DUDE, BINGO

Well, I’ve had a pretty good couple of days. I am officially off work, and it’s like a whole new world. So awesome.

I have two days left of Italian class, and it is so much fun. It’s very satisfying to go back to class and to remember everything else I’ve already learned.. as it turns out I actually might be able to one day speak this language.

As you may or may not know, Italians take the month of August off. They all just close up their shops and grocery stores, and businesses and gas stations, and go out of town for the month. It’s pretty amazing. I mean, can you imagine LA closing down for an afternoon? Never. But Rome is dead. I mean dead, and every day it empties out more. All the coffee shops are closed, most restaurants are closed, LUCKILY my grocery store is remaining open (thank god) but book stores are closing, clothing stores, all boutiques… it’s amazing. Now, that being said a certain amount of really touristy things stay open.. it isn’t worth it for them to close, but in general the city gets really quiet.

And fuck man, it’s nice here. The streets are empty. Driving is bliss! This week a lot of construction has started, they use this opportunity to repair a lot of roads and such… but there is parking everywhere, and the sidewalks are empty... it’s just really nice. Course the bummer is all my local restaurants are closed, no pizza, no kabobs, no ice cream, no sandwiches…. But McDonalds is open… woo-hoo.

Speaking of American food, last night me and a few friends went to the Hard Rock Café. Holy shit it was AWESOME. I hadn’t been so excited to see a plate of nachos in my entire life. Fiona, Zoe and I ate them so fast we actually ordered a second plate. HA! We were three girls who had been without cheddar cheese for far too long, and it was time to fix that. Hard Rock has an excellent happy hour, wicked cheap, but I must be getting old, because it is really fucking loud in there, and it reminded me of the hard Rock Hotel in Vegas. The only hard rock I have been to in years.

It was funny, going to the Hard Rock, it made me remember that there was a time when one of my life ambitions was to see all the Hard Rock Café’s in the world. I realize now that was about the travel, and less about the T-shirts… but it brought me back to a time, when the most valuable thing was my hard rock t-shirts… good grief.

Another highlight in the last few days was this weekend when me and a crew of brits when to a roman bingo hall. Pretty much your standard scene out of a kubrick nightmare… it was a really creepy room with enormously high ceilings, a whole smoking section… the walls were primary yellow with burgundy trim, and a whole wall of ENORMOUS industrial piping, somewhat decoratively painted shinny matching burgundy. The room was completely silent save the pre recorded voice of a woman in Italian calling out the numbers.

Quindici.
Due
Venti quatro.

All exactly the same, save the number sesanta sete. For some reason this one was recorded by another woman, and after several rounds every time the number came up, our table erupted with laughter.

It was a pretty fun night, mostly because they kept asking us to be quiet, and this just made us laugh harder. It was like being in church, except you could smoke. We kept ordering round after round of drinks, and not fucking one of us won bingo… it think the fucker was rigged against us. At one point I won. I mean, I totally got bingo, so I yelled out with all my might BINGO!!! Oh man it was awesome, my entire table cheered, everyone gave us dirty looks (a funny thing happens to a group of foreigners who have been in a country so long, and been consistently sneered at by locals… you begin to learn how to sneer back…)

Anyway, mother fuckers came back to me to tell me I in fact had not won bingo, I had mistakenly marked off a number. I was so deflated, heartbroken really. But I decided not to make a big deal and let it go. As the night wore on I got more and more convinced that I should have asked to see the proof. I got robbed man,… I felt like the guy from Dazed and Confused who gets more and more pissed off after getting shoved at the party (Came here to do two things, drink beer, and kick some ass, looks like I’m almost outta beer)… that was me, all brooding hours later…

HA! I didn’t really care. It was still fun as hell. We returned the fuck you by stealing a trophy. Which later was stolen from us by a group of male American tourists… at a bar in the center… ahh how the world goes round.

All in all things are moving along just fine for me.


Let me put it this way, I have taken a nap 3 days in a row, and that, if nothing else, is worth writing home about.