Rome Trip

Marcus's Trip to Rome: May 2009

At the top of the steps we walked to the left and found our way into the Villa Borghese park, where we wandered around and watched an Italian carousel that oddly screamed “Made in Japan!” We spread out the blanket again and nursed and ate strawberries for a little break; Marcus and I did, at least—Robert declared the strawberries “as sweet as a sour tomato” and did not partake.

We skirted the old city wall and walked out of the park at a different point from where we came in, coming out at Piazza del Popolo, from which point we then walked down Via del Corso—again, more crowded than most other places we’d been—toward our hotel. We grabbed a crepe along the way, admired the preponderance of underwear stores, and eventually ended up in Piazza Navona.

Here we ate at Tre Scalini, having pasta and risotto and then one of their tartufos; it was good but not great, and the service, again, was the peculiarly mixed “We hate and despise you, but OMG what a cute baby!” After washing off in the fountain and reapplying sunscreen (we had been vigilant about this all week, along with Marcus’s and my sunhats), we went into a little toy store at the end of the piazza and bought a wooden Italian alligator toy for Marcus. We also made a stop at a pharmacy a few blocks away to buy a couple treats for Jef and Jin’s new baby, born just this week while we were away, and at a bookstore to buy Marcus two Italian-language books. In the bookstore we were warned—by another patron—to be careful about taking our baby into stores and then outside. Why? Fear of thermal shock—that the 80 degrees it was in the store would be too far from the 88 degrees it was outside, and the shock would hurt our baby. Uh huh.

After walking through the clerical vestments district—who knew they had such the variety of priests’ clothes, right here in store after store?—we got Robert another coffee gelato con panna, and then sat down in the shade of the Pantheon’s columns (essentially on an ancient Roman temple’s front porch) to eat it. The Pantheon was much more crowded by this time—it was just barely safe to let Marcus get out of the backpack and crawl around on the stone floor here, attracting the gaze of both some Italians and some Indonesian tourists.

We then made it back to Crypta Balbi for their underground tour, which we could only take at 4:00, and which we hadn’t wanted to wait around for yesterday. The woman at the desk was nice and remembered us and let us go on the tour without any problem, although she too cautioned that perhaps it would be too cold for our baby there. Not a chance—at some points it was actually genuinely down to 70 degrees, I think, and Marcus and I relished in the coolness. Plus it was just fun to see down to the cistern, etc., underground.

After our final siesta, and a little bit of packing, we went out for dinner at the—to a Roman—absurdly early hour of 7:00. Marcus happened to be totally asleep on the bed, and even picking him up and stuffing him into the mei tai didn’t disturb that. We perched the sunhat on him as a protective block-out-the-world cover, and asked for another dinner recommendation from the front desk. When we got to the place he had suggested, however, on Montevecchio and Piazza San Simeone, just off of Piazza Navona, we realized that it was not our kind of place: it was totally empty, and the waiter seemed scornful that we were eating so early, and it just felt pricey and pretentious. Across the piazza, past a fountain, was a small osteria with a bunch of Romans sitting and drinking inside, and their menu looked small and interesting. We wandered in, and had a great meal with some of the best service we’d had in Rome: there was a waitress who seemed genuinely interested in how to explain “tap water” (we taught her the phrase), a lot of room for Marcus to crawl around and explore, and great, unique food. I had a taleggio flan with mushrooms and then an Italian-style beef tartare, with olives and sundried tomatoes. Robert had spaghetti alla olio (he just wanted something simple) and then a turbot in a pastry crust, and we both had a nice conversation with the ex-pat British owner. When Marcus got a little antsy—he woke up, of course, exactly at the moment that I sat down initially—Robert took him outside and let him splash his hands in the fountain, so everyone really was happy.

We walked back to Giolitti’s near our hotel for gelato, but this time we went in and got a table in the cafe area, rather than simply ordering a cone got a huge creation with zabaglione and gelato and a giant cookie. The waiter admired Marcus, and asked if he could bring a little something for il bambino—just a little strawberry with cream, he said, and we agreed. Were we surprised when Marcus got his own nearly full-sized ice cream cone, with half the scoop made up of strawberry gelato and half of unsweetened stiff whipped cream. Marcus, not too surprisingly, loved it—he tore into the strawberry side, getting himself and me (he was sitting on my lap because Robert essentially refused to have anything to do with him if he got sticky) covered in strawberry gelato. He was eating it well, but the fact that it was melting worked against him, and I was unable to take clean-up licks without angering baby. We had a great time, and just sponged off and then headed straight home and had a bath before bed. Below: the view from our hotel window by night and by early morning.

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Our last morning in Rome we just had time to have our favorite hotel breakfast before we hopped in a cab straight to the airport. Then we got to experience the joys of the Roman airport—I can sum those up in one word: lines.

Line to show your passport

Line to check in, get boarding passes, check bags (we didn’t have any to check), and show your passport

Line to get through security

Line to show your passport

Line to take a shuttle bus to the terminal

Line to show your passport and boarding pass at the gate

Line to show your passport at the beginning of the jetway

Line to show your boarding pass again at the end of the jetway and on the plane

It was quite the aggravating experience; despite arriving at the airport two and a half hours before our flight took off, we only got on the plane with perhaps three minutes to spare because of all the lines.

The flight home was good; though I had a far less pleasant seatmate than on the way over, we had far better food (the choices were the same—pasta or chicken—but the quality was hugely different) than on the way over.

Once in New York, my parents met us and brought us back to their apartment, and then Rie, Steve, and Aunt Mary came over for dinner (more Kyochan!)—mostly just to admire the baby. Marcus was taking a long nap when they arrived, because after all, it was midnight Roman time, but we decided that encouraging him to wake up, play briskly for a couple hours, and then go back to bed on New York time would be okay (as indeed it was—he was back on New York time pretty much the next day, trying to wake up at 3:00 in the morning but with gentle encouragement going right back to sleep until 9:00). Marcus got a lot of attention, and a post-Roman bath.

All in all, it was a great trip—we would definitely do it again!

As a bonus, here's a tiny video from our the week:

Some fun places I nursed my baby on the trip:

On the Acela to New York
On the train from the airport to Stazione Termini
In my seat on the airplanes, once next to a quiet, pleasant Arab man and once next to a fat, obnoxious American man
On a broken piece of marble in the shade at the Forum
On the ground in a shady passageway outdoors at the Colosseum
On the ground in the shade at the base of one of the columns of the Pantheon
On an interminable line in the Rome airport (standing, wearing Marcus in the mei tai)
On a blanket in the Villa Borghese park
On a blanket on a slope of grass just off the banks of the Tiber
On a blanket in a random playground near the Colosseum
On a bench in the map room at the Vatican Museums (where a couple of Dutch women gave me thumbs-up signs)
On my lap in various restaurants
On a bench built into the stone walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo
On benches in various piazzas
On the steps of the San Giovanni in Laterano basilica
On a bench built into the outside of the French embassy

Robert’s big regrets of the trip:

The dollar declined against the Euro every single day we were away.
Our hotel breakfasts made all other meals pale in comparison.
We never got a cannoli.
We never walked right along the Tiber.
We never made it to a Chinese, Indian, or Vietnamese restaurant in Rome.