ROMAN CHARGES

The weather had been clear over Europe: the captain had come over the intercom to tell us we were sweeping over Paris, saying the Eiffel Tower was visibible. You couldn't miss it, it was lit up like a Christmas tree. My first view of Rome was similar: the starry orange streetlamps criss-crossed the paralleled streets, punctuated by the Colosseum glowing like a giant novelty candle holder.
The Pressure was on: I was to meet Kim at Rome Campioni airport, my flight had been late exiting Shannon , and Kim had been waiting for me, half-starting dozens of word puzzles since she landed over two hours ago. Now though, we were waiting on board for the bus to carry us to the airport. Fair enough I thought to myself, it might have been a heck of a walk. Except when we piled ourselves into the shuttle bus we zipped around a corner and we were at the terminal before the rush-for-the-seats crowd had a chance mould their ass-groove into the seats. When we got to Rome central, directions for the hostel actually made us walk in a circle - I should have known when it listed three lefts in a row - and this directional maze meant that I was hardly able to find my way back to our hostel for the rest of the holiday without Kim's help. There's nothing like a bit of female visual sense to overcome the shortcomings of male directional logic - so much for "give me the map, I own a penis". The hostel was a stones throw from the Termini station and the Piazza del Republica, a semicircled set of ornate eigtheenth-century buildings with a fountain in the centre. The fountain was placed on one of the most impenetrable traffic islands I've ever seen. There were people over there though, sitting by the fountain, though how they made it there is anyone's guess. I imagined that they had in fact been there for months, and they all hade complicated back-stories like the characters on LOST. I'm sure at the finale of LOST it'll be revealed that the whole adventure took place on a traffic island – that's my theory anyway and you read it here first.

The Piazza de Republica. Many have crossed the road to visit the fountain. Few have returned


The following morning we walked down to the Colosseum, passing Trajan's Column and The Roman Forum on the way. Our tour guide for the colosseum was called Isabella, and Kim found it hilarious everytime she introduced herself to a new member of the group: "I'm Isa for your questions" she said. We felt it was a bit unclassy to introduce yourself as being "easa" people might get the wrong idea. Many Ooos and a plethora of Aaaahs later and we had finished our Colosseum tour, and then we began our Italian holiday tradition or taking pictures of Tiger and Evil-Donkey, the more famous the location the better. In the Colosseum, we realised we decided to take them when there was a large surge in the crowd, leaving people baffled and bemused.


After a Pizza and siesta, we headed out to test the nightlife in Rome. On the corner near our hostel there was a bar-fight in progress, possibly the most gentlemanly I've ever seen, this was good old fashioned fisticuffs, all upper body work, with punches you could hardly imagine impacting on the male-preened visages of the Italian fancy-men. We drank expensive pints in two Irish themed pubs, Marconi's and The Fiddler's Elbow, before meeting a bunch of Canadians with "Road pops", which is basically legalised knacker drinking, and so we spent the reminder of the night drinking Peroni in the Piazza, with only the odd conversation with a dodgy Italian drunk to punctuate our liquid Picnic. One hairy-palmed trog tried to convince us to get on a bus with him to God knows where, where we would have been castrated like a Nero concubine and forced to partake in some eunuch orgy. Fortunately, amid the Roman lust for violence and the ever-increasing threat of gentlemanly fisticuffs we survived our first night in Rome. The next morning however it felt that Trajan's Column was being erected in my head. All I wanted to do was escape to some Island somewhere - and I knew just the place.