Rome part due

You get exhausted overseas. You’re sick of not being able to understand what people are saying around you, the different toilets, different food, different smells, different standards of cleanliness and the constant need to do arithmetic in your head to determine how much money you’re spending. This is commonly called “culture shock,” but it’s probably more accurately culture fatigue. Not everything about a foreign land is wonderful, and home is very comfortable.

I’m not there yet (stay tuned for when it happens), but many of the people I met up in Rome had spent eighteen months or more in Italy and were happy to have a little slice of Americana when they could. So we went to Hard Rock Café and everyone got hamburgers. I had the veggie burger, which was fantastic and about half the price, and we wiled away the evening with memories of the various bands performing from the wall TVs and discussions about the best Tex-Mex chains (cuisine severely lacking in Europe). Dinner ended around nine, which is a fairly reasonable time for a Roman to start eating. Eight or eight-thirty is normal. I remember stumbling upon the Hard Rock Café after a blistering hot day nine years ago, exhausted, sick of not understanding menus and ready for American-sized portions. It was like light shone from heaven. I’ll always remember that restaurant with fondness.

But I walk through the night with a colleague, down the misty Spanish steps as the strains of vespers still echo from the Trinita di Monti church atop the Piazza Spagna. Piazza del Popolo, where a great Egyptian obelisk, captured by the Romans and erected here to channel ancient Egypt’s glory, leads us up to the fountain in the Pincio, at the edge of a huge garden called the Villa Borghese (look at a map, it’s easier).

The fountain is lit up and the light dances on the walls and ceilings and makes me think of the most beautiful fountain I’ve ever seen, the Trevi. I stepped out to see it before dinner, fulfilling the wish I’d made by throwing a coin in nine years ago. I doubt so little that I’ll be back that I don’t bother this time. Bad move?

A little creeped out by the dark edge of the garden (never walk through a dark city garden at night, someone once told me) and that car that drove slowly past us and is now idling at the bottom of the hill, we head on to gawk up at more churches, look in more shop windows and drink in the night air of Rome.