Friday, 16 June, 2017

The headline is definitely fake news as it is to be 38C today.

Last time you saw me I was passed out on the bed, partly undressed. For some reason, Julie wants some space in the bed too so wakes me up – I jump about 20 feet in the air in surprise, not knowing where I was. Any way, I move over and get back to sleep awaking again at 1:00 AM and then finally at 3:00 AM. Then I am wide awake as I cannot remember what I had done with my new camera and after looking at all the likely places concluded I had lost it, not bad for the first time using it. I didn’t get back to sleep again and felt like absolute crap.

In the mean time, Julie sleeps like a champ – probably 10 hours or so. When she finally gets up I tell her about the missing camera and she looks around and cannot find it either. Just as I established in my mind that I had to buy another one, I put on my jeans and find the camera in the back pocket – I had looked in the front pocket before as I never put anything in the back pockets. Whew, mystery solved.

We head out early, for Romans anyway, and go to the pastry shop where Julie had her salmon roll yesterday.

My toasted ham/cheese was one of the worst of all time – the bread totally stale and further dried out by the toasting process. Jan/Hugh I reckon this topped out for badness our experiences in South Australia on the drive back.

The idea this morning is to get to a money teller so we can get some cash and also buy a mouse to aid my data entry. Well we walk around in circles for ages in the heat and I am getting quite grumpy. We end up at Campo di Fiore where there is a market. But it wasn’t very impressive.

We settle in to a café for more drinks – they were not particularly friendly either.

We wander around in the heat for quite a while and I am feeling worse and grumpier. Eventually, I have had enough and request we go back to the apartment. Along the way, we passed:

I drop off to sleep at the apartment and have the sleep of the dead. After an hour or so, I awake and feel like a new person, refreshed and ready to go. I look up some local restaurants on Trip Advisor. Julie returns and has bought a Mouse for me which further brightens up my day. She looks at a few of the restaurants and we decide to go out for a lunch. We go by the turnoff to the Pantheon and through Campo Maddalena and Julie picks out:

The restaurant was in back of a pizza shop / bar and we are ushered into a room mostly empty that was air conditioned, important on a 38 degree day with a nice setting.

The menu is all in Italian so we ask the waiter for an English one. He disappears for quite a while and comes back with ones that he had obviously just printed. There were a number of mistakes on it. We make our decisions and after we place our order, the owner comes by and is very friendly. He then has sent out a complementary:

All in all, very nice and enjoyable. We go back to the apartment and Julie goes out prancing. I have a nap which is longer than expected because Julie comes back over an hour after the time that she thought she would. We decide to go out to Maddalena for dinner. There was a place in the Plaza that I had looked at the menu earlier so we went there.

A 4 piece busker band started up with 2 string basses, a guitar and an accordion. They played until they extracted the most cash they thought they could and then moved on.

It is still early but back to apartment for sleep. It surprises me that I am able to sleep after the naps during the day.

For a day that started out so badly, it turned out to be quite good with all the problems solved.