Kriszti and I just came back from a four-day visit to Rome, Italy.
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From Rome 2011 |
(Click on any of the photos to view full size or see the whole album at the bottom of this post).
One of the amazing things about Europe for me is how close things are…we left Szolnok on Wednesday afternoon (we chose to fly Wizz Air which has incredibly low-priced flights, but a very strange schedule), taking the train to Budapest’s Liszt Ferenc (Franz Liszt) airport. Our flight left Budapest at eight-something and arrived in Rome at a quarter to ten. The flight was roughly the same length of time as the train trip.
One of the difficult things for me to get used to on many European flights is that they don’t assign seats, so everyone queues up an hour in advance of the flight, then there’s a rush for seats and confusion ensues (including a fair amount of pushing and shoving, jostling and so forth). We paid a little extra for “priority boarding” which, essentially, meant we were able to cut to the front of the line…anyway enough said about that.
We arrived to Rome city center around midnight (after waiting on the shuttle bus for an hour in the airport parking lot) so we ended up taking a taxi to our accommodations–a sort of B&B called “Residenza Maxima” the pictures you see on their Web site are of the room we stayed in, but they tend to make it look just a little better than it actually was). It was located a bit far from the center, but roughly half-way between the center and the “Centro Congressi” a conference center deep in the suburbs where the TESOL Italy conference (http://tesolitaly.org) was being held.
We found the apartments, woke up the manager and got our keys and fell into bed, exhausted. Early the next morning we were up early and out about for our first forray into the city.
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From Rome 2011 |
It took us a while to get oriented (find the right tram into the city, buy tickets, etc.) but we were soon at the Piazza Venezia with our mouths hanging open because everywhere you looked there were jaw-droppingly beautiful monuments to look at.
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From Rome 2011 |
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From Rome 2011 |
Kriszti and I both love taking pictures and we adopt a machine-gun approach to photography–we were each snapping pictures like mad. Between us we took over seven hundred pictures in our first two days–I love digital! Can you imagine how much that would have cost in the days of film?
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From Rome 2011 |
We walked until our feet couldn’t hold us up anymore, then we headed back to our neighborhood where we dropped into a small market to buy some groceries. The guy at the deli counter was singing and whistling while he cut prosciutto and cheeses and served customers. And though he only had a little English and we (meaning Kriszti) only a little Italian, he helped us put together an amazing meal for only a few Euros, all the while laughing and joking with us. We already had some pasta in our basket, and he packaged up a small container of fresh pesto, several slices of prosciutto, a chunk of cheese (to die for), and olives (also to die for); in addition we bought a bottle of white wine, a jar of antipasti, some cookies and sweets and sundries. we took all this home to the apartment and Kriszti cooked the pasta while I set up a Skype call with the kids.
The next day I went off to the conference and Kriszti did sight-seeing, then hooked up with a local Nia teacher and eventually ended up teaching Nia classes in Rome! (it’s up to her to write about her experiences, nudge, nudge). We met up in the evening and had a magical night visiting some beautiful places such as the Trevi Fountain
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From Rome 2011 |
, Piazza Navona and the Pantheon
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From Rome 2011 |
.
On Saturday I attended the conference and gave my presentation in the afternoon. My presentation was scheduled for 3:15 and at 3:10 I was standing in front of an empty room. I was starting to worry that everyone had gone home early, or, worse yet, they simply hadn’t found my presentation abstract interesting, but it turned out that the plenary speaker had gone long, and people were late getting the next sessions. Within a few minutes the room filled up and I proceeded to give my presentation, “Leveraging Internet tools and resources for creating CLIL classroom materials…” I won’t bore you with the details, but I was very happy to say that it was well received; several people came up afterwards to congratulate me and say how much they enjoyed the presentation.
After the conference, I met back up with Kriszti and we spent another evening running around Rome until our legs nearly fell off.
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From Rome 2011 |
Sunday we slept a little later and then went to the Porta Portese Flea Market in Trastevere…this was a huge market with what seemed like a million people crowding into narrow lanes between stalls selling just about everything you could imagine. We had fun buying T-shirts, fridge magnets, and other kitschy tourist stuff for about a third of the price it cost in the city center. Unfortunately, Kristi had arranged to teach another class and we were stuck in the middle of this huge mob. We had a slightly stressful fifteen-minute rush along a surprisingly long lane packed with shoppers. Eventually we made our way out and then hopped on busses and metros to get here to where she was going. At this point we split up: she went to teach her class and I went back to the apartments to check out and collect our bags. We met back up in the city, then stashed out bag at the Termini station. We spent our last few hours in Rome doing more walking (blisters!) and a little gift shopping.
More planes, trains and walking and we were back in Szolnok. The last little bit of spice to our adventure was that the handle to our pullman wouldn’t come out and I had to pull it from the train station in Szolnok to our apartment (normally about a ten minute walk) at 2:30 am. Kriszti said the wheels sounded like a tractor in the early morning silence, but the bag was too heavy to carry having been stuffed with our dirty cloths and all the gifts we had purchased.
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Rome 2011 |
Now we are home relaxing in our pajamas and recovering…I think after a day or two of rest I’ll be ready to go on another adventure.