My First Weekend in Rome

My first weekend in Rome was filled with fun and adventure. Friday my roommates and I decided to go to Campo de Fiori, which is an outrageously large market. Campo de Fiori has everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to the typical tourist merchandise. I was amazed with all the interesting things that were there, at least I know where to go to buy gifts before I go homeJ!

Most of the merchants working at the market did not speak English, but it was blatantly obvious that they were very much accustomed to dealing with foreigners. Most of the merchants were very good at signing and figuring out what each other was saying, without incorporating any language. Even though the mass majority of merchants only spoke Italian, there were a handful of individuals who spoke broken English. Overall as a country I was very surprised with the number of Italians who spoke English. At Campo de Fiori, very few people spoke English, which I found rather ironic that a large tourist area had very few English speaking people.

Saturday was mainly a day filled with exploring; we mainly stayed in the Campo de Fiori area. My roommates and I found a couple different churches and decided that before we leave we would like to attend a service. We definitely looked like tourists this weekend, as we walk around Rome with our maps and cameras taking pictures of everything. For dinner we found this small restaurant in the heart of Campo de Fiori area, it was very small but air conditioned! The waiter luckily spoke English, which saved us the embarrassment of once again butchering the Italian language. The thing that I found most interesting about this restaurant was the menu. First of all the menu was by far the biggest menu I have ever seen, there were so many choices! In addition to the numerous choices, it was also written in 3 separate languages; Italian, English, and German. I was pretty impressed!

Sunday was the day at Oasti beach. The beach was nice but small. Oasti beach was the first dark sand beach I have ever been too. The water was really cold but the sun was really hot so it all evened out. There was a sand bar half way out to the buoy, I spent most of my time there or laying out so I didn’t take many pictures, but I will post the few that I did take.

Ciao