A 37 day imaginary travelogue of a
trip to Rome (with a few scattered other places such as New York).
This is written to match the journey I am actually taking, and so
each post is concurrent with the more or less actual day my wife and
I are experiencing in Rome.
What day number are we on?: eighteen. This, this is sort of the halfway point!
Level of writer's drunkenness (in
real life, scale of 1-10): minus one, and it is not pleasant.
What am I eating (in real life
again)?: nothing, not hungry, feel a bit grumpy.
Map or picture?:
Any other notes/Status: I think regular readers will find this illuminating: helicoidal means "Arranged in or having the approximate shape of a flattened coil or spiral curve"
Today's Entry:
We went for a rather long ramble to a distant park. My foot sort of hurt. I don't know why I'm telling you that, realism? I like Roman parks, maybe even love them, but I would definitely describe them as ramshackle. They can kind of get big, too. We walked around spotting an occasional old tree or untended monument that was somewhere between 50 and 2,500 years old. It's not bad to get a little outside of famous Rome. It's not bad to just take things exactly as they are, without context or history.
Another challenging thing about Roman parks is it's hard to figure out what's up with the buildings. Is that a palace? Is it the end of the park? Is it a fake building? Is it a community center? Is it someone's house? Is it a museum? This confusion is only increased by Rome's changeable nature. At 11 in the morning it may be a closed up building with no indication it will ever open again for anyone, and with no information as to what it is or was. By one in the afternoon though it may be a lunch cafe, thronging with people all dining on its veranda, or maybe a meeting will be there, or maybe it'll just open up and let you wander around it. At night perhaps there will be a party there that we weren't invited to, or maybe even the owners will have come back from their summer trip to the alps, and upon their return they will turn on the porch lights, all 3,000 of them.
We went for a rather long ramble to a distant park. My foot sort of hurt. I don't know why I'm telling you that, realism? I like Roman parks, maybe even love them, but I would definitely describe them as ramshackle. They can kind of get big, too. We walked around spotting an occasional old tree or untended monument that was somewhere between 50 and 2,500 years old. It's not bad to get a little outside of famous Rome. It's not bad to just take things exactly as they are, without context or history.
Another challenging thing about Roman parks is it's hard to figure out what's up with the buildings. Is that a palace? Is it the end of the park? Is it a fake building? Is it a community center? Is it someone's house? Is it a museum? This confusion is only increased by Rome's changeable nature. At 11 in the morning it may be a closed up building with no indication it will ever open again for anyone, and with no information as to what it is or was. By one in the afternoon though it may be a lunch cafe, thronging with people all dining on its veranda, or maybe a meeting will be there, or maybe it'll just open up and let you wander around it. At night perhaps there will be a party there that we weren't invited to, or maybe even the owners will have come back from their summer trip to the alps, and upon their return they will turn on the porch lights, all 3,000 of them.
I'm waiting for you to stumble upon the ruins that serve as a cat sanctuary. It's pretty ramshackle. (What a great word.)
ReplyDeleteI was there a lot, it turns out, just, you know, watching cats be cats, in the ruins where Julius Caesar was assassinated. There's a good Dollar store there, and the A.S.Roma store where I bought my soccer match tickets is just down the street.
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