Our first days in Rome

One of the things we like to do right off the bat in a new city is to take a tour around the city. Most large cities have several Hop-On-Hop-Off outfits. So we took one. We didn't hop-off - just sat. A few days later we took a guided tour to some of the more famous places. Some things we saw today and will see more of later are fountains and ruins like the colliseum. We get very definite impressions from these sort of rides. Rome is very, very crowded and it isn't even the high tourist season. It is crowded with people-everywhere-sitting, standing, walking, looking, talking, It is crowded with little cars, mostly parked. Parked anywhere you can squeeze one in. On the sidewalks, in crosswalks. Paralleled in, angled in, verticaled in. I don't see how they do it. And most especially, it is crowded with motor scooters. Large ones, small ones. Run down ones, very fancy ones. They are parked everywhere - especially since they are smaller than cars. And since they are smaller they can really zip in the traffic. In and out and around. I expected to see wreckage and bodies everywhere. We saw nary a drop of blood. (By the way they have a helmet law there, smarter than some of our states.) While the statues and fountains look fine, the office buildings and upstairs, the apartments, look old and dingy - because they are old (500 years) and dingy (all those cars and scooters.) But it was all very exciting and interesting to me. To Peg, who had seen it a number of years ago when it was far less crowded, it was just pretty frantic. I wish I had gotten some pictures to illustrate this crowdiness( a word?) but I didn't and am not sure I could.

The guide and driver on the bus said they were going to omit some regular stops because of the traffic. We talked to them since one of those omitted stops was the one we needed to use. So they didn't omit that particular one. Nice folks, these Romans.