Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I was invited to a party at 4 (party was at 6:30) that lasted until 11:30, so I didn't get home until late. Not even I know what's in store for me when I wake up in the morning.
On Wednesday I walked around in Rome along the Tiber, and then met a friend near the Spanish steps to hit the Keats Shelley house and the Piazza del Populo. Take a look at the photos:
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| Law court of Rome |
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| Took a photo of people taking photos. Woah |
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| Obelisk courtesy of Egypt |
Thursday was the party and today I came home after work. I was out of toothpaste, so I had to buy more after my shift. There's plenty of pharmacies all over Rome, and their symbol, the green flashing cross is on two blocks of my street. I assumed these pharmacies all had the look and feel of CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens or whichever pharmacy you frequent back home. I decided to go to the one by my apartment. I walked in, and I immediately notice two ladies in white lab coats. The rest of the shop mirrors their coloring, with mainly white labeled products dotting the shelves, with occasional flashes of green or red. This was looking more and more like one of those sci-fi science labs, where medicine has been found to cure everything from hand size to hangovers. I feel their eyes on me, as I cautiously work my way through the store. Perhaps they were worried I was going to shoplift, perhaps they were concocting medications in their heads that would fix my hair color, the size of my nose, or the off coloration of my eyes. Whatever the reason they watched me get all the way to the section of the store where the toothbrushes were hanging. I felt like I was in familiar territory, but then I noticed that all the toothpaste was white labeled tubes with green Italian lettering. I was hoping for some tiger or dinosaur smiling, with three different colors, or at least something that looked like crest in Italian. By this point, the doctors were on to me. One starts speaking to me in Italian, at which point I stop her and ask if she speaks English, and could prescribe something to fix my lack of language ability. She says she speaks a little English, and I explain I'm looking for toothpaste. She says "Oh you don't want that stuff (referring to the tubes I had been looking at)" and she walks behind the counter and starts furiously typing on a computer. She pauses, glances up at me, and then resumes typing. Two minutes later, a bottle flies down from a tube in the ceiling (which I hadn't noticed before, almost like one of those machines at the bank when you make a deposit), she hands it to me and asks for two Euro. It has the fun colors I was looking for, but we'll see if there's any side effects, like my eyebrows turning red, or my tongue turning green. Something as simple as buying toothpaste wasn't as easy as it seemed.
Tomorrow I'm going to the beach. A coworker invited me to visit her families beach house, where she, her husband and her two children are staying this summer, and I've decided to take her up on her offer. I'm staying home this weekend (meaning no overnight trips) but I've used the down time tonight to relatively plan the rest of the summer. I have less than 40 days left, and anything I don't plan might get missed. This has been a really good test run of Rome, and worse case scenario I can use my three weeks in the states to go street by street and find any last points of interest I may have missed, so come September I can start crossing anything I've missed off the list. I'll plan to post tomorrow, but we'll see what happens! Ciao for now!
Loved your narrative of the visit to the pharmacy. Several chuckles. Dad and I could have advised you about such settings, but better that you experience them for yourself. Glad you're getting some social invitations. It will be good to enjoy some hospitality from a local family. Take some flowers.
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