Lost in the Garden of Eating!

Lazy day, but that seems it is all I can be up to. This traveling lifestyle is starting to grind me down and I'm looking forward to getting home and having a bed and board I'm familiar with. And some private time. The flat is very nice and all, but one bathroom and four people in it? Just a bit high on my people meter.

Rain in the morning so we stayed in and did very little. Headed down (walk) to Testraverse along the Tiber. This is a lovely little, they say "poor", part of Rome, but is featured at least one cool church and a nice open market. My mother and POSSLQ chattered dementedly on about anything they noticed or thought of. Baxter and I hung back just far enough to hear the incessant rattle of female voices and spent our trip looking around. After two bridges, my informal way of judging distance along the Tiber, we swun off to the left, down a crooked little road that dropped us off on a traditional cobblestoned road/path which we walked slowly. We arrived at a little gate of some sort (the picture) covered in vines, and once through it we seemed to be in Testraverse proper.

We wandered a bit.. including wandering into some kind of museum (what isn't a restaurant, gelati store, or tenement in Rome is, in fact a museum or a Tabachhi) that immediately shoed us out because 1 pm was closing time. Fine with us, we wandered a bit farther and had a lunch. Like all lunches it was accompanied by a pitcher of wine, and all mellowed out we wandered down to the Church. The Church was rather nice, although it had something I had never seen before. As you walked in, to the left of the altar was a little box.. a box that charged you for turning on enough light to take a picture of the altar and architectural and artistic features behind it.

The Church will always find ways to separate the flock from their fleeces. They need to do a little more work on this clever scheme, I think, as it only cost 30 cents for three minutes. At that rate if the thing is on all freaking day they'll only make 144 Euros per day. And given the Italian schedule there is no way they are open all day.. any day. Take away Mondays (everything is closed on Mondays) open at 9 and close at 3? You've only got 206 Euros per week.

That won't even keep the average Priest in wine, condoms, and other nasty rubber novelties.

It's a good business plan, but a bad pricing point.

Anyway, we wandered outside and the church was surrounded by an outdoor market which was primarily focused on the plaza in front. 90% of the tables sold jewelry, so Baxter and I were a bit bored. We wandered around with the map trying to find the street an English bookstore was located on. As it turned out we passed the street once and had an Italian guy point us off towards somewhere in the vincinity of the South Pole.

Fortunately I had the map.

Unfortunately, while I had the map the POSSLQ was unsupervised by an adult and by the time I had turned around to snap the picture on the left she had unaccountably engaged the services of the Parakeet on her hand to tell her fortune. Not free, of course, so we had to pony up (a weird phrase to use with respect to a parakeet).

The good news? Parakeet picked a slip of paper which claims the POSSLQ will live until she is 98.

The better news?

I will be long in my grave. ;-)

We wandered about a bit more and finally found the bookstore which was operated by a charming Irishman with whom we shared pleasant lies and polite evasions.

We also purchased some of his product, so he was happy.

On the way back I separated from the rest of the crew. I'm still trying to find that perfect shot of St. Peter's. I tried to walk up this big hill that is kind of next to it, but I kept running into the walls of some kind of seminary school. Finally, after finding no chink in the Italianate armor I more or less walked into the hill and found a five story, excavated car park. Biggest one I've ever seen complete with restaurant, bus level, and 50 cent toilette which I gladly availed myself of. I even caught up with the others as they had dawdled over ice-cream.

Oh yeah, that dude is just some guy I saw in the square whose combo of big sweaty head and Italian cool struck me as, well.. cool.