Princess up in the air

We picked up princess uita at the airport yesterday. Matt and I brought our coffee on the train with us in the american sized coffee cups and got some strange looks from Romans who can't imagine drinking out of anything larger than a shot glass. She was radiant and gorgeous and excited. We discovered that I had botched communicating the request to have her bring one of the Genungs boxes. The one containing EARPLUGS which now that I have slept a few nights here I can see the need for. The streets are very busy and lots of traffic and car alarms going off and well you know,,,, its a big CITY. Puita keeps saying I"m so Excited, I hope you don't get sick of hearing me say this. "We'll tell you if we do," pipes Matteo, "If we had our earplugs we could use them"!

We head downtown to central Rome for Lunch. MMMMMMMMMMMMM. You know, I'm not really a food lover, kind of a pain in the ass to deal with food severl times a day if you ask me, but this Roman food is even getting me excited about eating. We sat at the most lovely outdoor cafe in the alley and PUITA and I split a bowl of spicy tomato pasta with sausage pizza. Some English couple squeezed into the tables next to us and proceeded to entertain us throughout the meal with their wisecracks and stories. They are on a cruise and Matt translates their lunch request for them. THey offer to pay for our lunch, which I thought was great, but the rest of the crew had their pride.

MAC take us around the corner to show us a gorgeous column with a HUGE statue of St. Paul with his huge sword on the top. I'll have to research this later, but I think the column may be Roman with St. Paul added on top later. Then MAC have to go resume their regularly programmed lives for the day and PUITA and I are left to fend for ourselves.....!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thankfully I have my pop-up map which I bought in Atlanta in honor of JOey on friends, who has such a contraption in London and has to "Step into the map" to figure out whether to turn left or right at any turn. It is extremely groovy and folds back up into my purse to the size of a wallet. PUITA and I remember that it is Sunday and MAC give us many rapido directions on where to go to find a church, and the arm of saint so and so is in the basement and turn at this piazza and see this thing and turn a hard right but not to hard. PUITA and I just blink a few times and stare blankly back at them trying to shake the jetlag from our heads to understand one word that they are saying. Finally, MATT has to step into the map to show me where the church is and we get it now.

We set off to find the church and the door is closed. We circle the hold damn block and try every door of the Gesu but no luck. We are just positive that Cris has told us at some point during the discourse how to get in here and check the times for mass but we simply cannot remember what whe said and we feel like losers as tourists from the get go on our first assignment. We hang our heads then look up in the sky and see several large building with crosses on the top that we feel sure our churches. We wander around and discover the times on the outside of one. Ah ha! The churches close from noon to 4:30. We are NOT losers after all. We see yet another church and wander after it to see if it opens earlier for a mass, but the closer we get to it, the more we cannot see the top and cannot seem to find such an impossibly large building. Scratching our heads we decide to sit down and relax and drink a cafe instead of carrying on with all this church nonsense any longer. We decide to just roam the alleys and lose ourself in the city. It is marvelous. All of the cobblestone streets feel like little hiking paths in a mountain to me. But instead they are streets with little shop doors open to the air and gelato shops every few doors with mountains of European large buildings on each side with the big windows and shutters and flowers hanging on the balconies. This is probably my favorite part of the day. Finally, we spill out onto a large piazza with a big market and it is time to step back into the map to see where we are. Campo di Fiori! Land of the Flowers. a big famous market.

We wander back to Jesu by 4PM and see that mass is not until 7pm. PUITA is starting to hit the jetlag wall having not slept all night and we decide that we need some action to stay awake. We plot out a course to see the Trevi fountain and the Pantheon. O.K. we can remember a few things MAC has said. The Trevi is everything you read about and see about. It is gorgeous. We make our wish and throw our penny over our shoulder backwards and now we just wait for it to come true.

We meander back to the Pantheon and are serenaded by a violin player standing out in the alley here, or an accordian player standing out there. Wonderful Itialian music. There is a brass band at the Pantheon and we marvel at the inside of the single Roman structure left completely intanct that is not a ruin. It has a concerete cast dome with a whole in the ceiling that is amazing to think was built with no modern construction tools.

Mass was.... in Italian.... We are proud of ourselves to have stayed awake through it and even more proud of ourselves that got off of the right bus stop in the dark and remembered how to get back to MACS. We are eating the sausage cheese and olives and can't beleive that we are really in Italy and really get to stay here for a whole week. We are ready to pass out.... Buena Nocha! Good NIght and Good Luck!