just another day in rome!

well, the hard part is over with! it ended up taking 4 1/2 days for my luggage to arrive (let's not talk about that again), 2 weeks for us to find an apartment, and almost 3 weeks for nate to get here, but now that all that is said and done, we are free to focus on work and enjoy the hot roman summer! we found a nice apartment in san giovanni, which is only a 15 minute walk to the colosseum, and we are very happy with it, its spacious with high ceilings and internet included! being able to give my family virtual tours of the apartment through skype is unbelievable. our landlord only speaks italian, so it was a test for me right away to scrape it all up from the back of my mind and put it to use making phone calls and meeting with him, and dealing with all the lovely issues of signing a lease, paying rent and deposits and getting a new washing machine while megan stood by and politely tried to be part of everything. but now that we have our own space, it is worth it. the neighborhood is nice, easily accessible, and has everything we need within a couple blocks. we figured that we probably walk at least 6 miles a day, back and forth between home and the colosseum and the rest of the city. this is our justification for eating pasta every night and panini every day:) 

and yes, we have jobs. megan and i have just finished week 2 of work with the colosseum pub crawl. what exactly do we do? well we, along with about 15 more staff members from various english-speaking countries, hang out around the colosseum during the day (or the pantheon, spanish steps, or wherever we are in between) and invite people to come out to our pub crawl that night. it's a promotional sales job, we make commission on everyone we personally get to come out that night. then we all go back out at about 9pm to the colosseum where we meet everybody and play drinking games and get to know each other (we have anywhere from 60-150 people each night) and then depending on how many recruits we get, how long and hard we work etc, we find out at about 10pm if we "get a shift" that night, which means we either stay, party, keep the group together and get paid for it, or we have the option to go home and sleep, or stay and party and not get paid for it. i always go home and sleep if i don't get a shift, i know, no surprise there, but this job is exhausting and we desperately need our sleep! so in a nutshell that's what we are doing right now to pay the rent, and nate started friday and he'll be working with us too. i'm hopefully going to start selling tours soon (of the colosseum, vatican, roman forum, whatever) because it's strictly a daytime job and the commission is higher, but we will see how things go. 

meanwhile, in rome, the uefa champions league (european soccer) final is in a couple days, and there are tons of festivities going on, this event is way bigger than the superbowl or the world series i'd say, and it's right here in rome, so even though tickets are 1500+ euros and already sold out anyway, it'll be fun just to be in rome while it's happening, and if im lucky maybe i'll get to see cristiano ronaldo or ronaldinho walking down a street somewhere!:) it's manchester united v barcelona, it's going to be a great game, go barcelona!

today is memorial day, and usually we would be working except there's a big concert tonight at the colosseum for the festival, so for some reason we get the day off. yesterday we went to the beach, which apparently is what every roman does on a sunday, and i wont make that mistake again, but the water was cool and refreshing. and last night we went to a staff bbq and it actually felt somewhat like memorial day, since our host was from new york. we will probably check out the concert tonight and enjoy our night off! and we are planning on a taking a few day trips here pretty soon, to remind ourselves of where we are and why we are here, not just to work 24/7! but so far so good, i'm going to put up some fotos, and for those of you on facebook i already posted an album to my profile of pictures from megan's camera, more to come.. 

a presto!

j

from a 4th story hostel window..

What do you get when you mix 6am flights that last 24hrs, afternoon roman thunderstorms, 2 homeless girls, and pub crawls? Well, where to begin. First you get your luggage left behind in denver because the clueless united airline woman in reno was obviously not doing her job, which leads to wine before noon over pizza and much conversation, interrupted by phone calls from italians trying to rent us rooms in english (thank god i had my italian phone in my purse, not my luggage). Then in attempt to not look like i just got off a plane on which i hardly slept, i borrowed shoes and a shirt from megan to walk to the colosseo where we were enthusiastically greeted by our new co-workers of the pub crawl, where we promptly got stuck in a rainstorm and huddled under the arches of the colosseo with a couple gladiators and several penguin jokes. After quickly becoming part of the team we tried to brave the rain, ended up giving in, bargaining and buying a 2 euro umbrella, made it back to the hostel where we crashed until we had to wake up and go back to the colosseo for our first pub crawl, and my second t-shirt in the last 8 months that says "i came, i saw, i crawled," which i happily wore because it was a clean shirt, and all i had were my flying clothes. After flip cup, beer pong, new friends and a few strange shots, we had to drag our somehow wide-awake selves back to the hostel at 3am, where we got about 6 hrs of sleep, more than the previous 2 nights combined. 

That was day 1, this is day 2, and today our priorities were just as straight as yesterday. breakfast was gelato. we were supposed to start working today but decided i need my luggage first (which didn't come yesterday, hasn't come yet today, and better be here by tomorrow) and we need a place to live when we have to leave the hostel tomorrow morning. Fortunately we had a couple options which we checked out, and tomorrow we will be moving into a small room in a nice apartment about 15-20 minutes walk from the colosseo, with 3 italians but only for the next week. We are starting to set up appts to look at several apartments in the next few days and are hoping to find something perhaps by the end of this week that will work for the 3 of us all summer. our first apartment viewing is tonight, and i think pasta is in order and perhaps an emergency visit to H&M (i have a good excuse this time) (not that i need one) before we embark on pub crawl #2, wish us luck! (for which, i'm not sure:)