Rrroma

I felt very spoilt when Juan Pablo gave me a trip to Rome for the Easter holidays as a birthday present this year. I had been in Catalonia for 7 months without leaving it except for a daytrip to France and a weekend in Madrid. Those 7 months had taken their toll on me and I was desperately in need of a break. I was very touched by the present, and thrilled by the prospect of going to a country and a city I had never been to before - and in excellent company.

I had certain expectations of Italy - delicious food and stereotypes of energetic, smiley, loud, possibly somewhat brash Italians, just to name a couple. As for Rome - I envisaged a polluted, chaotic city embellished with pickpockets and ancient ruins.
The morning we left for Rome, I was in extremely high spirits despite the early start. We had plenty of time to have a bit of breakfast at Girona airport before hitting the clouds and arriving in Italy a bit over an hour later.

The sun shone in Rome. I couldn't have been more delighted at the first Italian encounter that I witnessed - an ecstatic "Amore mio!" followed by hugs and kisses as an elderly woman came to pick up her husband from the bus stop outside the airport. To me the way it happened, the gestures, the facial expressions and the wife's perfect hair and designer bag were just as I thought those of an elderly Italian couple should have been. After the affectionate greetings, the wife dutifully let his husband take the front seat as she accompanied her chihuaua in the backseat of the car. Just as a dutiful wife should have.

We stayed in a stuck-in-the-seventies hotel near Termini, the main train station. It was so ridiculously tacky and overpriced that we couldn't help but laugh about it.

Getting around Rome wasn't as complicated as I thought. The metro system was a bit limited due to only two lines, but it did the trick for us tourists, anyway. One of my first rides on the metro was to the Vatican. I was a little bit sceptical about going there, afraid of being stuck in a crowd of fanatic pilgrims, but I decided I want to see what I had heard talked about ever since Mr. Embling's art class at the age of 8 - the Sistine Chapel. It was all a bit too much to take in, and thinking about how all the non-Italian works of art ended up in Rome made me shudder. But after a good two or three hours of wandering through the halls of the Vatican museum, reaching the Sistine Chapel was worth it, even with the ridiculous amount of tourists you had to elbow your way through.

What impressed me most about Rome was that, not having done my research or looked up photographs on the internet, I was blown away by the fact that around pretty much every corner of a Roman street there is some breathtaking Roman ruin in the midst of office buildings and clothes shops and ice-cream parlours (which, may I add, served amazing ice-cream flavours like limoncello and nocciola). I was also surprised by the tranquility of the city - you could easily find a quiet neighbourhood right in the middle of the city. After 2,5 years of Barcelonian racket, the Roman buzz and the stereotyped image I had of Italians arguing over nothing with the loudest of voices truly became a myth.

My intention was to write in more detail about Rome, but it has been a couple of months now since our trip...so this will have to suffice...*sigh*