20041101

tv is a laxative for the brain...

whooptie woo! fun was had by all - well at least i think 'all' had fun... i know i did - in the eternal city this weekend... oh yes... no doubt about it... fun fun fun fun fun. just to let you know... i am going to post this weekend's events in a couple of installments, as i have a feeling that this is going to be too long... so you'll get one today and one tomorrow.. okay? okay...

thursday night [yes, thursday is part of my weekend... ain't it grand?] - i head down to sloppy sam's on campo with some of my friends right after school to go get a post critique drinky-boo [i won't go into the crit... because it would just be depressing...not really, but i don't want to bore anyone with school junk while i can talk about festivities... hmmm (i'm making the 'weighing' hand gesture right now)... school junk... festivities... school... fun stuff??? hmmm... i'm going to say: fun stuff!!] my friends decide to call it an early night, as one of them is catching a 5am train to venice and the other two are just tired, as it's been a fairly rough week for all... add alcohol to already exhausted people and you get people ready ready ready for sleep. ... i receive a phone call from camille and kristen and we decide to meet up at sam's again a little later on because the three of us don't feel tired at all [strange, considering that i had only slept for about 2.5 hours... oh well]. i head back to my apartment to see if the brad-ster is awake yet [he crashed hard directly after crits] and we head back out to meet the girls for a quick night-cap. after the bar [we really weren't there for very long...] we - brad, camille, and i - headed back to my/brad's flat... i stepped outside to make a quick phone call only to come back in to find brad and camille had kind of fallen asleep on one-another's shoulders... so cute.

i kind of fell onto my little mattress on the floor and slept until about 1pm on friday afternoon!!! i love sleeping late [actually, i just love sleeping, but oh well].

friday - so we all kind of lazily crawl out of bed at around 1... get our respective showers - rome leaves a kind of funk on you - we've come to a collective resolution that it's the combination of pollution, all of the people, heat, humidity, etc - so, twice-daily showers have become a habit for me. we head out to trajan's market, as there's a pretty nifty-looking sculpture installation there and we [brad, camille and i] really want to see it. --- this is where things get a little funky ---

there are NO cars on the streets. NONE. i was able to walk out in the middle of corso vittorio emanuelle II in the middle of would-be rush hour traffic without having a single car pass me. WEIRD!! there were also no people out... compared to a normal friday afternoon in rome... no people, just LOADS and LOADS of police. i felt kind of like we were in the twilight zone or something. ... 'there is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. it is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. it is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge. this is the dimension of imagination. it is an area which we call ... THE TWILIGHT ZONE.' [rod serling's (creater of the show) intro to the twilight zone...]

so we head off to trajan's market [only later do we find out that rome hosted the signing of the first european union constitution on friday... thus, all of the police and no cars and such]... only to find out that the market is closed for the day... still somewhat weirded-out, we made our way across the street to the museum at the vittoriano monument to check out the lovely degas exhibit there... i have a great affinity towards degas' paintings [even though he was a misogynist and such], so that made for a lovely start/middle of a fairly weird day.

from there, we went back to our apartment to try to figure something out for dinner... brad and camille head to the store to try to find something that we can make [as we have NO food in our apartment]... the come back with PEANUT BUTTER!!!! and CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE MIX!!! i'm in heaven, to say the least. i had the best damn peanut butter and jelly sandwich that i've ever had in my entire life. i have never, ever craved peanut butter before, that is, until i came here. ... for desert, a lovely serving of chocolate chip cookies with milk!!! we dined like kings/queens. it was amazing!

after that, we met up with everyone from studio [saved for zack, baldwin, austin and david, who were visiting the biennale in venice] at sam's for drinks and conversation. after just a little while, everyone but me decided that they wanted to call it a night... just then, my new friends, cara [i don't honestly know if it's spelled with a 'c' or with a 'k'... sorry], rachel, becky and victoria pop into sam's on their way to a club called 'anima' to go dancing... thank god! i've been waiting to go dancing for ages... so needless to say, i'm excited.

we head out and go dancing - i swear, the people who run that club are daft... there were probably somewhere around 100 people in a space the size of a closet with no bloody air conditioning/ventilation... nothing. i've never been so hot and uncomfortable. we decided to go grab a quick drink to cool off... we decided that it would be best to go somewhere else to go get drinks, as anima serves their rum and cokes for a whopping 9 euro. on our way back to campo, we got followed by group of guys after group of guys... none of whom spoke english... so i had to try my very best to interpret conversations using my three-year-old-like italian skills [rather, lack thereof] to try to explain that all we wanted to do was get a quick, refreshing drink and a slice of pizza. italian men! i swear... after i said 'good-bye' to rachel and cara [as becky and victoria had gone home a little earlier than the pizza run], i started back to my flat... only to be followed all the way home by some creepy guy that we had met earlier that night... perfectly nice, but a little bit creepy... i'm glad that i live with guys, as i told him that if he didn't leave me alone, i'd sick my roommate on him... that and the five-point dead-bolt did the trick...

more to come, kiddies... more to come...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I too realized mid-semester the quality of peanut butter, while discovering loaves of white bread that are already crustless, as well as cherry jelly. Good times. If I had known how amazingly cheap the Bailey's was earlier, I would have also tried the "cocoa balls" or "choco wops" cereal with some Irish cream instead of milk. My only advice for you is that if you want to enjoy Rome for the remainder of the semester, don't visit any northern European countries, for they will show you what you have been missing for the last few months (order, realistic schedules, service, and good design). Take care.

Po