Photos of Real Italian Culture

There are a lot of pictures in this series, so bear with me.


The thing that has affected me the most has of course been my bathrobe. You see, I left mine in Texas. Now I had gotten used to the way things are back in Catherine Hall, were all the showers have a small changing area, and at home, where I can have the entire bathroom to myself. Not so here, where there are not only no changing areas but six people sharing a bathroom. Rapidly I realized the necessity of having a robe to get myself to and from the shower and for warmth in my pajamas.

A consultation with a well-intentioned guidebook revealed the name of a store that ought to have sold such things. For all I no it did, as I never managed to find the place. When we went looking, Treco, Anna, and I instead managed to locate Chinatown. I did not even know Rome had a Chinatown, but in a few weeks when I finally break under the strain of eating pasta two meals a day every day, I will know where to find alternate food.

The next day, chastised by our inability to opperate a guidebook properly, we went to the supermarket down the street, where we found amongst a truly random assortment of goods -- many of which were not legal for sale in the US -- bathrobes. Now I had three color choices: white, which I rejected on the grounds of being hard to keep clean; pink, which I rejected on princepal; and the third, which by lack of other choices I was forced to accept, which is a color that I describe as "prison jump-suit orange". Asside from one little eye-scorching detail, it's a pretty nice robe.