Rome & Vatican

One month ago I visited Florence and Venice. And now I was heading to Italy again, and this time, to Rome, the eternal city. I was excited, but things didn’t go well at the beginning.

My friend and I booked the hostel ‘Ciao Bella’ through hostelworld.com, and upon arrival we were told that they were overbooked. I was really annoyed. What’s more, they didn’t even apologize and let us go to another hostel. Then we went to the one named "freestyle". The guy working there is from Nepal, later we found out that he was also a mechanical engineer student, but due to some reason he went to Italy and work before he could finish his degree. Anyway he’s a nice guy, but his manager isn’t. I suspect that the hostel is running illegally, as it closes down on week days and moves everyone to another department one block away. It’s strange. The poor Nepalese had to work all on his own with minimal time for sleep, and we didn’t settle the room till noon. I was down at the very beginning.

We then took the metro to the Colosseo.  There are only 2 metro lines in Rome and they are very crowded, dirty and unsafe. I came across a pickpocket, actually two, they work together. I was then talking to my friend and suddenly felt my wallet moving in the pocket. I turned around and saw a woman standing beside me, holding a handbag in her left hand to cover her right, with which try to get the wallet out of my pocket. Obviously she was not skillful at all. In front of her stood another woman, whose job was to block others from seeing it. I stared right into their eyes, and they quickly walked away. Their bold attempt ended up unfruitful and I learnt to keep alert during the rest of the trip. It’s a problem when you live for a long time in a safe county like Singapore. Anyway that was the first confront with a pickpocket in my lifetime.

The moment I saw the Colosseo, I felt as if a dream came true. But so what? There are too many to see on the earth. But quite often, you don’t really know why you are going there; rather somebody tells you that they are the 100 or 1000 places you must visit in your lifetime. Crap! I now have realized that the pure happiness of travelling comes from you experiencing something (positive) unexpected, rather than visiting places everybody else is visiting. We didn’t go inside the Colosseo anyway. Walking around it was enough. We did come back to the Colosseo again at night, and spent a lot time taking interesting photos.

Ancient Rome is a great historical site. Yet I cannot understand it, though I read about it quite a lot prior to the journey. As a matter of fact, the ruins didn’t make much sense to me. And it left an impression on me that Rome is a city of ruins. What’s more, it … stinks. It is true, there’s funny smell all over the city, not very pleasant. But in fact, Rome is as bad as I felt at that time. I didn’t discover its beauty till the next evening.

We also went to see the Mouth of Truth. If you have ever watched the movie ‘Roman Holiday’, you probably know the legend that a liar will lose his/her hand if he/she puts it into the mouth of the marble mask. So, I went there and put in my right hand and said, “I’m gonna lose my hand!” Guess what happen? Of course nothing happened. And actually I made the story up. The church where the mask is kept was closed and we only got to see it behind the bars, literally.