Andiamo!!

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, right?  Well I worked on a road construction crew for four summers during college (so I’m no stranger to professionally playing in traffic), and these people are fucking nuts.  Traffic patterns here are not unlike the bastard child of a Zerg rush and Lemmings, and pedestrians give positively zero fucks about the trusty dead-weight-tonnage-rule…  chaos and balls are the name and spirit of the game if you wanna get anywhere.

I could get used to it here.  Actually, who do I think I’m kidding?  A living, breathing city that is deeply in touch with thousands of years of heritage is the perfect place to live.  The food, the architecture, the art, the culture, the everything is the reason I could totally expat here and get used to it…. but the madness associated with driving?  Screw that noise, I’d rather navigate the winding alleys and blocks on foot.

Oh yeah, and everyone drives micromachines. To the point where riding a scooter isn’t something you’d ever be made fun of for riding.

That’s right, the name of the game here is go.  If you were there first, you have the right of way, and other people stop for you.  Traffic signals are a nice suggestion, but ultimately feckless.  Oddly enough, everyone seems pretty calm and accepting of what would otherwise be a road-rager’s worst-case scenario.  It might also have to do with the fact that the only places you can do better than 10 mph are on the main thoroughfares– and those are clusterfucks of Biblical proportion.

Speaking of Biblical– we spent most of the day today at the Vatican Museum…  or Musei Vaticani as the locals call it.  I’ve seen pictures of St. Peter’s Basilica, and many of the works of art in the museum proper…  I’ve seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel…  In no way did I once feel like this was going to be like a Lucy/Desi rerun– just on a bigger screen.  In fact, I was pretty much awestruck by the whole thing, finally seeing with my own eyes the works of masters like Michelangelo and Raphael.

Or how about Raphael throwing Dante Alighieri into one of the Vatican murals.  Dude’s wearing red, and rocking some serious olive branch action.

I would write more….

… but I’ve got a ticket to an audience with Il Papa Francesco in the morning.  Not to mention, I’d have to somehow cover the territory spanning the 500 pictures I took today alone.  The Italian word of the day today, children, is andiamo—  GO!

Unplug.

SICK?! Yeah, not happening.

Me and my big goddamn mouth.  Cortana was sick as Hell last week so I quarantined myself to the couch to prevent getting whatever bastard plague that’s getting passed around her office like a bad case of crabs at Caligula’s place.  No such luck, I’m afraid, because once we hit the highway for our departing flight in Toronto– I started to sniffle.  I told myself, sure, my immune system is going to go full-on Duke Nukem on this thing because I will it so.

Then we got on a nine hour flight…  that felt like it was being piloted by the Marquis De Sade.  Apparently I’m one of those people whose illnesses decide to do a fat Sheenpile of blow the second they hit 40,000 feet.  I tried to sleep, and yeah, that was as futile as resisting the Borg (when they first came out and actually were damn near unstoppable).

My immune system can kiss my ass.  My darling wife claims to have licked my keyboard the day I went into quarantine, so there’s that not-serious-but-still-happening blame game.  However, 9 hours of sniffling agony later where the only part of me that didn’t hurt was the tip of my elbow (a la Indiana Jones), I was treated to this:

Anyone wanna venture what mountains these are?

Now, I don’t coddle the weak– and that most assuredly includes myself– so I informed my family that I wanted all the drugs.  I wasn’t going to deal with some pansy-ass plague while I’m in Rome.  Fuck that shit right in the face.  So I doped up and shrugged 85% of that shit off like a boss.  The other 15% was due to a combination of adrenaline, sudoephedrine, ibuprofen, afrin, and no fucks given.  I’ve already snapped over 200 pictures (been here roughly 5 functional hours), and I’ve come to notice something–

— Italian drivers are the most bizarre combination of courteous, calm, and fucking insane.  Now, mi scuzi, uomini et donne….  morto famme.

I may post later.

In the meantime—

I TOUCHED THE FORUM DOORS.

Unplug.