Getting Settled!

Diario di Roma Tre
Tuesday March 14, 2017
Cloudy  63°F/17°C back home in Cedar Park, Texas 78613
Partly Cloudy  61°F/16°C in Roma, Lazio, Italia 00143
Buongiorno,
           As Beppe Cassa drove Michael and I downtown to Roma Centro Sunday night to meet our friends for the evening, I couldn’t help thinking…If New York City and San Francisco have pot holes

My "Welcome" Mat

like Rome, then Western civilization as a whole has an infrastructure problem, and we are all doomed! Gads, what a jarring ride! It was the same in Nettuno, a port city about 30 miles south of Rome, when we were there on Saturday.
         Even though I’ve been to Rome before and have gotten acquainted with it, it takes me some time to reacclimate myself. First hurdle is the jet lag that accompanies each of my transatlantic flights. I’ve been here almost a week, but I’m still feeling the effects of my 4,400 mile, seven time zone journey. Michael and Laura always do a great job of making me feel at home and getting me settled in. This morning after I showered and had my morning coffee, I headed up the street to the nearby market where I shopped for a few items for my apartment and checked out the neighborhood. This is a different neighborhood than the one I stayed in almost four years ago. It is just a short distance from Michael and Laura’s home, which makes it convenient for visiting, but far enough away to ensure each other’s  privacy. Right next to

Michael and Beppe Cassa

the market is a little restaurant or bar, which dispenses sandwiches and other light fare along with caffé, vino and other bevando alcoliche. The neighborhood reminds me of a similar neighborhood in Queens when I was working in New York City, or my little corner of San Francisco when I was doing radio in The City. Everything one needs can be found in the neighborhood, and it is usually within walking distance of home. For longer distances there is the bus or the metro, Rome’s two-line subway system. The A line and B line will eventually be joined by the C line, but there have been ongoing delays in this project, which has taken on the historic delays of New York City’s effort to build a new  subway line under Second Avenue.
         Rome’s C Line subway construction has been frequently halted by the discovery  of antiquities along its planned routed.  Rome is more than 2,000 years old and built in layers piled high upon itself, like a wedding cake as my son the tour guide frequently explains to his enthralled fans. When any antiquities are spotted, work is halted while teams of archaeologists survey and evaluate and decide what the contstruction crews can do next. Rome will probably get to be 3,000 years old before the new subway line is running. There is a main boulevard that comes to an abrupt halt for no apparent reason, because some 4,000 year old Etruscan ruins were uncovered. God only knows when the construction of the boulevard will resume, if ever.
          Following our visit with the other ex-pats, it was just a short walk to Piazza Repubblica and a one-stop metro ride to the Termini train station when we changed to the other metro line for the ride out to Palassport where Laura would pick us up for the short ride home.
          The exchange rate – Euros to dollars is pretty good right now €1= $1.06 USD. I generally order a few hundred Euros from my bank before I even get on the plane. Then instead of cashing travelers checks along the way, I visit a local Post Office or bank ATM to get the cash I need along the way. By the way, I always let my bank or credit union and the companies that issue the credit cards I plan on using on the trip that I am going to be out of the country, so they would think that some unscrupulous hacker has purloined my credit card. Make sure, too, that all of the debit and credit cards you will be using are the new chip cards. They are the standard in Europe. Your old magnetic stripe card may not work. As an extra precaution, I replaced my pocket wallet, my travel wallet and my passport holder that I wear around my neck with RFID blocking cases, so some sly hacker/thief with a pocket scanner can’t read my credit card numbers.
          If you don’t speak the language of the country you are visiting, don’t fret. Travelers are eased along their way with pictograms and multilingual signs at airports and train stations. It helps to invest in a conversational course in the language of the country you’ll be traveling to, or failing that, download a book of phrases and key words onto your Kindle. I’ve got the Google Translator App on my IPhone and IPad. The Google app even scans and translates written material. Local folks will appreciate the fact that you are trying to communicate with them and will generally try to return your effort. An attitude of America First! or Speak American! Will get you no where. That’s an attitude best left at home.
Ciao,
MikeBo

[Mike Botula is the author of the wannabe best-seller LST 920: Charlie Botula’s Long, Slow Target!  (Amazon Books)  MikeBo’s Blog is a wholly owned subsidiary of his web site www.mikebotula.com , and is linkedto Facebook,  Twitter and Google Plus!]

© By Mike Botula 2017