People of the CyberWorld, wake up!
It’s Monday, the sun is shining and the weekend has left a panoply of flavors, sights and sounds carved onto my senses.
Yes, it’s been hectic. Friday night started with dinner at a Japanese restaurant in San Giovanni. My first time at such a place, with a group of 10 friends. A crowd, as international as they come. 2 Portuguese, 3 Germans, 2 Italians, 1 Spanish, 1 Finnish, 1 French and 1 Cambodian.
As funny as a Japanese speaking Italian might be, I can’t say the food calls for a quick return. I really didn’t like it and it was funny to see that one of my friends, who doesn’t even like fish, thoroughly enjoyed it while me, a fish lover, had such a difficult time savoring the sushi, the maki and the saké.
After dinner we went to a nearby pub where we had trouble finding room for so many people. After some time, though, we finally got hold of three tables and we ended up meeting a very drunk and obnoxious Finnish couple who I convinced to sing the Finnish national anthem for us. And so they did, kind of…
Bed came at 5 in the morning and the phone rang at 12. Me and another friend had two tickets for the Italy-England 6 Nations Rugby match. The game was only at 5 but we started on at 2 cause we had some intermediate stops and a lot of walking to do.
We left the car in Anagnina and took the metro to Barberini where we picked up the tickets. Then we walked all the way to the stadium, heading first towards the S. Trinitá ai Monti church, down the Spanish steps, into Piazza di Spagna, through Via Babuino and on to Piazza Del Poppolo, incredibly full of beer-drinking, red and white English fans. Then, Flaminia all the way to the stadium.
15 minutes prior to the game we take our seats in the Stadio Flaminio, the teams come in, the English sing “Sweet Chariot”, the national anthems play, God saves the Queen, gli Italiani sono pronti alla morte and it’s kick-off!
55 minutes of a close match and a final strong half-hour by Her Majesty’s players yield a predictable 31-16 victory for England.
The A metro line in Rome has been closing at 9 due to construction works for a long time now. This is a big pain and as we had a restaurant reservation for the night we had to go all the way back to Anagnina to pick up the car. But before getting on the metro at Spagna we took a stroll down the great Via del Corso checking out the movies playing in original language (one of the few places in Rome that does this) and looking for a McDonalds. 7 o’ clock, we hadn’t had lunch, we were starving…
The problem was that my friend had the idea of going into one of the large book & CD/DVD shops in Via del Corso and this is always bad news for my wallet. The end result: 5 new CDs for 55 Euros. I finally bought “Early Days & Later Days” by Led Zeppelin, two cheap albums from The Smiths, “The Singles” from The Clash and a double Jazz CD for 5 Euros. It has Coltrane, Duke, Miles, Ella, Satchmo, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, George Benson, Dizzie Gillespie, Nat King and Natalie Cole, and a lot more. For 5 Euros, it was a sure buy. I have most of the songs already, but for 5 Euros, what the heck!? By the time we got out there wasn’t even enough time for the burger.
After the uneventful ride back to the car (if you don’t count the lady who got her fingers stuck on the door), off we went back for Pizza near Via Veneto and Trevi. Saturday night Roman traffic is lunatic as usual, and we did see two or three accidents involving motorbikes, of course, but other than that, it wasn’t as impossible as I expected.
The difference between a Pizza SuperTelevisione and a Pizza Televisione is one egg and one Euro. But since the previous evening we paid 5 Euros for a chestnut, an orange and a nut each one filled with icecream and all three trespassed by a stick, one Euro for an egg is quite normal…
I made it back home at around midnight thirty but didn’t go to sleep until three, not sure why. Me and another friend had planned to go skiing early on Sunday morning. I said wake up at 8, he said 9, we agreed. I woke up at 10:30 and got to his place at 11. We headed to Ovindoli, on the way to Pescara, about one and a half hours from where we live, to the sound of Led’s Immigrant Song, Whole Lotta Love and Stairway to Heaven. What sound!!
