Ghetto

I haven't had a comment or a note in a while so I guess my fifteen minutes is about over. I'll be home for Passover tomorrow which seems a fitting closure to my journey over here. The whole joyous meal with family to celebreate freedom thing, not the buckets of lamb's blood to keep the Angel of Death from wacking your first born thing.

Rome and Italy in general, not Sicily, seems to be pretty colgged with the gelato licking, map folding, totally lost looking, loud drunk American girls in their stilettos on the cobblestones wobbling, flash photographing, public urinating type of tourist that usually draws unwanted attention. My hostel in particular has been full of very young looking University kids on spring break from elsewhere in Europe. They move in herds and it's been especially difficult to make a friend for this week. I'm actually getting a little lonely, and unserendipidiously, my lovely roomate Helen, is arriving in Rome for a week, three hours before I get on my plane home. aw shucks on that one.

Rome has been city incredibly dense with art and history. Luckly i had a great professor in Architecture History so I can spot a Leonardo Di Caprio , or a Benini when I see one.

The hills and streets of Rome had me intersecting with the four small blocks of the Jewish Ghetto more than a few times. There's a Synagogue and a few restaurants that specialize in the famous Artichoke Ghetto Style (whole fried that blooms like a crispy delicious flower). I learned that the Jews in Rome were here before the Diaspora so they're not refugees from anywhere, but they were herded around the city into ever smaller neighborhoods by Pope after Pope. I may have forgotten to mention that people have been asking me questions in Italian all month. I look Italian I guess with my beard and my (ahem) ethnic nose. And in the Ghetto when I would talk to someone they would offer me a wish for a happy Passover not even asking if I was a Jew! Dang! One very friendly shop keeper in a pretty hip chothes store called "McQueen, all clothes and sneakers from 1972" offered me a happy Passover saying, "I say to you Pasach because you are Jewish and there is a speciala feelinga between us!" And if I were searching for a way to sum things up which I would never do because summaries leave out all that was wonderful and awful, but if I was I would say that a "speciala feelinga between us," is how I would describe my time in Italy. The pleasure was all mine. Traveling in Italy was like sinking your teeth in to a perfectly ripe peach; it just gets all over you and satisfies you only like something sweet, simple, and perfect can.

I'm a big fan of the Stats so lets go to the big board and ring it all up:

8. # of countries traveled. (Czech Rep, Slovacia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzgovenia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy.
21 # of cities
7 # of items lost (2 umbrellas, favorite wool hat, camera case, camera lens filter, DL, flashlight)
17 # of Gelatos
70 # of coffees
22 # of rolls of film
8 # of train rides
14 # of bottels of wine
113 # of bowling score in Krumlov, Czech
4 # of pizzas in Naples
1 # of times I overpaid a taxi driver
0 # of thefts
4 # laundry loads
59 # days abroad

I hope that anyone readind this has had half as much fun as I did writing it. Get to Italy before too long! And in the words of the late Pope Giovani Paulo II, "Don't let the door knob hit ya' where the Good Lord split ya'!"

Amen