A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Foro

I was just about two weeks out of undergrad and I hadn't yet started my (temp!) job when we married; Dr. Bloom (who wouldn't be Dr. for a very long time) had a semester left of college and a full-time job at my uncle's bakery. So we had a week, and a couple hundred dollars (but then our bed would have to be charged, or we would have to sleep on the floor . . .) and a very sweet offer of a timeshare for our honeymoon. We had a lovely time, but Dr.Bloom promised a trip to Italy for our tenth anniversary.

In truth, it was Dr. Bloom who wanted to see Italy. He was a classics major and a Renaissance man, and an Italian-American to boot. I was eager to go anywhere with good eats (and I still am). And when he made the promise, it was before med school debt, before children, before we were adults. I never would have held him to that promise, and I don't know that he would have held himself to it, if I hadn't been so sick last January (he reminded me that we are also approaching the anniversary of that).

And so it was that I found myself in Rome two days after Christmas, after a night-time transatlantic flight. Dh had slept; I had not. We arrived at our hotel 10 am Rome time (6 hours ahead of the east coast, US), left our bags, and headed out on foot to see the city. (Pictures forthcoming).

In the evening, we headed back to our hotel to change for dinner. Romans don't eat dinner until around 8:30, and it's an *event*. Appetizer, primi piati, secondi, dulci, caffe . . . it was 11 pm before we finished. And there had been this fantastic bottle of wine . . .

We woke on the 28th to the busy sounds of the street below, and wondered at how busy, until we popped open the laptop (neither of us had brought a watch) to discover that it was 8 am --

Eastern.

Two pm, Rome.

Six days in Italy. Three days in Rome (counting the one on which we arrived). Ten years of wishing, on dh's part.

We showered, and ran to the ancient part of the city, and it was too late for admission to the Palatine or the Colosseum, so we had pizza at a tourist trap across from the Colosseum while I reassured dh that nothing is really bad if it's funny

(I presented him with the theory that there's bad, which is like "aaack, we slept in til 11, and we wanted to be there at nine" which is quite sad, and there's BAD like "I lost a freaking DAY" which is so bad it's funny. Only the truly awful can be redeemed in this perverse way).

And we were having PIZZA outside the Colosseum!

Coming soon:
Our heroine drops a headset in . . . well, you'll have to wait . . . discovers -- too late! -- that she has eaten pate . . . spends four freaking euro on a can of Coke . . . has dinner with nuns and buys honey from monks . . . flies home on a plane with seven pilots . . . and has her delicates searched by TSA (but they left a lovely note).