Sight Seeing

Tuesday 22nd September

I have to confess to not keeping a diary, so to speak, over the course of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday so a lot of this will now be from memory so might not be as detailed as usual. I took the Brazilian guy around Roma for the day and we ended up walking around for around 6 hours I think. It was a pretty good day and, although I have already seen the things I was showing him, it was really good for me too as it gave me the chance not only to see all of those things again but also get to know Roma a little better again.

I have been low on spare clothes for a while now so managed to find a pretty cheap shop to buy a couple of t shirts in - these were much cheaper than the Armani stuff I bought in Milano and it was €16 for 2 t shirts. You don't appreciate how nice it is to have clean, fresh clothes until you have to live in the way I have for the past 5 weeks. At times I feel so dirty it's really uncomfortable. I can't wait to have somewhere to live so that I can do my washing whenever I need and also to be able to get all my clothes from the UK.

We visited pretty much all the sites today - Piazza della Repubblica, Fontana di Trevi, Colosseo, Foro Romano, Citta del Vaticano, Castel Sant'Angelo, il Pantheon, etc... We stopped off at a restaurant right next to the Colosseo to get some lunch. It is a restaurant I know well as I visited it a few times last year when I came here on holiday with Emma. I was pleased to see that the food there was still very good and I remembered a couple of the staff there too. I have been dying to use some of my Italian and got the chance with the waitress - I told her she was a very beautiful girl in Italian and she seemed pretty pleased! I wasn't trying to pick her up as she had an engagement ring but I just wanted to say it as early as possible...

The weather was pretty good all day and I am pretty sure that I am really going to enjoy living here with this climate. The more I think about it the more I want to work evenings somewhere so that I have the days free to sunbathe - typically English, eh? I think it would be good to maybe get some work in a hostel or a bar or a hotel as they would be English speaking roles but I would be working alongside fluent Italian speakers so this would help me to learn Italian quicker. Ideally, I need an Italian girlfriend - I will definitely learn quickly then!

We went out to Campo de Fiori this evening after having far too many sambuccas in the hostel bar and I ended up losing the Brazilian guy but spent the evening with a couple of Argentinian guys we had been speaking with in the hostel. They were really nice guys and we had a really good laugh. I was winding up all the Asian guys who come around trying to sell roses to couples - most of them were getting a bit annoyed with them so I pretended that me and one of the Argentinian guys was gay and started haggling loads on the price of a rose. They got pretty annoyed after a while but the couples near us thought it was hilarious! I got in pretty late, I think at about 3am and felt extremely drunk!

On the way to Campo de Fiori we saw some American girls by a bus stop so stopped to talk to them and it turned out that they were going to Campo de Fiori too. I knew that they were waiting in the wrong place so told them and said that they could come and get the bus with us and I would show them where they needed to get off. Once we got on the bus they were really rude - everytime I tried to talk to them they turned their back on me! I was pretty annoyed - I wasn't hitting on them, they weren't that good looking! I was just trying to help them and be nice. After that I decided to leave them on the bus and let them find their own way!