Rome

So last night we went to the Italian Opera. I think we originally thought that it would be the full blown singing/acting/etc. We were able to get discounted tickets through the hostel so we figured-why not? We'll give it a shot. Plus it was right next door-talk about being convenient. Literally like a 5 second walk from our hostel. So we wanted to be punctual, so we arrived at about 8:45 since the show started at 9:15....and no one was there. So we walked all the way back to our hostel (Just kidding remember?) and went back about five minutes before it started.

It was held in a church and it didn't have any acting. It was just a piana and the singer. At first I was like hmm...not sure if this was good idea or not, but we actually all ended up really enjoying it. We had watched some opera in Vienna on TV but it was soo much better seeing it live. The accoustics really makes all the differences. The young lady was really quite good...well I guess we wouldn't know anything else, but she seemed pretty good! Either way we were impressed. The only thing that was a little weird was between each song the singer (and sometimes piano player) after the applause would get up, leave, and then like 20 seconds later, re-enter the room, thus requiring another applause from the audience. It seemed really strange to the three of us...but none of us are experienced opera attenders so we just went with it. If anyone has any insight on this I'd love to hear it.


Then Amanda and Eric decided to celebrate the 4th of July and went out with a group of other travelers. They spent some time trying to convince some bartender to play some country 4th of July song...but when he refused they ended up singing the Canadian National Anthem. Or so thats what I gathered anyway. I'm not sure why exactly or the reason behind it...but thats the story. I decided to be lame, or cool I guess depending on how you look at it and stayed at the hostel totally engrossed in my book (thanks MOM!). Our mother bought us three books for our trip--she even tried to make them gender neutral so Eric could read them too if he wanted. 2 of the 3 are pretty dynamite. The other one is so so. So just a quick shout out to our wonderful mother...she takes such good care of us :).

Has anyone noticed that my grammer, punctuation use, etc has improved dramatically since the past few posts? Well this is because I am finally on a normal keyboard. You remember when we were in Germany we had the whole y and z mixed up keyboard, then next we ran into the keyboard that had all of its punctuations mixed all up over the place...thus resulting in very un correct grammer. Well we finally almost have a regular keyboard. The one I'm currently using is just like the ones all of you back home are used to, except the signs/symbols don't actually go with the keys. For example...the key that has a question mark..when it is pressed actually results in this: _. So you can't really look for the symbols (like parantheses, periods, questions, at symbols, etc.) you just have to trust your handy dandy fingers to just remember where these keys are at at home. It's actually quite easy. Hmm....I just wrote a whole paragraph on keyboards...time to move on I think.

So this morning we departed Florence and took a quick little 2 hour high speed train to Rome. Throughout the whole trip our ears kept popping and unpopping. It was really quite an uncomfortable experience. Amanda informed me that this was also happening when we were traveling in Austria--however both Eric and I slept through this. I wish I had slept through this time as well, but we have to have at least one person stay awake on the trains to make sure we get off on the correct stop. Plus I'm in charge of being the tour guide in Rome so I needed to do a little reading up on the city. And believe me...there is A LOT to do here. So we will be busy. We have 5 days here. I believe we will also spend a day doing a day trip in Pompei...probably our last day here.

So once we got here we found our hostel with little trouble...other than the hot sun beating down on our necks, but lets face it. We are pretty used to that by now. When we got here I was a bit surprised. It is in a building that is an apartment building, and they turned one of the floors into a hostel. It has that really nice homey feel! It is ran by a family and the guy showed us all the places we should go and such so that was real nice.

We also have our own room, just the three of us which is a nice change. And....we have a TV! As well as a small library of DVD's. So we decided that we just wanted to relax a bit so we popped in a movie and watched/napped to that. We then grabbed some dinner from a local grocery store, came back coooked it, and now Amanda and Eric are watching another movie...James Bond something or another while I read more on Rome, Cinque Terre (where we are gonig next), and wrote this blog. We had been planning on having today be a bit of a chill day so it worked out quite nicely. Tonight I think we will be doing a little walk through the city to get a bit orientated with it so that should be fuN!

I debated about blogging tonight, but after writing that last blog which took forever I thought that even though today was relatively boring day that I better try to keep as up to date as I can in order to avoid doing that again. Plus the internet is free here!! Wahoo!

Take Care!