so... rome...
i have mixed feelings about rome.
you can't go past the history that surrounds you. you can't go past a pizza made to order with a luscious yet crisp crust almost as good as the yoghurt based one my beloved uses. you cant go past a night time tour of the colleseum in a group of 25 rather than freaking out among the ten or fifteen thousand people who turn up during the day.
you can go to the gelato shop with 150 flavours
or the smaller ones with flavours like licorice, fennel and honey or peach and wine.
you can marvel at the cobble stones worn slippery smooth age. gloving with foot worn pride.
you can stare at your sleeping angel, 15 and missing her friends back home but still determined to bask on the beaches of athens!
you can watch street vendors selling trinkets dissapear like smoke when one of them gets a phone call and announcesloudly with beautiful diction... "gardia". you can smile happily when another visitor to the eternal city asks "do any of these people eat at home"?
or you can get over the awe of a built landscape quite easily when you are confronted with the worst postal service ever encountered by human or beast.
ok... the parcel was around 10 kg but i managed to carry it to the local PO even though my hip was screaming "stop it you feind"! this is a mid level PO with lots of folk collecting pensions, organising god knows what with specialised officers. it's a busy place that should have masses of the neccesities for the efficient working of what they offer. however there are no boxes to fit our bibs and bobs in! we suggest smaller boxes to split parcel into but still no luck! many conversations of no real use occur and finally a bloke with a reasonable grasp of english drags my beloved off to find a solution. one and a half hours after we start the whole endeavour off we finally send our parcel off via a tobacconist who has a set up with a multi national freight company for the princely sum of 203 euros... the next day i buy some stamps from the PO and see a worker with a mass of freight boxes in his arms! i buy the stamps for 40% more than they cost at a tourist nick nack shop 3 days before and vow to never use the national post in italy ever again should i ever be there again. sigh.
lets not finish on a sour note though. there was a wonderful restaurant called la canonica right under our flat. thats where we met the 'blah blah man'.
his name was francesco and he had an able assistant called rheuben. francesco had lived in australia for a few years in the noughties with his then paramour and claimed he would have been there with rheuben except rheuben was in jail for embezzlement or some such. an interesting pair indeed!
their food was a reccomendation for the art of italian cooking in a family owned and run place. melt in your mouth lasagne not served in a precisely cut square with a uniform height. spaghetti and meatball with a spicy tomato sauce herbed to heaven. pizza's the fussiest of my familys eaters thrown down her throat like i used to do with tequila in the 70's. niiiice.
all in all the eternal city delivered nicely and despite the crap postal service and lack of any real recycling set up i would happily go back if some one invited me to with no trepidation... if only eat till i'm full and to set up reforms in their postal system.
ciao for now
and may you have a sporting chance in all your endeavours!
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