Spring Break, Italy & Tunisia, Part I

So Spring Break... 8 days, 2.5 countries, 3 people, 15 coffee drinks, several legal bottles of wine, seafood in places and forms it is absolutely not supposed to be, one cute American PhD student, more churches than I remember or care to, and enough Roman ruins and mosaics to make MaryClaire cry out "NO MORE ROMANS!!! WE CAN'T ESCAPE THEM!". Oh, and one hammam that rocked my world and my perception of public exposure in more ways than I am capable of expressing (and considering the amount I talk, that's a lot of ways).
Italy, Sicily (since it doesn't really count as a part of Italy), and Tunisia. Jealous yet? If you're not now, you will be when I finish. The characters for this little play are MaryClaire, she's from Maryland and studying the middle east and arabic at Georgetown, Will, who's from fom Connecticut and studies political science at Tulane, except that one unfortunate semester at George Washington after you-know-what that we don't really like to talk about. It tends to make him a little cranky--for kicks we throw out phrases like "Foggy Bottom", "Will's little DC problem", and "so how about that global warming and it's effect on the Gulf", just to see how he reacts.
We sarted the trip in Rome, the Eternal City. Well, I'll contest the eternal bit as Egypt feels older and more decrepit that Rome does, but I will give them the benefit of the fact that their city is tops. Rome was the center of the world and has never forgotten that fact: every turn in the street, every Armani clad man, every high-heeled woman, and every perfectly foamed cappuccino reminds the visitor that Rome knows what's it's about: the only question is, do you? In fact, my greatest trouble in Rome was attempting to decide whether I should be more impressed that those heeled women didn't fall on the cobblestones and kill themselves or that Italy managed to get away with ripping off as many ancient treasures from Egypt as it did. Seriously? I think there are more obelisks in Rome than can be found in the city of Cairo, excluding the Egyptian Musuem. And can I just say how tacky the Ramses II Karnak obelisk looks surrounded by Poseidon and his flipping little sea nymphs? I took a photo of it so that I can Photoshop it back into place next to it's partner, still at Karnak.
However, I should really have learned my lesson about mocking the Italians after realizing that karma likes Rome: in the midst of mocking their removal of the obelisk, right in front of the Church of Saint Agnes in Agony (who named this place?), my flipflop broke. Thanks to this incident, I would soon have a pair of Dorothy sparkley-black flats and a blister the size of Tuscany on my left toe. Exhibit a) Lindsey trying to find shoes in Rome. Not speaking any Italian. Unwilling to pay 200 Euro for a pair of sandals. Just you wait... this is not the end of Spring Break being out to get my footwear, nor has it decreased my perceptions that flip-flops suck and are a vastly annoying form of footwear, but that I love them anyhow and this makes me mentally unstable. But I saw the Parthenon, finally, after many years of waiting, and walked along the alleyways, where I bought a spray-painted forest from a young Italian guy. Yes, I know, it sounds tacky... but it's actually kind of a cool painting.
The Vatican consumed the morning of Day 2, including St. Peter's Basilica, which I climbed to the tip-top of and saw the lovely views of the city. It's pretty amazing what a person can do with enough money, labor, craftsmen, and a few hundred years--not that I have any desire to at any point be buried underneath a creepy marble and gold rendition of myself, complete with tacky crown and people kissing my marble toes, but it's pretty impressive. It's also a lot less tacky than the neon green reinactments of St. George slaying the dragon that are ever-present in Coptic Cathedrals. We visited Colosseum and the Palatine-the Forum and the villas of ancient Rome. Not as impressive as the guilding of the Vatican, but these days even the Colosseum is a testament to the power of the Catholic Church. As MaryClaire says "If you can put an inscription onto the Colosseum taking credit for building it, now that's real power!" The best part of Rome might have been the food... amazing cappuccino, lovely dark chocolate, gelato, a divine cafe called Trafforia Chianti, where we, ironically, didn't drink chianti, but spent a good three hours drinking wine and eating bread and appetizers and pasta and salads and I think there may have been a dessert involved. It's a little hazy at this point... the wine and all that.
And then on to Palermo...