Italy, Day 3

01 Apr 06

Rome!

Finally!

Except...no luggage.  They can't find it and assured us it would be in in two hours.  They lied.  No luggage.

The cab ride from the airport to the hotel scared the shit out of me.  No kidding.  It's all gas and brakes.  Green light - gun it.  Red light - slam on the brakes.  And I thought drivers in Mexico were scary.

We met the rest of the group at the hotel - which is not like a hotel at home - in the late afternoon. Hotel Oceania occupies the 3rd floor of a building and the signage is nothing like I expected.  Guess I'm too used to a hotel being an entire building with big bold signs everywhere.  The rooms are kind of cool, though, once you find them. (102 stairs to our rooms - I started counting stairs on our first trip to Europe.)

Our walking tour included the Trevi Fountain and the outside of the Pantheon. 

We had dinner seated at an outside table of a fabulous restaurant.  The seating arrangements were kind of scary, as the table extended into the alley and on occasion a car would go screaming by.

I did not purposely blur this picture - that's a car rushing down the alley.

I drank way too much wine (which was cheap and wonderful).  I drank enough that I found this sign to be hilarious.

Sign on the restaurant's bathroom door.

Between the jet lag and the copious amounts of wine I drank with dinner, I was feeling no pain.  But on our way back to the hotel, I did have to pee something fierce, so Robs and I chose a McDonald's bathroom to use.  I think Mrs Squid was with us, too, but my memory's a bit foggy.  We expected that McDonald's would have a public bathroom we could use, and they did.  Only...well... it wasn't exactly what we were expecting.

It was a squat toilet.

Now, on sober days, I have issues with squat toilets.  After wine and no sleep, in yoga pants, it was almost impossible.   Someone gave me a heads up that it was a squat toilet before I went in, but I hadn't fully thought it through.  The stall looked like a square shower pan with a thing that came up from the ground that I was supposed to aim at.  I remember yelling through the door to Robs that if I fell, she had to come help me.

It took some doing and some bracing against the walls, but I managed to hit the damn target without peeing all over my yoga pants, for which I was very grateful, since literally the only clothes I had with me were the ones on my back and the dirty ones in my carry-on.

I was feeling really grimy by the time we got back to the hotel, so I borrowed a shirt from Squid to wear as a night shirt and washed my clothes out in the bathroom sink.  All I can say is poor Squid, he had to share a room with three women (okay, one was his wife) and I had hung all of my clothes around the bathroom to dry.  It's a good thing he and Mrs Squid are fabulous, easy-going people.