October 25 - Monday - Interlude

We're in Rome now, and I'm a couple days behind organizing our pictures and posting our blog. But I want to capture a few things for the record before I forget them - things not necessarily reflected in our photos.

We're at the Hotel Grand Parco Dei Principi in Rome, located in the northeast corner of the Ville Borghese. According to the best I can figure out from our guidebooks, this is an area that's considered to be North Rome, a little off the beaten tourist track. None of the guidebooks actually show the northern end of the Ville Borghese, it's so uninteresting to tourists.

The Hotel Grand Parco is a 5-star hotel. Europe rates all its hotels with stars, much like you might see in an AAA tour book. Unlike the AAA tour books, however, this rating is official. A hotel must meet certain standards to receive each level of ratings. Five stars is the best. This is a hotel Holland America uses, among a few others, for their travelers.

We've never been to Rome, so the various districts and distances between them were meaningless to us. We are definitely novice travelers in this city.

As it turns out, this area seems to be embassy row. Our little room (beautifully furnished, fabric on the walls, heavy wooden doors, very quiet, very clean, and, I have to emphasize, very small, is on the first floor - that means it's actually on the second floor, but Europe seems to start with zero for ground level (we've seen that often as we've traveled here), and then move up consecutively from there. (Think of ages in certain Asian countries. When you're born, you're "one," because this is your first year of life, and so forth.)

We have a very small private terrace with our room, not as large as most closets, and it looks out over the back of the Austrian embassy. Not too far away from us is the Saudi Arabian embassy.

This hotel outclasses us by far. Although we appreciate the finer things of life, we rarely indulge in them. A fine dinner served by a wait staff is probably wasted on us. We like good food, but we normally eat family style, sitting around the table and chatting, getting up to get whatever we forgot to put out for the meal. We appreciate beautiful, well-made clothing, but well-made and functional is usually our standard. Getting dressed up, for us, means putting on something that's clean and not wrinkled, that fits us reasonably well, and is appropriate for the occasion.

So we are outclassed here (but safe and comfortable - something we prize highly). To order a late night ham and cheese sandwich would add 22 Euros to our bill. To order a soft drink would add another 5 Euros. We are paying slightly more than 30 Euros for a 24-hour period of wireless internet  - pricy, but if we're going to spend what we believe is big bucks, this is a better choice than 30 Euros for a ham sandwich and a soft drink.

So, Europe is not cheap, and Rome is no exception. That's not news to us. One of the fun things about traveling, for us, is to travel our style - clean, safe, and comfortable, with fairly nutritious food that doesn't make us sick, and to stay within our sense of not being extravagant. We want to come home with dollars in our pocket and to be able to look forward to the next trip on our agenda.

Things I want to remember to record in  a subsequent post:

• The number of countries represented by our fellow passengers on our HAL cruise - many
• The Captain's Log summary of the number of miles we traveled each day on the ship, including the hour we docked and left port at each place and the gps coordinates
• Some pictures and data of the dates missing in our blog, the days we were at sea

Now that we have high speed internet, I'm catching up on posting blog pictures. It may be until we get home that I post our complete flickr albums. We don't want to waste our time here using the internet. It just so happens that it's now 5:30 in the morning (I was up at 4:30), and I'm biding my time until Lauren gets up in a few hours, and this is one of the ways I can use my time without disturbing him too much. I am sitting in the hallway of our room, by the light of the bathroom, on a pillow, and typing away. Lauren is a light sleeper and borders on insomnia; I am a deep sleeper and an early riser (very early). We have learned to compromise over the years of our togetherness - or perhaps a better way to say this is that we have learned to be considerate of the other's needs while keeping our own needs and habits satisfied.

Last night, after walking for more than 5 hours trying to figure out just where we are in Rome, when I was more exhausted than I can remember being for a long time, I rested and then uploaded some missing pictures in our blog, rested and uploaded some more, and finally figured it was ok to give it up about 9:15 and fall into a deep sleep. I posted pictures through Trabzon, Turkey last night. This morning, I will make a little more progress.

Walking 5 hours? Before we left home, I created a map and directions from Google maps to get us from our hotel to the nearest McDonalds, which happens to be close to the Spanish Steps. That was our challenge yesterday - to follow that map without getting lost. We ended up in what seemed to be an endless underground walkway - at least a mile or so of it - nothing like that in the directions I had, but we achieved it. It took us 2 hours to get there. We walked around a while, and then we found a little shorter way home, but not shorter by much, walking only a short distance through the underground and then trapsing the length of the Borghese to find our hotel. Lauren and I both have fresh colds (they were going around during our last days on the ship), and I'm sure that added to my exhaustion, but we did it, and we now have a sense of Rome that we wouldn't have otherwise had.

This is how tired I was: When we got home, I took off my socks, lay down and fell into a sleep for a short while. When I fuzzily woke up, I decided to put on my socks. I put on one, and then couldn't find the other. We looked for it and looked for it and looked for it, even digging through all of our suitcases. This is a small room - come on! I finally decided to take off the one sock I'd found and put on a new pair. As I took off that one sock, I found that I had put two socks on one foot.

Today, we'll be off to find HOHO (hop-on hop-off) bus 110 by taking city bus 910 to the Termini, and hopefully we'll see some of the more popular Rome sights.