Rome

I have added photos of our trip to Rome in early November. It's fast becoming one of my favourite things to do, this going to a European city in November for a week. I had loads of things I wanted to say about Rome, but there's just too much of it. So, let me recommend a few things very briefly.

First, we stayed here. The lady who owns the apartment is a very friendly American lady, and the apartment is where she actually used to live, so it's got a proper "someone lives here" feel about it, rather than the more usual "it's too small to actually live in, so I'll rent it out to tourists" feel that you usually get. That said, it really only sleeps two people. However, the location is fantastic. We walked everywhere from here; the only time we got the bus was when we were going to the Villa Borghese. We also ate in a bunch of places that our apartment lady recommended, and they were all very good.

My favourite places to eat and drink were here, which does amazing fried artichokes with salt and pepper; here, where we ate fantastic pizza on a Saturday afternoon and watched trendy Roman people go about their well-dressed Saturday; La Scala, which is in Trastevere as well and does the most amazing orange risotto; and this cafe, which does the strangest sour/sticky sweet coffee you ever tasted, in a beautiful 1950s bar.

We also availed ourselves of a private three-hour walking tour, which can be booked by talking to the lady who runs the apartment and brought us to the Forum by a route we never would have thought of by ourselves and which helped us to make a lot more sense of the layout of the ancient city than we would have got by other means. So I would recommend that too, if you've much of an interest in the ancient times.

(I also really liked the dog park in the Villa Borghese, and the cat sanctuary among the temples in the Largo Argentino.)

It is exhausting, though, and really, really crowded. There are people everywhere, all the time, and there are always mopeds up your arse and cars trying to squeeze past you on the narrow streets, and there are no footpaths and everything's cobbled, which sounds lovely but means you have to watch your step. So if you're going, you need to build in some rest time during the day.

Some day, we will storm the Citadel

But not this time.

Because of our stupid 24 hour delay, we got into Halifax on Sunday night instead of Saturday night, and so we missed the opportunity to actually go on board the Tall Ships in Halifax when we got there. Instead, Queenie and Himself collected us at the airport and drove us to the harbour where the ships were moored for their last night in town, so we could walk around them in the gathering fog. We ate hot dogs for our dinner and held off on talk of home and catching up so that Mister M could explain the difference between ketches and sloops and I could, like I always do, pretend to be able to remember it. It was very cool, because we got to see the Pride of Baltimore II, which was a privateer in the 1812 war, and we saw The Bounty, which is, of course, a reproduction. We also saw a couple of really cool national navy training ships, one from India and one from Germany.

On Monday, which was a scorcher (sorry, Irelanders), Mister M and I managed to haul ourselves out of the apartment to watch the (fanfare) Parade of Sail, in which each of the ships gave a little tour of the harbour before leaving for Lunenberg. We could have gone down to the harbour, but it was hot and packed down there, so we stood up on the hill just below the Citadel and watched from there for a couple of hours. We had binoculars and a camera, but no hats or sunblock or water. And so the inevitable happened, which is that we got amazingly sunburned and felt dizzy and had to go and sit in a very touristy pub and drink beer and eat lobster sandwiches until we felt better.

Queenie and Himself made barbeque happen in the evening, and although it had nothing to do with ships, it was good because it felt comfortable and friendly and proper, and we met their neighbours and played washer toss, which is a little like horseshoes, but with washers and boxes of sand, and we drank beers and it just felt really good, which is just as well, because it tipped down rain most of the rest of the week. Ha ha. Serves me right for getting the Angel Gabriel to give me a good haircut, and buying a fancy hat to keep the sun off.