Yesterday was simply incredible. I was feeling a whole lot better (I actually SLEPT that night!) and was stuffing myself full of medication, leading to me actually being awake and kind of wanting to do things. After meeting a puppy outside our apartment that literally jumped into my lap and licked (and completely scratched up) my face, we started our fifteen minute walk to the Colosseum.
LET ME TEACH YOU SOME THINGS ABOUT ITALY: Basically, I’m learning that nothing runs well. Nothing. Everything is disorganized, and nobody seems to want to do anything about it. Apparently they rarely even draw up contracts for things, so if you live here it’s hard to know that you’ll get paid for things. It’s a beautiful country to visit, but I think I would get incredibly frustrated living here after awhile.
So like, even the tourist things are set up horribly. At the Colosseum there were a few lines: there was one for people who didn’t already have tickets, one for people who had tickets (this was us!) and one for people who had paid a little extra to “skip the line.” We ended up passing the people in the skip-the-line line, which made literally no sense, and it took us about fifteen minutes to reach the security point (which exists for every tourist attraction here, no big deal, just a body scanner and a bag checker).
The security points themselves at EVERY SINGLE PLACE have also been INCREDIBLY inefficient. It’s just like the people running them don’t care. They don’t care how slowly people go, they don’t care that there aren’t enough things open for them to get people through in a timely manner. They have those little box things that you put all your stuff in for it to go through the x-ray scanner: but at every station, there were only like two or three boxes. NOT ENOUGH. So people were always waiting for boxes – literally, if they had twice as many plastic boxes (which they physically have, at other stations that are closed down because it’s the low season) the line would move twice as fast. This is just one of the many issues I see with the way things are run; I feel like they would be so simple to fix, but nobody can be bothered.
We finally got past the Colosseum’s security point, and then all the lines CONVERGED. Like, what was the point in waiting in separate lines? And THEN there was this huge free-for-all, with no signs, no anything, just a swarm of people trying to figure out where to go and not lose their place in line, shoving and pushing each other, the whole shebang. It was so ridiculous, and there are so many simple ways to fix it. This is like one of THE main tourist attractions in Italy, and it blew my mind that it was run so badly.
A really odd thing that I’ve been noticing throughout Italy is that it seems to ignore all the history you actually care about. Most of the Roman architecture was built thousands of years ago, but when it became a Catholic State, almost everything was converted to be Catholic Churches and stuff. And in all of the signs for everything, they focus 99% of the information on things that happened after the Catholic Church took it over. Like, okay, you’re at the Colosseum: obviously what you care about is learning about gladiators and the way they fought and all that cool stuff. But instead, almost all the information was about what became of the Colosseum when this pope or that pope did some kind of thing in probably like the 1400’s because that seems to be when all the Catholic shit went on. Like, sorry, but NOBODY CARES. That’s not why people are interested in the Colosseum; if we wanted to learn about Catholic history, we’d go to a church. But this is the trend for pretty much every single tourist attraction. Another example: the Pantheon was converted to a Catholic church (of course) at some point: but walking though it I had literally NO idea what it was originally built for. EVERYTHING was about how it was converted to a church. Like. What?
Aside from my annoyance at the useless information the Colosseum presented me, it was still a pretty cool place. You could walk all the way around it on two different levels, and they had rebuilt a floor where it would have been for the fighting. But you could also see the whole area under the floor, where they stored weapons and where the hospital and the morgue was. It was so incredible to see what humans were able to do without machinery – and even crazier, the built the thing in only ten years. There was also a sort of museum thing throughout part of it, which was a cool way to experience it slightly differently.
Unfortunately, the museum part of it wasn’t the best (surprise, surprise): besides the religious stuff, it mostly focused on who dug up what when- which like, again, we don’t care about. Also there was a model of what it originally would have looked like and we were like OH COOL and then five minutes later there was a sign that was like hey, remember that scale model we showed you? Yeah, it’s all wrong. These are the things that were inaccurate. OKAY, if you’re going to show us a model, why not just SHOW US AN ACCURATE ONE?!
After the Colosseum, we headed to the Trevi Fountain (insanely beautiful), had lunch (risotto!), went to the Pantheon (see above) and stopped by a bunch of squares and some other landmarks. Rome is such a beautiful city, and we kept running into things that we didn’t know existed, like huge buildings and monuments. It’s the perfect city to wander around and get lost in.
We finally had some gelato (I know, I know, it took me THIS LONG) on our way back to the apartment, where we crashed a bit, watched some TV, and did some writing. Also I freaked out about going back home a little bit more, but I’m starting to figure things out which is good.
Then pizza to go, wine, and more TV because we are old people who need our rest, dammit. I turn 28 in like, I don’t know, not very long. I’M OFFICIALLY WELL INTO MY LATE TWENTIES. I need my sleep.
Today we took a terribly long time packing up and checking out, but it happened eventually, yay. The plan was to walk around a bit before heading to Naples, but the weather turned to shit overnight. Instead, we’re sitting in a cafe, drinking 1.50 euro cappuccinos, and getting more stuff done. It’s good to feel useful.