Sono andata a Roma...e Bologna...e Lucca

Oy vey. Very, very, very full weekend, again. It starts Thursday afternoon, when I hopped on the local train from Florence to Rome, for a mission to get a visa to Russia. You should know that though the local train is very cheap (16 euro and change to go to Rome, as compared to 35 euro for the Eurostar) it is very, very slow. It took nearly five hours to get to Rome from Florence, including a rather interesting delay... somewhere between the two cities; I have no idea what godforsaken town the train simply stopped at for nearly an hour. What made it a little bit more interesting was the mother and daughter sitting opposite me: the daughter started fidgetting profusely at around the half-hour mark of delay, and even with the language gap, I could tell that she was very anxious to arrive in Rome, perhaps to see a long-distance love? That would be the only factor I could think of that would leave her as agitated as she was. Who knows, I just made up one more-hairbrained-than-the-next story about them, just because I could. Anyways, I got to Rome, I had a mediocre dinner in the train station because I was tired and couldn't bother, and checked into my hostel for the night, which was filled with what certainly seemed like an entire high school of German students, but luckily none of them were in my room, 'South America.'

Friday morning dawned bright and early, as I began what was going to be (unbeknownest to me at the time) a very long morning. I have a picture of my breakfast, because the cornetto con cioccalato (chocolate crossaint) that I had was legitimately bigger than the cup my cappuccino came in, and the coffee cup was certainly sizable.

The only good thing about Friday morning:


From there, I left for the Russian embassy, a fairly short and very pretty walk from my hostel. I took a lot of pictures of the Roman houses along the way, all excellent examples of late Renaissance and early Baroque architecture. Upon arriving at the Russian embassy, the most hilariously, absurdly well-guarded building I've ever happened upon, I was told, in a roundabout fashion in very broken English, that I was supposed to be at the Russian consulate for all visa-related matters. Crap. Of course the consulate was nearly two kilometers in the other direction (though I didn't know that at the time, either), and of course it closed (or so I was told) at noon. It being ten at the time, I thought I had plenty of time to walk over to the via Nomentana, 16. After a broken-Italian conversation with the lawyer's office at via Nomentana 16 and instructions from the very courteous concierge at a hotel that the Russian consulate was actually located at via Nomentana 116, I was not hopeful of my prospects. The walk is always less scenic when you are stressed.

I got to the Russian consulate, was let in another ridiculously well-guarded gate, and was told that the visa department was on il primo piano, the first floor. I automatically assumed that the first floor was technically the second first, because Italians and most Europeans count the ground floor separately. Another wait of about thirty minutes commenced outside a closed door, where I bonded with a Russian-Italian baby, but where it turns out was emphatically not where I was supposed to be. An admonishing Russian matron herded me downstairs, promptly told me that the visa forms I had filled out prior to coming were the wrong ones, and gave me new ones. By now, know that it was at least quarter after eleven. When I had finished filling out the forms, it was 11:40. I had been told that the consulate closed at 12:30 by the embassy, which evidently wasn't the case when I returned to the window and another unsympathetic Russian woman of a certain age (and girth) informed me that the consulate actually closed at 11:30. I am firmly convinced that diplomats do absolutely nothing. This is when the tears first started. I knew that morning was the only time that I could go to Rome, and I needed that visa now. Luckily, they took pity on me (but not until after a fresh batch of tears during the payment process) and the moral/happ ending of this story is that I have a Russian visa. Or I will next Friday when I go back to Rome (durrr...) to retrieve it. But now I know where to go, the correct address of that location, and I'm hopefully hitching a ride back with one of the SUF classes that has a day trip to Rome that day.

Next time (because the library is closing soon and I have to go home for dinner), the rest of my afternoon in Rome, evening/morning in Bologna, and visit to Lucca.