Do as the Romans do - yell at postal workers (Becky)

We had a slow start to the morning. I tried to use McDonald’s free wifi, only to find that they sent the password to a mobile phone (which I do not have). Instead, I spent a while at a net café, stopped at the supermarket, and met back with Jeremy at noon. We then ventured to the post office to mail postcards. We pulled number 250 and they were serving number 220, so we killed 45 minutes before eventually getting to the desk to send our cards. There is something strange about the post offices here – they seem to be a very contentious place. We witnessed many upset customers, one man who yelled what I assume were Italian obscenities at all of the staff, and the slowest processing in the history of all post offices. Everyone filled out a form, then waited, then filled out a form, then got upset about something, then filled out a form, then waited, then finally filled out another form and got a receipt. Even our postcards were individually weighed and metered instead of just stamped. It was craziness.

Anyway, after that we wasted more time shopping for clothes and replenishing my dying wardrobe (everything had been stretched, stained, or lost). And finally we headed to the Coliseum, but decided to take the Coliseum tour the next morning to ensure that we had enough time. So we took a long walk out to Vatican City instead. We explored the tiny city and all the religious sites, but unfortunately were there just as the Sistine Chapel was closing, so we missed that.

I had a tentative phone conversation with an Americorps job scheduled for 10:00 pacific (7 pm here), so we hurried back to the Internet café, where I had no email from the Americorps people. Oh well. It did give us a chance to read the gossip pages about Michael Jackson’s death, which we had somehow completely missed hearing about before this (being away from the internet and cable news so much is very strange!).

In the evening, we took a long walk back to our hostel to get a corkscrew, then drank a bottle of some sort of Italian wine that Jeremy could tell you more about. We sat outside the Coliseum with a few small groups of tourists doing the same thing, and again completely missed out on any Italian discotheques..