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