It was our ski debut and it was every bit as disastrous as “debut” and “ski” in the same sentence might suggest. I soon had to put my snow chains on because I couldn’t move the car anywhere. We parked, went back to rent some skis and found out that the place where we should go was after where we had parked. Walking with skis on your back is not an easy thing and as we passed the car again, we thought it was better to get on it and drive to the always elusive big car park. Surprisingly, there really was a big car park and it was easy to find a spot. We finally started dressing for the adventure and my friend struggled for a while with the incredibly heavy boots. Meanwhile, I took pictures.
I fell getting on the elevator, enjoyed the ride up and fell 10 or so more times after we started descending, only to find out that I had lost my car keys in one of the falls. I guess some people might have panicked, but I’m so used to losing things and/or getting robbed that it’s become second nature and I don’t care anymore. Losing your car keys somewhere in the snow, 200Km from home, probably meant having to spend the night around there or convincing somebody to take us back to Rome where I could go fetch the spare key. And then, of course, going back to Ovindoli, get the car and return. I get tired just thinking about it.
Anyway, one of the things I’ve learned is that when you lose something, the best way to get it back is to look for it. Duh, right? Well, let’s just say that it’s more important than it sounds. I put my skis down in the mountain (just left them there) and walked slowly back to the elevator searching for the key. I didn’t find it. Meanwhile, my friend, unaware of any of this, had already tumbled is way down and was waiting, and waiting some more, for me. I then decided to tumble my own way back to him, tell him of our little problem - which he took rather well too -, finally get the damned passes and work our way up another elevator and down another slope back to where we had started. My idea was to talk to the lady in the beggining to see if she knew anything about my key.
We made complete fools of ourselves in this second elevator. It was one of those you stick between your legs and then just go with it to the top. We never made it past the first kick. We couldn’t balance at all. We were advised to take the slower moving walkway instead. We didn’t even know there was one, otherwise the embarassment would have been saved.
We must have gotten up there at around 15:45 and I went tumbling ahead down the slope to see about the keys. When I arrived, always looking under the elevator, it was past 16 and the elevators close at 16. The lady was already leaving and I again left the skis lying around and started running after her. Of course you can’t really run with those boots. So, I just walked as fast as I could and got to her as she was entering her car. I told her about our situation, she called the main ticket office (where we had just come from) and someone had delivered my key there. She agreed to take me with her on her car and after a very slow trip (driving on snow is very dangerous…) I had my key.
She then tried to drive me back to where my friend and my skis were. In the end she couldn’t because she didn’t have snow chains and the car was thrashing all over the place. I told her I didn’t mind walking the rest of the way (even if the temperature was -6) and we finally said goodbye, as I thanked her for the huge help. In our chit-chat I found lots of interesting stuff about her. Namely, she is the owner of the whole thing (elevators, cabins, you name it) and she prefers beach and sea to mountains and snow and is thus quite fed up with that place. We talked about meeting the next time I go there, which will be soon.
When I returned to my friend and the skis, it was starting to get dark and we knew we didn’t have much time to play anymore. We just tried some more techniques (yeah, right) in a small area and took the last pictures.
We returned the skis and finally ate something in the day, at 6 o’ clock. I had brought some sausages, some bread and some fruit but all of it was either mashed or frozen. We ate it anyway. During the trip back home my friend commented that it was lucky that we had gotten the key back. I argued that luck doesn’t have much to do with it. It’s all about making an effort about your stuff. It’s happened to me several times and when he thought about it, he also had two or three such examples. Finding stuff is the most natural final step after you have lost them.
Back at my friend’s house, he prepared a meat meal for us which landed right on the spot. We then watched some movies I’m not going to talk about and checked some of the Serie A and Winter Olympics results.
At 1 in the morning, I finally managed to beat inertia, get up from the couch and drive back home to my bed, for the most peaceful of sleeps…
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