New Year's Eve in Rome, Italy

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Upon arriving at the Rome train station, we found our way to our hostel after a few misguided loops around the blocks. Nice because it was actually only a block away from the train station. Pensione Giamaica was on the 4^th floor of a non-descriptive building, and we were greeted at the locked door by a big barking dog. An old woman came to answer the door, didn’t speak English, and seemed to nearly threaten to not have us because we didn’t have the printout of our reservation. Say what?? Finally after a quick phone call on her part, the man who actually ran the place came to our rescue. He spoke English in a thick accent, was very talkative and helpful, and showed us to our cute little lime green room. He chattered all the while about how if we go out for New Year’s, there’s a free concert by the Coliseum that we should go to and stay at for a few minutes before and after midnight because it’s traditional for people to throw old household items out their windows at midnight. It was also the time when guys liked to pull out guns in their revelry. Uhh… Once the concert was over, it was also traditional for people to make the trek across the city to the piazza square, where I guess more festivities occured.

A few minutes after we settled in, he brought us a tray containing huge pieces of cake and two glasses of wine. What is it with Italians offering wine as a welcome gift? I guess that is kind of their trademark. The cake was delicious, packed with raisins and dusted sugar, and we ate every crumb. Thanks for our second (meager) meal of the day! After eating this and unpacking, we decided (or maybe I decided) that we were tired enough that a nap sounded really good before heading out for the festivities. So we set our alarm for 9:30pm and had a great and much-needed nap.

The trek to the Coliseum was a bit of a failure. That particular metro stop was closed off, I suppose to avoid congestion. Tons of people were out and about, and the holiday spirit was apparent in the whistling, whooping, and hollering of several of the young locals. It made me wish I spoke Italian so I could feel more a part of the fun. We made two misguided stops on the metro due to this non-existent Coliseum stop, and finally just decided to wing it on foot by following our map and the locals. It was raining off and on by this point, and it was a pain trying to compete with so many umbrellas. To make a long story short, after several wrong turns and changing of minds, we made it to the concert area 20 minutes before midnight, and pushed our way through the thousands of people as close to the front as we could get. It was impossible to get to the very front, as by this point everyone was pushed so tightly together you couldn’t get through even if you wanted to. I didn’t even have to hold myself up. The concert was in Italian of course, and everyone around us was singing merrily along. The spirit was catching, but like I said, the language barrier kind of dampered the fun for me. The countdown started at 66 seconds, and the huge chant arose as people got their wine bottles and glasses ready. I was taking pictures with our nice camera, and at the midnight strike Shane and I didn’t get to kiss because I was frantically trying to stuff the camera in his coat to avoid the shower of wine being sprayed up into the air all around us. As a result my white and only coat now has purple spots all over it, which I have a feeling won’t ever come out. Pictures thereafter sport a red trickle of wine running down my throat, which I never knew was there. It looks slightly like blood. Haha.

After the countdown and the rain of wine, the fireworks began, both in the sky and on the ground. Those on the ground miraculously cleared a huge gap in the crowd—how, I don’t know—but the ones in the sky were gorgeous. We got several pictures, but none of them are spectacular, as trying to take pictures of fireworks is always hard.

The crowd began slightly dispersing after this and a huge circle became the fireworks/bottle dump. Tons of bottles were thrown into the center, followed by fireworks loud enough to cause you to go deaf. Shane and I walked around the perimeter taking pictures of the merrymakers and the ruins of Rome. Empty or half-empty wine bottles littered the streets everywhere, and vendors sold them on the curbs. Finally, when the chill of the air started to penetrate even my two layers of coats, we headed back to our hostel, dodging broken bottles and vomit. We saw 3 abandoned high heeled shoes along the way, and a few homeless guys huddled in doorways with a line of those half-empty wine bottles. Merry Christmas to them! Our stomachs were very hungry by now, and we searched for open restaurants on the way. Hardly any were open anymore, and by the time we got back to our hostel we had given up finding any hot food worth eating. We made do by buying two apples and a bottle of water, supplementing it with our pistachios and cookies left over from Christmas dinner. This satisfied us enough and we went to sleep around 2:30am.

In the morning we awoke, talked for a bit, and I decided to go back to sleep for a while because I still felt exhausted. We set the alarm for around noon, and settled back into our beds. I’m not sure whether I heard the alarm go off or not, but Shane never woke me up, and I never woke him up. As a result, we both woke up around 4:30 in the afternoon!! Our whole day had been wasted by sleeping! I couldn’t believe what a lazy bum I had been, but I just felt sooo tired! This was supposed to be our sightseeing day, and I felt bad that I had kept Shane from seeing Rome. We decided then to stay one more night in Rome, sightsee the next day, then continue on our journey without coming back for Epiphany.

Needless to say, our activities this day were minimal. We went to the train station and bought reservations for a train to Naples on Sunday morning. We decided to go there, then take the commuter train to Pompeii, then a little farther south to Sorrento, where we would stay the night. With this taken care of, food was next on our mind. We went to a little pizza and pasta restaurant and had, you guessed it, Margarita pizza, along with spinach ravioli. The pizza was lacking compared to the other two I’ve had, and the ravioli was different, but good. There wasn’t very much of either, but it filled us up. We paid 17 Euro for this meal, including the sitting fee. Shane is already losing weight, and I’m sure I’m not far behind!

From here we tried to find free internet but to no avail. The two McDonald’s the train station sported required an Italian cell phone for the password, which of course we didn’t have. We finally sighed at our loss and paid for 20 minutes of internet at a café, where we made reservations for what promises to be a great little hostel in Sorrento. With all the important things completed, we headed back to our hostel, looked at the pictures we’d taken thus far, and settled in to sleep a mere 8 hours after we last got up.