Day 79 May 14th 2009 Rome, Italy

Mama and Cara arrived this morning at Fiumicino airport and I was there to grab them and bring them back into Rome! After dropping the luggage at the hotel I took them for a cappuccino before scurrying over to the Vatican because we had made a reservation to go on the Scavi underground tour. This is a very cool tour if you ever get the chance. The Vatican only allows about 250 people to take the tour every day because the history contained under St. Peter’s Basilica is just too priceless to open up to all public. A full 2000 years of history is layered under the giant basilica and at the end of the tour you are standing 8 feet away from the purported bones of St. Peter. You have to send an email to the scavi office in the vatican to make the reservation. After the tour Mom and Cara were very tired so I dropped them off at the Mercure hotel near the Colosseum and headed over to my school, Lorenzo de’Medici for an end of school party. We taught our school administrators how to play American-style flip cup and opened up quite a few bottles of bubbly. I returned to the hotel and picked up a refreshed family to cruise down Via del Corso and show them the super-shopping street. Via del Corso and the perpendicular Via dei Condotti are the biggest name shopping streets in Rome, containing everything from giant department stores to small vendors to Dior, Versace and Armani stores. Didn’t buy anything but we had to exchange some American dollars to euros so we walked over to the American Express office to complete the exchange. Damn weak dollar right now! We jumped in a cab after to head out to the Ciampino airport to pick up Katie who was arriving from Dublin after touring the country with her mom. The end of the year LDM school dinner was that night so we took a taxi again from the Ciampino airport towards the city. Here’s where things got a little interesting and stressful. The cab driver did not exactly know the address I gave her for the restaurant we were going to at first, so she typed it into her GPS. But the GPS didn’t have the exact address I had either so we were kind of driving on a prayer. Well the prayer didn’t help too much because we got very lost looking for this place. To compound the problem, I called Davide, the administrator of our school to get the name of the restaurant because the address wasn’t working. But all he could say was the restaurant was called ristorante! That’s Italian for restaurant! So without the name and without the exact address working we somehow after 20 minutes found the place. Now here it gets even better. The place we were eating was a traditional Roman restaurant, meaning they only serve what Romans ate 2000 years ago. To make a long story short Katie, after telling the chef she could not eat wheat, was served a boiled squid and some sort of mashed polenta. You, reader, can imagine the results. I did end up eating a tentacle which tasted sort of fishy and rubbery but in the end the squid got hidden under the remaining food and sent back. On the flip side the red wine mixed with honey was very delicious and the soup was quite good. A ride back into the city to drop off Mama and Cara and Katie and I went back to the apartment in Trastevere.