I've had a rough night and I hate the fucking Eagles

With somewhere like rome, it's hard to know where to begin -- so I will try and relate it in some kind of chronlogical order.

Our holiday began when we arrive at the airport, an hour before check-in was supposed to open. The holiday gods smiled benevolently on us, and we were able to check in right away and ditch our bags. My rucksack with all its loose straps and buckles had to go to oversized baggage, but we were unfazed. Security was no problem, even with my steel toe-capped boots, I just x-rayed them with everything else, and we were on our way.

By this time, we were starting to get hungry, so we found a restaurant and decided to treat it as our own private depature lounge -- taking up residence there, and staying for hours, making everything drag out as long as possible. While seated, the girl noticed it begin to snow outside -- but I managed to convince her that her suggestion of it might be dust and not snow was a good one, so as not to see her upset at missing it.

We boarded at a reasonable time, the flight took off without delay, and almost before you know it, the plane was landing again.

The other end was again without drama, through customs we went -- the girl having a much shorter queue for a change, coming from outside the EU -- and our bags turned up almost right away. We had booked a transfer from the airport to the B&B where we were staying, and had to watch out for a man holding a sign with my name on it. Except he was nowhere to be seen.

He eventually arrived about 8pm -- half an hour after we landed -- and I can't decide if he was just lazy, relaxed and roman about time, if he had expected us to be late and got caught out, or if he was deliberately late on purpose so that we would have to pay 50 euro instead of 40. Either way, he was friendly and helpful and we were on our way though the dark, Italian night.

As is so often the case with these drivers, his taste in music was pretty dodgy at times -- and we were reminded of The Big Lebowski when the driver started playing the Eagles. I wanted to ask him to change the channel, tell him I'd had a rough night and I hated the fucking Eagles. He probably wondered what we were laughing about in the back seat.

Traffic in Rome is probably just as you've heard -- road markings are less of an instruction and more of a gesture, but we arrived in one piece at the B&B and were shown to our room. All rooms were themed, and ours seemed to have a very far east feel to it -- especially with the Hindu wall hanging. I celebrated being in a new place by almost immediately breaking something -- I was a little over-zealous, picking up my rucksack from the floor, and attempting to swing it onto one shoulder, hit the full-length mirror hanging on the wall.

I didn't just crack it, though, I knocked the mirror crashing to the floor where it shattered into a thousand pieces of barious sizes. Luckily our transfer hadn't left yet -- we got the impression perhaps his other half owned the place, since he gave us a business card and said we could call any time -- and he was totally unfazed by it. He saw the funny side as he swept up the shards of glass, reassuing us not to worry and even saying it was "good". We never established if he literally meant it was a good thing I had broken the mirror, of if he just meant "it's all good" as in "don't worry, it's fine". To this day, I have never been asked to pay anything for it -- so consider myself very lucky indeed.

So, yadda yadda, accommodation was clean and comfortable, with breakfast included and in a not-too-dodgy part of town. An area that seemed to consist of Chinese clothes shops, that is clothes shops run by -- at a guess -- Chinese immigrants, which had barely any stock, and never any customers. The girl insists they were merely fronts for dodgy dealings. We had heard not to stay near the station from various sources, and when you got near the station you saw a world of difference to where we were staying. We were still a good 15 minute walk from the Colliseum, but it was worth it, plus there was a supermarket up the road we frequented with broken Italian phrases.

Next post: day one; the rain, the Roman forum
(sorry about infrequent updates, I can only udpate here if I visit my parents)