Day 5

Saturday, June 25
    Woke up bright and early to see Francesca and Angi before they left for Sardinia. I felt slightly better about the amount of STUFF I brought to Rome when I saw Francesca's suitcase was almost the size of mine. And they're only going to be gone for... 4 nights. And I'll be here... 36 nights total (or something like that).
    After a while I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood; y'know, get to know my surroundings. In order to do so, I had to to first close all 14 windows in the apartment. I've included an accurate, scale drawing* for your viewing pleasure, and so you may better grasp the daunting task I had ahead of me:

   As you can see, it was no small feat. I finally got out of the apartment, remembering to set the alarm with the remote after I had locked the front door, and I headed out for my walk. Being that it was approximately 19:00, on a sabato evening, I wasn't surprised when all the stores and shops were closed. It was a nice, relaxing hot, sweat-inducing walk anyway.
   When I returned to the apartment building, I decided I would take a few photos to share with my many adoring fans few begrudging family members out there on the interwebs! First, the simple (but very pretty) marble entry of the building.

 

   Next we have the lovely lift, barely large enough to hold me and my suitcase... and to the left/ in the foreground, the stairs I take because at the moment, the buttons on my shorts cannot afford me taking lifts.

 And after two levels, we arrive at the door to the apartment; so festive, with its "welcome" bunny!

    And then... in all my excitement to get inside, have some water, take some pictures and put up my feet... I opened the door without turning off the alarm! (Not pictured is my heart exploding out of my chest and my eardrums bursting as the alarm screams inside my brain.) I pushed the button on the remote once, and the alarm slowed, but was still wailing. Pushing it a second and third time seemed to do the trick, though, as no polizia ever showed up, and the phone didn't ring with some Italian security company asking me what was going on...  Between the walk, the stairs, and the alarm, I decided my heart need a rest before continuing on my photo journey of the apartment. So I had a glass of water and then continued where I left off.

    Where were we? Oh, right, the entry way. So here's that. I am standing just inside the front door, and you'll notice there are two sets of doors visible, another in the back on the left (behind the construction stuff) and a fourth set to my immediate left, just out of the frame. If you refer back to exhibit A, the floor plan, you may be able to determine that the solid doors straight ahead lead to Angi's room, and the glass panel doors to the right lead to more bedrooms and the kitchen.

 

     The doors on the back left take us to the living room (or family room, I never remember which is which, but they only have this one couch room, we'll just call it the couch room, okay? Okay.) which is quite lovely and large, just difficult to photograph.

     If we go out of the couch room, straight across the entry way, through the glass doors, make a right after the bathroom and then look left, we see the beautiful and quite modern kitchen, complete with new LG fridge that has water and ice in the door! IN ENGLISH!!! I feel right at home in the kitchen, for now anyway...

    Next is a photo from the terrace of the couch room. SPQR Mercato. Haven't been in there yet, I just wanted to show a brief example of Italian "road rules."  Basically there aren't any. Every vehicle shown in this photo is parked, with no one in them. I've seen way worse than this, too.

    Finally, I'll leave you with a photo looking down off the terrace, into two large patios. Lovely. And completely terrifying.

Baci di Roma!!



*Not extremely accurate. Definitely not to scale.