Italian arrividercis II

So here is the rest of my ”What I did On My Weekend” essay:

Friday evening started as you all know with a trip to a pittoresque town outside of Rome, where a gang of interns from WFP plus yours truly had some really lovely food at a rustic restaurant that came comlpete with a fat cook in a white apron trying to take our disorderly orders in an orderly manner. He yelled at us but so does everyone here (Italians yell when they’re happy, they yell when they’re angry. I’m starting to get used to it). After saying our looong goodbyes outside the restaurant (“Ciao ciao, see you Monday!”) we all piled into our separate cars.
To go home, I thought.

But we went to “Geronimo and friends or (or something like it)”. It looked like the bar had been built and furnished to suit a madman’s perception of the US. Cacti and bald eagles painted on the walls, flags hanging everywhere (a funny coworker of mine asked “was there a flag sale?”), Harley-Davidson signs, you name it. It was fake-America; the kind of place you’d think it was if you only saw Easy rider and spaghetti westerns. And the people! They wore belt buckles and boots and leather vests and we couldn’t stop laughing because it was so bloody precious! The best thing was the dance floor: a crowd of cowboys and bikers dancing intently to Tainted Love and Rock around the Clock. We joined them, happily.

At three in the morning we bid our farewells to each other (“Ciao ciao ragazzi!”) and once again I was more than happy to go home. But alas, yet again the Swede had apparently missed something because the car caravan just set a course for the closest café. I’m not making this up. Five o’ clock in the morning I’m standing on a freezing parking lot with a crowd I don’t really know in a place I don’t really know, politely refusing to drink coffee. And then we said goodbye. Again. I must have said “Ciao” to these people for about two hours all together that night! The big question is WHY we had to say goodbye to each other in the first place, we were practically all joined at the hip anyway??

Later the same day (Saturday that is) my new flatmate and I cleaned for five hours straight. I didn’t even have breakfast, I just got out of bed groggily and attacked the floors with a broom. A shame really because the weather outside was lovely.

Sunday I went to Porta Porteze, a big outdoor market that’s open once a week. It’s quite famous and been there forever apparently. To me it basically seemed to be the place where cheap Chinese fake stuff goes to die. Picture it: about 300 stalls (with loud vendors crying out the prices) selling identical trinkets to tourists and Romans alike, a forum for hustlers and suckers to do business.
I bought slippers – only two euros! (So yeah I was one of the suckers).