Roma

I am writing this at 11pm in an extremely ghetto train station, awaiting a recently-booked 4:30am train to Milan, taking a shift watching our stuff while the others sleep on benches. The story behind this is not going to appear in this blog. Fortunately for you, huddled masses yearning to breathe the truth-feast that is my writing, Rome has left us with no shortage of bloggable stories. Now. Starting from the beginning.

I woke up to our last day in Barcelona feeling crappy. I caught whatever finch had. But I figured, what the hell, last day in Spain, I might as well go for it. We spent most of the day at the beach. Cam and I went for a long swim, while kunal picked up his skirt and ran back to dry land. By the time we boarded the train, I was pretty tired from the swimming and the sickness. We spent 45 minutes or so exchanging magic tricks, and then everyone else went to sleep while I squirmed uncomfortably because I was feeling too sick to sleep. When I finally dozed off, finch somehow managed to sleep-elbow me in the face. I'm not even sure how that happens.

Upon our arrival in Rome, i planned to just crash and take a sick day, but first finch and I needed to hit up an ATM to pay for the (wi-fi-less, by the way) hostel. We found one, and then managed to get ourselves lost for four friggin' hours trying to find our way back. When we finally did, we had just enough time to get yelled at by kunal and cameron, get made fun of by kunal and cameron, and get dinner with kunal and cameron before it was about time to sleep anyways.

I had the good sense to drug up the next morning, and I was feeling chipper enough to go out sightseeing. We did our day of wandering. The trouble with sightseeing in Rome is that all the sights look just about the same - ruined buildings and half-standing pillars. That said, Rome is a plenty interesting city. My favorite quirk is that the ambulences play a tune instead of a siren. It sounds urgent enough, but it's much more pleasant. Also, the locals are awesome. There is an amazing hole-in-the-wall pizza place a few doors down from our hostel called flu-flu's - cheap prices, fantastic pizza, but mostly the owner is just hillarious. Think stereotypical Italian pizzamaker, minus the handlebar moustache. He is perpetually jolly, and he always says to us "eat! Eat! Eat!", makes fun of us for awhile in broken English, and then goes back to happily making more pizzas. We must have tipped him like 50% the first time we went.

The next day (kunal's birthday!) we were seeing the colliseum and forum, so I decided to power through the sick again and see them too. The colliseum was fairly nifty, although the forum suffered from the aforementioned problem of just looking like generic ruins. Story of the day: after the colliseum, we were taking a break in a large dug-out concrete area where an Italian kid (11 years old?) was kicking a soccer ball around. After I knocked it back to him a few times when he kicked it astray, he invited me to play. Anyways, I wasn't trying 100% for fear of knocking the kid over, but he was still pretty good and I was very rusty. Basically, he kicked my ass (and politely said "thank you" every time he stole the ball). I liked that kid. When I had to go, I said "good game." he pointed at our goals and said "10-1!" I was then duly made fun of. Afterwards, we went back to our hostel and celebrated kunal's birthday with a pleasant game of scrabble and a nice early night for all of us.

Today, we backpacked over to the Vatican. Chris and cam were uninterested, so they waited while kunal and I saw the sistene chapel (strangely, they sometimes spelled it like the 16 chapel. I guess whatever they choose is correct). They have it set up like they're trying to sell you something - the signs to the chapel actually filter you through about 200 other rooms first (including an out-of-place but very cool section on Egyptian history) before you reach the chapel itself. Naturally, the battery in my camera died two rooms before the chapel, but I decided to mimic the chapel ceiling and spark life into it with my forefinger. My assault-on-battery worked, and I got quite a few pictures of the chapel.

So we bummed around the Vatican for a few more hours, ate dinner at this Chinese/Italian place (there was an innocent-looking Chinese guy who stood outside and made us feel bad about not eating there every time we passed. It became a running joke), and now we are at a train station. I am definitely still not 100%, but I am starting to improve and it looks like I will have survived this sickness without actually sitting any days out. No promises about the next update - extrenuating circumnstances such as lack of wifi can result in things like this ridiculously long post. Holy crap I have been writing this for over an hour. Alright ciao.