"When in Rome: part 1" a novel by Cale Valentine

Even blogging gets confusing when all the directions are in Italian. anyways, good times. I'm sure a lot of people are going to write on what we have been doing the last week; like going to the beach on the only cloudy day, watching an unforgettable Sunday mass in the pantheon (yeah, that pantheon) and family dinner. I’m going to go in another direction towards the way of life. first, you can never be sure anything is going to be open. businesses here open and close whenever they want. no "back in five" sign on the door. it’s strictly hit or miss. second, if you got money back to recycle glass in this town, homeless people wouldn’t exist. its crazy, every night is a party and every morning the streets and steps by our apartments are filled with bottles and cans. but going along with this, by noon everything is back to being fairly clean. I would guess Rome has one of the best garbage collection systems in the world. also, there is no such thing as a pedestrian only zone. the walking bridge maybe, but even that’s debatable. mopeds cruise down the narrow streets weaving through people. cars pretty much rally in the same fashion, we even had somebody get hit by a mirror but i’m not going to say any names. oh, everything here is so old. if you think about it our oldest building/structure/bridge/road is maximum 400 years old. we went on a tour and our numbers were in the 700's BC. also forgot, we actually saw the head of john the Baptist. his real head. the one that was attached to his body. it is in a church we went to early in the week. also walked into a wedding at the same time, so it was kind of a two-fer. another really cool thing. you can actually drink out of any fountain you see in the city. I guess they are all powered by the aquifer or something, but its really nice. they even have small ones that can become drinking fountains, which we didn’t figure out until about day three when some kid saw us sticking our heads under them like a bathroom sink and came to the tourist rescue. on a personal note my shoes make my feet bleed (threw that one in for sympathy). we are the only ones who run a hot shower from what I hear. but in truth, its more of a hot to cold back to hot to scolding hot to freezing sometimes. but who can complain. there was supposed to be a question mark after that rhetorical question but I cant seem to find it on the keyboard. which is another thing. I cannot for the life of me get the 'at' key to work on one of our computers. granted it is a MAC, but still, I have to copy and paste it from another sight to get it to work. I had something else about the showers. oh yeah, if you haven’t heard, Tim, Todd, and Kalan's shower has their toilette in it. actually in the shower stall, behind the curtain. it seems like a good idea because it cancels out the need of a bidet. we have one, but I haven’t built up the courage to use it yet. not going to get into why. going in a different direction, I found the perfect place for my hammock (for those who don’t know, I usually have one with me) but our neighbor lady said we cant put it there. she didn’t say we couldn’t put a hammock there per say, but she said it was unsafe to put our laundry on a clothesline there so I put two and two together, which is quattro. that equation was bilingual, figured you could do the math. I know, I know bad joke. ill try to refrain from those in the future. I really want to get into a lecture we got from our landlord guy, but I've probably already bored you enough. I know the grammar is horrible so I take full responsibility, but if the spelling is wrong blame it on Microsoft word. Grazie (thank you); pronounced graht seeay, not graht Z. Didn't learn that until about day 4. Buona sera.