wandered out to Trastevere for dinner. troy's broken fountain Trastevere was eerily empty but we managed to crowd ourselves into a trattoria that was totally packed and engaged further in our full body Italian immersion. There was an annoying blonde Italian lady pushing her way around by Elina and Troy. Behind me there was some trecherously loud Italian birthday party. And, in a total freak of luck, we ended up in the only non-smoking dining room in all of Italy. Troy and Elina, both fully in the throes of a chain smoking marathon, grunted smokily with disappointment, but then switched to debating all topics of the world that you shouldn't. Politics. Religion. Don Ho. From there we wandered to Bali, a Tiki bar that Troy and I both wanted to check out. Unfortunately we were more interested in it than it was in us and after an hour of not getting our drinks, we finally up and left Bali. Fortunately we found a Redrum bar nearby that served us "pronto!" and with very strong drinks. Finally sauced up, we left to go back home, stopping only briefly to pay homage to Troy's favorite broken fountain. He really likes that thing, although I don't know why. I think Rome has a fountain for everyone and if you know Troy then it would make sense to you why he'd choose to like the most dark, broken and icky one. troy tortured by sour patch kids Alright, so then we came home and returned to Italian Stud Pretzel Poker, but this time Pajama Party style. All three of us got into our sleepy-time best, drank more cheap booze and played poker until around 5am. Troy, after being served my classic "gin, gin, gin and maybe some tonic" cocktail finally caught a sour patch kid crawling out from his skin. He was almost mortified but then he saw that the alcohol running like blood through his veins had placated the blood-sucking sour patch beast. This is why he took this picture, just before eating the little devil with a victory cry of "YUMMM!!" Elina's 1st Commentary poker pajama party I sit here writing, I am already tempted to go home. Rome is fine. That's not the problem. It's Troy and Laura. They're taking all my money in what has become officially known as "Italian pretzel poker." It all started harmlessly enough this afternoon, as these things often do. We were sitting in a non-descript Italian restaurant with nothing to do, eating what wil probably the first of many pizzas I consume in Italy, when I suggested the prospect of playing cards. Finally after a bit of shuffling around and trying to figure out the Italian words for cards (for you non-italians it's 'carta')Troy secured the deck and we were off and running. Except one thing, no poker chips. No chips, no problem. Laura got a bag of pretezels and they have been working remarkably well for everyone -- everyone except me. While it's not big stakes, the losses are all piling up. At this rate, I may not have enough to get home. But tomorrow's another day. And while I may not see any of Rome's historic ruins or fine sculpture, I am consoled by the knowledge that whatever time zone I'm in, I'll still get my ass kicked in poker. White Night spanish steps cirque du soleil setup Saturday night was Rome's annual White Night. "La Notte Bianca" is a night when everything in Rome stays open all night, from 8pm to 8am. The buses and metro are free. Museums and movie theaters are all open and free. Concerts are going on everywhere all night long. Everyone comes out to the street and parties like it's 1999, but, ya know, not exactly. There were only two things on our agenda. The first was to see Cirque du Soleil perform at the Spanish Steps at 9:30 and the second was to meet up with Dario for a sunrise concert in Pincio, a big park that overlooks Rome from the north. We got to the Spanish Steps and almost got run down in a crazy mob of stalled strolling Italians before settling down on a side street, setting up shop and anticipating a looting session right outside the Prada store. From there we could very clearly see the stage and yet still avoid the enormous pulsing crowds that were everywhere. We could also buy booze at the shop next to us. Prime location! cirque du soleil performing While there we met up with Chris and Austin, two American guys I'd planned to meet. They're hanging in Rome trying to teach English for a year. We chatted with them and waited for the Cirque du Soleil show to start. In an hour and a half of waiting all we saw were them lining up candles on the steps. It wasn't much of a show. Finally, in classic "small world" style, I caught Dario wandering down the street with his gal Carla. They joined our Prada position and told us that the Cirque du Soleil thing would be starting at 11. Thus we waited and drank on the street for an hour and a half and waited to see the show, which only lasted 1/2 hour. dario We tried to have fun during the show, but it really didn't live up to my level of expectations. There were no flying people. No people diving into the steps. No fire. No water. No nude looking people like in Zumanity. Just a lot of bending people and then an opera singer. It was still cool to see, especially for free and because it was on the Spanish Steps, but by the end of it we were just hungry and cranky. Dario still managed to keep our sprits up though by doing some Italian dancing on the street. (This will be animated at some point. Just not today.) popolo bathroom fun Alright. So from there we found a restaurant for dinner and had yummy wine and pasta and cheese and gnocchi and grappa. Troy and Austin jumped ship beforehand but then Paul and his boss type guy, John, from LA joined in. From there we walked up to Piazza del Popolo and decided to settle into Pincio and wait for a concert. This waiting started at 3am, but the concert wasn't starting til 6am. Finally, around 5:30 Elina and I decided to jump the White Night ship and go home. Guess we should have told Dario and Carla and Chris about that part, but, um, well, we didn't. Sorry guys. Instead we walked to find a taxi, I fell down and made myself bleed and then we came home to be rowdy with Troy for a whole 1/2 a second before passing out. pincio during white night All in all, the White Night was fun but we really didn't do or see enough of the free Roman cultural stuff. This morning I wokeup and Troy was already gone out wandering. Elina was sleeping and I was starving so I went to get groceries but found that every grocery was shut because it's Sunday. Instead I ran into Geoffrey Rush and his family strolling around my neighborhood and so I gave them directions and ordered a pizza and now I am here writing this and making everyone wait for me before we go out for a stroll. That is what we do now! Tomorrow is Lake Garda for Elina and I - so I may not get to update til we get back. But have no worries - because when we return on Thursday Dario has promised to have an "International Party" at his flat. Should be fun, although the "international" part seems to be in question since the only people in attendance will be Americans and Italians thus far. Oh well. Close enough. << back to where it all began... Content & Photos © 2004 Laura Laytham, laura@girlsaresmarter.com.