Sunday, April 19th, 2009: Arriving in Rome, Italy

Bob:

Bidding a fond farewell to the Noordam, we retrieved our luggage, caught a minivan taxi right outside the dockside terminal, and arrived at the Grand Hotel Fleming in Rome before 9 a.m. My Garmin Nuvi 270 GPS once again came in handy in helping guide our taxi driver to exactly the right spot with a minimum of detours. I switched the language over to "Italiano" so that he could hear and understand the turn-by-turn directions, with the curious result that he would occasionally verbally argue with the GPS's directions in Italian! That gave me some confidence that the machine's voice synthesizer really was speaking intelligible Italian. Much to my surprise, my GPS also alerted us to the position of the speed cameras apparently used in Italy the same way they are in Germany, and our driver slowed down when he saw those big, red warning messages. Otherwise he kept up a very good clip, passing everyone on the road to Rome except one BMW and even Phyllis, who has been described by family members as driving like a "bat out of hell" complained that he was driving too fast. Maybe I'm getting too used to the Italian style of driving, but he only blew through one minor stop sign that I noticed and overall I thought he was quite competent.

We arrived at our hotel so early, in fact, that Monika was worried that they wouldn't have our rooms cleaned and ready for use, but that turned out not to be a problem. We rolled our wheelies into our second-floor room, unpacked, and rested for the morning before setting off for some neighborhood exploration. Our room had no functional heating or cooling, so we had a choice of having the windows closed, which made our room hot and stuffy, or having the windows open, which made our room cool but fresh. We opted for cool and fresh, but that unfortunately chilled my sister Phyllis when she came down to visit us. Phyllis was, however, happy to find a coffee shop just across the street from our hotel where she and Monika later enjoyed a cup of latte.

About noon we were starting to get hungry and set off to explore the area with the goal in mind of finding a supermarket to purchase the essentials for a simple lunch. To that end, Monika and I walked downhill a few blocks to the Tiber River, stopping off to buy some ready-made sandwiches at a supermarket we found along the way. Continuing down to the river, we ran across a hiker-biker trail running along the North bank of the Tiber which we followed first one way and then another, hoping for a bench where we could sit down and eat our meal. We didn't find any benches and after getting chased away from one spot by a hissing, spitting feral cat, we finally ended up sitting on a low spot in the brick wall beside the trail. We had great views of the Tiber and two very nice bridges while we ate, but my enjoyment was noticeably decreased by the onset of a steady cold rain. Monika, who was raised in northern Germany, grew up with cold, rainy weather and so was able to ignore it and still have fun, but I was happy to finish eating and get moving again to warm up a bit.

We continued walking westward on the hiker-biker trail until we reached the pretty old bridge we had been gazing at whilst eating lunch. According to an explanatory plaque, the current bridge dating from the early 19th Century, was the newest in a succession of bridges in that same spot dating back to Roman times. As we walked onto the bridge we were astonished to see three or four different vendors, all selling padlocks at different sizes and prices. Like Curious George, that made us want to explore further. In the center of the bridge were some steel pipe structures that might originally have been bicycle racks. But I'm really not sure because they were completely encrusted with padlocks of all different sizes, shapes, and ages! My curiosity now fully aroused, I checked the writing on some of the locks and found it typically consisted of a male name, a female name, and a date, plus the occasional heart drawn in.

Aha! With ratiocination worthy of Sherlock Holmes, I concluded that there is some kind of weird courtship ritual going on at that bridge in which each couple buys a padlock, writes their name and date on it, and then locks it on the encrusted pile of locks. I would hazard a guess that the locked padlock symbolizes the undying unity of their love for each other, or something like that. Awwwwww, gee, isn't love beautiful? It's really similar to the American courtship tradition of the couple carving their initials in the bark of a tree, but much less damage to the environment when you think about it. Another advantage is that the padlocks are also less permanent as you can always hire a locksmith to pick open the lock in the event the couple breaks up. For the couples who did end up wanting to get married (an increasingly ignored opportunity back in the U.S.!) there were plenty of churches in the area in which to tie the knot, so to speak.

Wandering back to the hotel we chanced upon an Internet cafe, where we stopped off to check our email. Returning to our room in a very steady rain we hung up our clothes and attended the 3:30 orientation session for our Cosmos tour that started the next morning. Along with a heavy-duty sales spiel about how great all the optional excursions were, we also gleaned the necessary information about our wake-up call, breakfast time, and deadline for being on the bus. That chore over, we had supper and turned in early because we had a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call for our tour of Rome the next morning!