Pub Crawl: Quando a Roma…
So, on Thursday we decided it would be a good idea to head to Rome for a night out. Everyone was excited to experience the Pub Crawl, which meets at the Spanish steps and then leads drunk Americans from bar to bar for a small fee of 20 euro (t-shirts included!). About 20 kids from our program ended up going, but we were split into different groups because of the huge number of people signed up. The first bar gave us free beer (generic!) or wine (from a gallon jug!) and pizza (with surprise ham under the cheese!), and was actually pretty fun despite the roughly 110 degree teperature inside. About 12 of us formed a semicircle around the AC unit, which was lovely. Probably half of the people there were from ASU, so there was that…
The second bar was nice, by which I mean the drinks were 6-8 euros with our “discount.” Needless to say, our broke behinds stayed pretty sober. We had a good time comparing dance moves with our friends from the program, but the other crawlers and locals were, sorry to generalize, boring and creepy, respectively.
We moved on to our final discoteca, after walking briskly past the Trevi fountain, corralled by Pub Crawl employees who were yelling at us to be respectful and quiet. The drinks here were 10 euro, minimum, so we continued to entertain each other by dancing, observing the belligerant ASU kids, and flirting with drag queens to try to get onstage. At 3 a.m., the responsible half of the group went back to the hotel they’d booked to sleep, while the rest of us headed out onto the streets to kill three hours before the first train back to Orvieto.
Walking through Rome between 3 and 6 a.m. was one of the strangest, coolest experiences here so far. The city was almost completely empty, and as we walked the couple miles between the club and the train station, we got explore the Roman Forum and the Colosseum refreshingly alone. A couple people took a nap on the grass in front of il Colosseo (a few broke off to go buy drugs from the locals, but that’s another story), but I just had a quality heart-to-heart 4 a.m. conversation with some new friends. We walked the last few blocks to Roma Termini as the sun rose over the city, and boarded our train at 6:07 a.m.
We arrived in Orvieto around 8 a.m., and I immediately showered and slept until about 5 p.m. Twelve and a half hours later, we loaded the bus for Naples and Pompei.
