Rome I – The City

Monday, June 7, 2010 – We arrived to Rome on Monday, our 2-bedroom apartment literally almost close enough to the Colliseum to hit it with a rock. 2000+ year old ruins are basically scattered over every other block in this city, so regardless of where you stay, you’ll likely be next to a world-famous landmark. I won’t bore you to death with everything we saw, but time and again it struck me as completely ridiculous that things built 2000+ years ago are still standing at all; moreover that some of these things are still used for utilitarian purposes, like bridges for automobiles to drive across. In fact, we read that the engineers today simply would not be able to build the Pantheon using the tools & technology available when it was built. Huh?

While experiences are completely subjective, my only complaint in Rome was that nice people seemed to be an exception. In general, people seemed to be very short-tempered and in quite a hurry. I was surprised that they seemed to be the stereotype I’ve always heard of the French, of which we did not really experience while in France. Funny enough, much of the time we met a nice Italian-speaking person, they ended up being Brazilian.