Roma is not pulita

You’re going to have to be patient with me and this introduction. We’ll get to the point eventually but we’re going to take the long way there. Or just skip to the next paragraph to get on with it. After I had finished writing post, I happened to be reading an article that was discussing how the format of a post to Facebook (video, image, text) impacts the audience response rate. The conclusions aren’t terribly surprising, an image post beats video and text, video beats text (if we could find a way for text to beat image we would have a new rock, paper, scissors) but it convinced me to add an image to this post (which was previously all text) so that it could be all that it could be. See, I told you we would get there.

For the regular followers of this blog (read: my mother. Hi Mom!) you’ll remember that I mentioned last week that I was going to Rome for the weekend to see my friend Slate. He had been on a multi-day bike tour across Italy (he actually rode through Ancona last Friday) and was spending the night in Rome on Saturday before flying back to Portland on Sunday. On Wednesday this week he was in Las Vegas at Interbike. The week before he was in Italy riding his bike up a mountain pass. Now he’s staring at Vegas’ take on Rome in Caesar’s. Cool.

Well I try to be blasé about it, casually saying, “Went to Rome for the weekend,” but I still felt pretty giddy getting off the train on Saturday afternoon. I mean, I wake-up Saturday morning, get on a train, ecco, I'm in Rome. Rome! I was talking to a friend of mine who lived there for a while a few years back (Hi Olivia!) and her take the desire to return and the simple pleasure to be taken in being there pretty much summarizes my giddiness.

I have been thinking of Rome a lot lately. I am not sure why. Maybe I am dreaming about it because I know I can’t go there anytime soon. Maybe it’s because I am so curious to see how and what I feel about it now, years later. I want to go back to Trastevere and walk the cobblestone streets. I want to go back to the Villa Borghese and sit on the benches and eat my gelato. I want to go back and sit in Piazza Navona next to the fountains and stare at the tourists aimlessly wandering by. I want to have drinks and a pizza at the tourist cafe that was right around the corner from my old apartment next to the Vatican. I want to walk up the hill to my old school and bitch the entire way about how hot it is. I want to fall asleep in bed listening to the incessant buzz of the motorinos.

He was late getting to the hotel. If we had been meeting in Gresham, I would have been bummed. But killing a few hours in Rome is pretty easy to do. I spent the time wandering around some of my favorite parts of the city, having a gelato outside the walls of the Vatican, and watching the nuns and priests walk across St. Peter's square. I love seeing nuns and priests in St. Peter’s square. They seem like props, like Mickey Mouse and Goofy at Disneyland.

When Slate arrived I showed him around Rome a bit (yup, I am familiar enough with Rome now that I can show someone around) and then we had drinks at a little bar within view of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Just hanging out watching the sun set behind the Vatican while having some wine. Ho hum.

Saturday night we went to Trastevere, the district in Rome trying its best to be like Alberta, and had dinner at a tiny restaurant. While we were waiting for our table, three girls walked up to take a look at the menu. I overheard (it wasn’t very hard) one of them loudly declare, "There are enough restaurants in Rome that I am NOT going to eat at one with English on the menu." Fair enough. I've been guilty of sporting the same attitude. Joke's on her though, and I wonder how often the joke has been on me, because a friend of mine who lives in Rome had recommended the place as one of the top restaurants in Trastevere and it's about as authentically Roman and Italian as you can get and we were the only tourists in there by the time we were seated. Cue ridiculous feelings of smug superiority. Also cue giant smile remembering the plate of roasted potatoes and the bowl of Polpette della Nonna. Seriously tasty. Back at the hotel we snarked about the silliness of single beds in twin rooms in European hotels. Yet somehow we both slept through the night and didn't fall out of them. Go figure.

Sunday, Slate left at 9 for his flight back to 'Merica and I sat on a bench in Villa Borghese and watched the people in the park and listened to the street musicians. Just another Sunday in the park in Rome. I had some amazing pizza from a place beneath the Spanish Steps which looked too touristy to be good but proved me totally wrong (I'm sensing a theme here...) and then took a hot, crowded, slow, crowded, hot, slow train (and crowded) back to Ancona. And that's what a weekend in Rome can look like.

I’ve mentioned my new roommate Simone? The vet. From Montova in Lombardia. We’ll just refer to him as Simone from now on, shall we? Our ongoing adventures in communication are fun. By fun I mean it’s fun trying to explain the flavor of ginger or why there is a name for blondes and brunettes but not for women with black hair. (In case you were wondering it’s so that blonde jokes can exist.) The Italian word for clean is pulita which I confuse in my mind with polluted in English because they sound the same. The word for dirty is sporco. I finally got that clear in my mind when I put my pile of dirty dishes on top of the clean ones he had just washed because Simone said they were puliti. (By the way, never refer to a girl as sporca because it’s REALLY rude.) And I keep calling cold water calda because those two words sound similar even though calda means hot. I’m told Italians have the same problem going in the opposite direction which is some consolation. That is, if you take consolation from knowing you make the same mistakes as everyone else.

The grocery store I frequent, as well as the daily farmer’s market, don’t sell chilis, but the farmer that Valentina buys all her vegetables from grows them so she occasionally brings me two or three since she knows I like spicy food, or at least I miss being able to eat if I’m in the mood. Sauté them whole in a bit of olive oil before adding onions and tomatoes and they make for the perfect heat level in sauce. Now if I can just find some fresh cilantro (coriandolo) I will have everything I need to make salsa and Raimondo's and Simone's heads will pop if I shove a bowl of chips and salsa in front of their maws. But finding cilantro is harder than you think it would be for a plant that is native to Italy. That surprised me too. I assumed it was from Mexico. It's not. I looked it up. The Roman soldiers are responsible. They spread it during their conquering and empire building. They would mix it with other spices and vinegar to rub on meat as flavoring and a preservative. But now, cilantro, indigenous, is "not typical" and seldom used in Italian cooking while tomatoes, unindigenous, are considered "typical" and always used. Today she brought me this bunch of fiery fellas.


This is the photo that makes this an image post which makes it more effective.
I left them sitting on the other desk in the office and promptly forgot all about them. A couple hours later my nose was running, there was a slight burn in the back of my throat, my eyes were stinging but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That’s when I realized I’d mace’d myself! Because I’m a genius.