Rome: the start of "A Month In"

As I mentioned in this post, we are spending a month in Rome. Now that we a are actually settled in (a 2 day process), it's time to bring y'all up to date.

We left home Monday, and had a relatively uneventful trip here, with the following exceptions:

• The cat did not pee on the hour long drive to Calgary -- not the first time but close;
• We ran into a friend who happened to be working as a Calgary gate agent for KLM;
• There was no real sleeping on a fairly nice 8 hr flight from Calgary to Amsterdam (yes, we waved at The Netherlands on the way in and out);
• We arrived in AMS late, providing only an hour's connection to our flight to Rome, necessitating a mad dash across the airport, though immigration, through a security check -- but we made it;
• It was a straightforward location of our train out of the FCO airport;
• However, we missed our train connection at Roma Trastevere because we were on the wrong platform. Fortunatly, the next train was only 15 minutes later;
• We arrived at the Valle Aurelia station near our apartment, loaded down with luggage, but wandering around it for 15 minutes as we couldn't figure out where we were, which road was which since none had signs, and we walked in circles for a bit.

Rome's road signs are beautiful when you can find them

Our apartment is fairly spacious and pretty nice...

The living & dining room. Spartan but spacious.

...including a really nice private balcony/deck covered in plants (and strawberries!)...

Set up for al fresco dining

...though I have a closet for a kitchen.

The entire kitchen

Size of kitchen does not affect cooking ability.

Coteletta di pollo con salsa tomate y fungi, with other stuff

Our apartment is in an out of the way mostly residential neighbourhood with no tourists, offering lots of apartment buildings and not that much else. We have 4 supermercatos of varying sizes within a 10 minute walk, most of which hide.

Parking garage entrance left. Store entrance right.

And that Pam store is the size of the old Calgary CoOp near where I lived.

Still, the neighbourhood's a busy place, where there's lots of traffic and silly parking.

My local grocery store (Punto)

Double parked parents wait to pick up kids at school

Flowers cascade from most balconies

Some people have ruins in their front yard

On-street flower vendors. Flowers probably came from Holland

A framing shop

So Tuesday was spent checking in, getting some essentials and getting over the jet lag. Today was a real meeting with my landlord (a nice old retired lady) to sort out the WiFi and other stuff, arranging a SIM card for my phone and getting transit passes. You can only get the passes at one of a few ATAC offices, and in typical Italian style, the one closest to me was closed for renovations. So we had to run out to Termini train station on the other side of town, a bustling and fun place.

And so they come and go

I have already learned that living here will be bad for my liver. Turns out most wines in the supermercatos is under €5. Many are under €3. This one's €1.97 (or $2.60 Cdn).

What the heck. Have 2.

Tomorrow we're actually going to get up at a reasonable hour and check out the local daily markets.