Bedbugs.

So.  The Cherry Hostel.  Without a doubt the shadiest place we stayed.  It was run by this skinny guy named Silvio, with the help of an Asian girl who was dying her hair in the kitchen sink the night we got there.  There was a plaque on the front desk that Silvio had won at a poker tournament.  We had problems from the beginning - we had booked our reservation with the Asian girl, who apparently hadn't written it in the log or something.  So we stood by while she and Silvio shouted at each other for a couple minutes, then she led us to our bedroom.  The next morning at breakfast, people were talking about bedbugs.  Nate got a few bites.  Oh, and even though there were "No Smoking" signs everywhere, the owners of the place were smoking in the kitchen.  So we decided to make other hostel arrangements.  As we were leaving, this guy named Dino popped out of nowhere and demanded that we pay for an extra day because we canceled our reservations.  After some fruitless arguing, I said, "We have to go."  And we left.  It was kind of awesome.

That day we had the greatest focaccia sandwiches for lunch.  We knew we had found the right spot when we realized no one in the restaurant was speaking English.  We saw the Appian Way and got an awesome tour of the Catacombs from an Indian woman.  


-A.

The tour guide really was the highlight of the tour.  A guy asked if whether all the dead bodies would have made the catacombs really smelly, and she said, "You can be sure that it would, sir."  


It was nice being a little outside the city-- the Appian way just goes by these nice big spacious villas, and it's actually really pretty.  There's one part that still has the original black polygonal stones the Romans built it with.  Pretty cool.  We drank some Lemon Soda while we waited for the bus.  It's so good.  It has pulp.

(Did you know they make potato pizza here?  I guess you've probably heard of that before, but it's so good.  Like when you roast chunks of potato with rosemary, they just take those and put them on top of the pizza and cook it.  It's divine.)  

When we got back into the city we threw a coin in the Trevi fountain for good luck-- Rick Steves says it's supposed to mean you will come back to Rome next year.  Fingers crossed.  We got the second-best gelato in the world at San Crispino.  Mmm, ginger.  I think this is the day we saw Christ Bearing the Cross.  One of the cool things about Rome is that there is so much art to go around, even some of these little no-name churches get to have some.  There's this nondescript church with an elephant statue outside it, and inside is Michaelangelo's Christ Bearing the Cross.  Really lovely.  Oh.  Michaelangelo's Moses is a similar thing.  So awesome.  He's actually in the church that also holds the chains that held St. Peter.  Pretty cool.  

We went to the Spanish Steps, which is, according to the guidebooks, a pretty place where locals like to hang out, so of course we heard absolutely no one there speaking Italian.  But it was pretty.  The house where John Keats tried unsuccessfully to recover from tuberculosis is right next to them.  (We went to the bathroom in the McDonald's nearby-- in Rome, McDonalds's are CLASSY.  We were standing there agape when some Canadian people started sympathizing with us.  Clean, well-lit, well-designed-- everything a McDonald's in the USA is not.  There were screens playing video ads on the urinals.)  From the top of the steps, we watched for probably a half hour as these Bangladeshi guys would walk around with a bouquet of flowers, hand one to a girl as if it was free, and try and get the guy she was with to pay for it.  It was really funny.  Nate's the one who noticed what they were doing.  

From there we walked up the hill into Villa Borghese, kind of the Central Park of Rome, which was really nice.  BIG.  We only walked through a tiny chunk of it but it was really nice.  We've loved the parks in every big city we've been to-- Hyde Park, Engilscher Garten, and Villa Borghese.  

This is where we sat and tried to plan out the next day, our last day in Europe.  Villa Borghese park is up on this hill, so we walked down a different way than we'd walked up, along Via Veneto, which has all these swanky shops and restaurants and the enormous American Embassy.  Then we went home.

Rome metro.  It's a beautiful thing.

-W.