Fawlty Towers!

Sunday 20th September

I got up at about 9.30am this morning - just in time for the breakfast so I went down and had a chocolate croissant and about 5 cappuccinos! Saw Brian at breakfast and we got chatting - turns out he lives in Rome so he gave me his email address and said to let him know when I arrived as he would be happy to put me up for a couple of days while I was searching for somewhere to live! After he left I sat talking with Yuli again for a while and learnt some more Italian - I can speak very little right now but the more you try the more you learn. Yuli is a really nice bloke and he seems to really enjoy helping me learn some Italian.

I had to move rooms this morning in the hostel as there is a big party due in tonight. When I went into the room there was a Hungarian girl there called Barbara so I sat talking with her for a while. She seemed like a nice girl so I suggested going down to the beach together a little later - it would be nice to have some company now all of my American friends have left. After about an hour Barbara decided to come to the beach with me so we spent about 4 hours down there sunbathing. The weather was really deceptive today as it was a little hazy for most of the day but the sun was very strong and I ended up burning quite a bit on my back! Ah well, it will go brown in a few days I think.

It was nice to have somebody to talk to for the day and we spoke about all sorts of different things. I went swimming in the sea a few times - I love swimming in the sea and I hope there is a beach fairly close to Roma so that I can go there from time to time. Barbara thought the sea was too cold so didn't come in the sea which was a shame - it's always more fun if there is someone else in the sea with you!

I have been feeling pretty tired all day today and I am sure that I will sleep well tonight. I am going to try and get an early night tonight as I need to travel to Roma tomorrow in search of my new life. I tried using the internet in the hostel to try and plan out the trip and also to update my blog and Facebook but it was ridiculously slow so I gave up pretty quickly on that idea. It's been really frustrating and I have now fallen quite far behind on my blog so I am going to have to spend a lot of time bringing it back up to date in Roma.

I went out for an evening meal with Barbara and we went to the funniest restaurant ever. It was almost like Fawlty Towers! They were so disorganised, didn't seem to have a clue what they were doing and got pretty much everything wrong for the whole of the time we were there. I thought it was really amusing but then I never stress about things like that. Maybe somebody different might have been annoyed but I thought it was too funny to be honest!

After the meal we went to get a waffle and a gelato and the heavens opened just like the night before but only heavier. It rained so hard that within a couple of minutes there was pretty much a river running along all of the roads and we got absolutely soaked. All of the Italians were looking at me like I was crazy as I was walking quite casually in my t shirt - I'm used to this kind of weather in England so it didn't bother me in the slightest but they were all running for cover!

When we got back to the hostel we sat and had a beer before heading up to bed. I think we turned in at around 11pm which is pretty early by my recent standards! As soon as we had gone to bed a big party of German teenagers started making lots of noise so, after about 15 minutes, I went and told them to shut up or I'd shut them up. It was certainly a lot quieter after that but it was definitely not quiet! Still, I was pretty tired so it didn't take me long to get to sleep.