Swompdonkey

This morning, I woke up at 11 am in a haze of alcohol fumes and dim memories from last night. The pub crawl was amazing!
I'll spare my reader the gory details, but many whiskey and cokes and shots were consumed at five of Rome's seediest and liveliest drinking establishments. I must have met 30 people and forgotten almost all the names (There were at least 50 people on this crawl). One name I didn't forget was Rosalie, the name of a girl from Quebec City who had been living in France for a year and was delighted to speak joual to a fellow Canadian after months of softening her accent for les francais. I went along with 4 other people from the hostel, an american, a brit, and two aussies from Tazmania. We did it up big, no doubt about it! The atmosphere was great, and nearly everyone was very talkative and friendly. I barely remember stumbling back to the hostel and collapsing sometime around 4 a.m.

Today, naturally, was expected to be a writeoff... but I am not one to take things lying down. I convinced my companions from last night to jump on the metro and spend the afternoon on the Via Apia Antica (the ancient Roman road also known as the Apian Way). We also visited some incredible catacombs, where the bodies of early Christian martyrs were buried by the hundreds in the time of the persecutions. I found it interesting that the adherents of this religion, that had suffered such torment at the hands of the empire, used symbols like fish and sheep as their symbols of their faith. In the face of cruelty and degradation, their art was the embodiment of serenenity, not wrath, or despair. Pretty inspiring.