Mamma Mia! Wait, Literally (Rome, Day 4)

I started the day, one again, with a triple espresso (oh, how I miss those now) and we took a scenic route up to a museum that Alice wanted to see. There were some really pretty views of Rome on the way up.


I was kind of bored in the museum – I think I’m just museumed-out for a little bit – but we did take some pictures with pieces of a huge statue of Constantine.


We got lunch near the Spanish Steps and then got some more good gelato (yay!) to sit and eat with the other 928,292 tourists sitting on the Steps. I actually didn’t mind that it was so crowded; that made it kind of cool. All I had ever heard was that they were overrated, so I wasn’t expecting much at all and they ended up being cooler than I thought. It was pretty from the top, too (the last picture).


At this point we were pretty much done with everything on our List, and we were all kind of tired, so we didn’t feel like trekking off to the other end of the city to see something else. While we were sitting around figuring out what to do, we saw a group of kids our age driving around on a five-person bike. It was set up like a car with a steering wheel, but everyone (except whoever’s in the bitch seat in the back) has to pedal. It looked absolutely ridiculous, but fun (in a ridiculous way), so we decided to rent one for an hour.

First, though, I had to sign some waiver in Italian that I’m pretty sure freed them of liability if we died. Great. Should have been more seriously as a warning. It was actually hard to pedal and very hard to steer, as the sidewalks weren’t quite wide enough and there were always hordes of people walking down them. There are also dips and curbs and the sidewalk cuts off, but driving in the street isn’t really a great option because Europeans drive like they’ve got a hit out on everyone in the street. There aren’t actually too many crosswalks with walk/don’t walk signs and corresponding traffic lights in Rome; you just sort of run when there’s a break in traffic. Really. So, we almost died/killed people on several occasions.

When we started out, we were having trouble maneuvering through a tight spot to get onto the sidewalk. Some taxi drivers were standing around laughing at us, but one of them came over to help. He was giving us directions and trying to tell us what to do in Italian, which was pretty funny, because he can’t possibly have thought we knew what he was saying. At one point in this disaster, he actually said “mamma mia!” It was too perfect. When we got on our way, a lot of people thought we were very funny. We were a tourist attraction in ourselves. A lot of people laughed, a few took pictures, and some got annoyed because we almost ran them over. My friend Carrie would look out at some people as we passed, put up her arms, and go, “AY!” It was hysterical, but I think she creeped a few people out. A few guys thought they were funny and put up a hitchhiking finger. It was the most fun thing we did on the trip, just because it was so nuts and we were laughing so hard, looking like idiots.