Stones, sticks and stones, more sticks, more stones, bones, break my bones, I don’t care...whatever...ruins...they’re still ruins if they’re ancient or not...it’s all pieces, bits and pieces of junk that some old archaeologist with a funny looking white hat and a pair of shorts thought was vitally important...the bad audio drones on to the importance of it all...“as they crossed the land, they brought with them pieces of stone pottery and tools, blah blah blah”...call me selfish but I don’t give a damn about what happened two thousand years ago, at least all the details which move like snails when you’re bored...and to think we had to stand in line to get tickets for this...they were right, we should have ordered tickets online in advance...or better yet NOT ordered them...I could have stayed home in front of the television or been just sitting and drinking in my recliner and looked at my own personal ruins...I gave up that for this?...oh yeah, you wanted to come here...ghastly heat, oppressive humidity...museums with relics made by people whose name I can’t pronounce...statues, more statues, and even more statues...a statue of Caesar commemorating something or other...I should be impressed, but no, I’m not...they all look alike to me, meaning no, they don’t all look alike, but a statue is a statue by any other name...you keep looking, I’ll sit in the comfy leather chair that they must have known people like me would use when they get bored...the only good thing about this overcrowded place is the air conditioning...take your time...I’ll be fine...maybe we can do lunch later and get overcharged like the tourists we are...after lunch, we decide to walk around the plaza...I lay down on a bench by a fountain and before long somebody is talking loudly in Italian to me...am I not allowed to lay on the bench?...what’s the problem?...eventually, he goes away and I work on my Italian style siesta and Sophia Loren dream...afterwards, we do some more walking around past shopping malls and tourist stalls and pizza halls that have pizza which isn’t nearly as good as the pizza at home...walking down old craggy uneven roads like people must of done hundreds of years ago except when they had tired mules and horses carrying tired wobbly and tottering carts behind them...maybe they were gatherers...but I know they didn’t have people hustling water at them...but I don’t care if you hustle me because I’m thirsty...all that sitting in a chair at the snoozeum made me thirsty...one street looks like another and the names don’t make sense...now we’re lost and have no idea where we are...the natives don’t speak our language...how dare they not!...but they try to help anyway...it’s more than I would of done...we try to find our way walking but our legs now feel like lead and we’re looking for a friendly bus or taxi to do a “Calgon, take me away!” moment and magically invoke teleportation and get us back to our hotel...and somehow we make it and it didn’t seem so hard after all...sometimes desperation is the greatest motivation...fall on the bed and turn into a Roman statue for two hours...you’re awake?...you’re hungry?...so am I...I sure don’t want to walk far, so we go to a place that is across the street and find a little wrought iron sidewalk table...actually the carbonara is pretty good and the prices aren’t bad...we sit outside and talk and drink wine...the night falls and we’re on our third bottle of wine...there’s nowhere we want to go...we’re still tired from our travel travails...we can go up to the room and make love...or maybe we’ll just order some more wine from our nice waitress Simone and cuddle the night away at our sidewalk table and watch Rome, or at least part of it pass before our eyes...it doesn’t matter to me under the mellow misty Italian moonlight...sometimes a bad beginning leads to a good ending.
