Rome: DAY 13

THIRTEENTH DAY

September 25, 2005

The odds and ends of living outside your native area are many.  The most difficult one for me is the computer.  I am a living dinosaur and have virtually no skills with this kind of machine.  My only strength is that I can still type fast due to my incredible Lima Central High School typing class with Miss Rickenbacker.  I think I was mean to her, but she persevered and taught me to type.  Back at the good old Nashua office when I run into trouble, I just yell for Omar and he fixes whatever I have done.  Here, the only way to get the news or American sports is the Herald-Tribune, USA Today or by using the Internet.  I have now figured out how to read the NY Times on line as well as USA and Yahoo’s sport sections.  What a relief - I can’t wait to see how the Niners do this week.  Maybe it will be a bye week.  Well, it’s just as well we’re gone: the A’s are failing, the Giants are gone and the Raiders and 49er’s suck.  Might as well go to Rome for 6 months, as I really don’t care about the Warriors or Sharks.  Still, I have a long way to go on the computer and Kimberly is taking care of my technical issues, really scary. 

We are so busy.  Yesterday was very intense.  We looked at a nice apartment in the Monti section of Rome, old neighborhood and full of character.   The apartment was a real upgrade on what I had seen before.  As you walk outside and look to the left, you can see two immense columns of the Trajan Market less then 25 yards from the front door. I want to be careful with the hyperbole but this particular view is quite spectacular.  Kim still likes the one in the Pantheon hood better, but we will see.  Then a terrific lunch with our new friends Nord and Charles at their favorite place in Trastevere called DeGildo.  It is on the corner of Garibaldi and Via Scala and was quite noisy, but the pear salad was to die for.  In the middle of lunch we had a small incident the kind that happens fairly often in Rome.  Some guy in his car was parked in and started blowing the horn in long and very loud blasts.  Within a few moments an American customer at the restaurant was out of his chair screaming obscenities at the horn blower.  The two guys started to rush each other but somehow nothing happened.  In view of the fact that they were both at least 60 it was probably for the best.  No judgment on the Ugly American, but it all seemed rather small and silly. 

Kim joined a group from the Academy across from the American Embassy to march and protest against the Iraq War.  The crowd was rather small but enthusiastic.  I did not join in, hating crowds.  My guess is that the storms down South have deflected much of the criticism for the moment. When she came back hours later, we reorganized and went to dinner with some of the other Visitors.  One last walk up the stairs to our Villa and finally home.  It was a big Saturday but I did go on line to learn that my other sports team, the Northwestern Wildcats lost a close one to Penn State in the last 50 seconds.  Glad I missed that one, too.