A Sunday Afternoon About Town (extended)
This morning the wakeup dice showed 10. The structure of my room is very effective at keeping out the sun. When it comes to noise, the walls might as well be dangly beed curtains, but that's another (simple) story: I just have to get home after the trash-man comes. At 2355.

I got up and proceeded to read the living daylights out of a text I brought. The window was open. At about 1400 I launched myself in the direction of downtown. I ended up on a tram, sitting very much in front. I don't know about trams yet.

After some leftrightlefting I found myself astride of the Imperial Fora, perhaps my favorite place. On top of the expected ancient granduer, I was offered an additional nectar from the teat of the she-wolf. Sunday is disaster prevention day!!

I started off in the fire-safety area. First, a mobile fire-truck that had transformed into a jumping platform, for the large inflatable landing pad below. Anybody could stroll up, declare themselves impregnant, and climb up tower jump down into the pad. Flips were popular with the marks. I exectued a 360 groin-imperiling spin with suitable aplomb (confession: I was sorely tempted by the Running Man).

The final station was a rock-climbing exhibit. I'm not sure how climbing rocks encourages one to prevent fires, but I did make it to the top. I suppose in Italy, the best way to prevent a fire is to be able to escape from it. Sort of like ignoring somebody makes them stop bothering you. Thus the alert Italian is capable of climbing to a suitable location in their inflamed building (ideally of fake-rock architecture) from which they hurl themselves towards an inflated pad below. For my efforts I received a Fire-Prevention Climber Award (no reward for work as firejumper - too much hotdogging i suspect). It took the form of a card, with the name "Bill" written on it. I doctored the "B" and was on my way.

To the earthquake exhibit, where I received a map of seismically active regions in Italy. It corresponds very closely to the regular map of Italy, though instead of mountains imagine seismic zones. Suddenly without stimulus, I wandered towards the Campo Di Fiori. My stomache, incidentally, was pissed.

At campo I encountered a hispanic "manifestazione" = happening. It was quite the affair, with over 200 people dressed in traditional losetoCortes garb, banging on drums, blowing into Shells, and dancing rythmically. It was fresh. At the apex of the drum acceleration, a parade that may or may not have been planned for commenced. At least 50 strong broke away from the circle of dance and processioned around a corner. Among them was the blowerinto of the shell. Coincidentally, Ecuador was scheduled to play England in the worldcup some 1.5 hours later. Not coincidentally, some Ecuador fans joined the celebration. They came suddenly, preceding the parade and raising the average blood alcohol content by at least 0.02. Once the blowerinto of the shell and the rest of the parade emerged from the Yellow-shirted throngs and reunited themselves with the dancers and the bangers on of the drums, all hell broke lose. DANCING EVERYWHERE. I even dusted off my shoes like Pro-basketball player and started hop-stepping. To my dismay, the eventual sequence of rythmic movements (notice i'm not saying "dancing") resembled very closely the Vanilla Ice. Thankfully, the other rejoicers were going too apeshit at this point in time to mis-interpret my bungled bouncing as insulting... which was good, because it wasn't. Dammit I was really having fun. At one point I was dancing in a sub-circle with a man who had lama-pants on. They were so fuckin hip I wanted to run in circles really fast for a while. Fortunately, my omega (rotational velocity) was constrained by the circle, which at this point was a ragged trapezoid. I looked around for the man with the lama pants. He was gone. No! there he was! He had somehow gotten his hands on a drum... which he had in a head-lock whilst he beat it so hard I thought the Colloseum would collapse. I was going Sir Crazylegs dancing around anonymously.

But working up one hell of an apetite. It was hot, too. I left as things started to peter out, and staggered into a pizzeria. I got 2 pieces of pizza, which actually means 4 but they're combined via a complex folding process wherein they lose their individuality. I mistakenly tried to pay with my Fire-Marshall-Phil certificate. The cashier looked at me with unbridled fury, like she had just argued for 2 hours with 14 other certified fire-climbers about their award NOT constituting legal tender, no matter how hard it was to scale the fake rocks. I didn't care. I grabbed the pizza and ate in 7 animalistic bites, getting carried away and chewing off a small corner of my Seismic Zones in Italy map (which at this point was covered in sweat and lama hairs) in the process.

Next I watched the first half of England v. Ecuador. It was positively abominable, and I felt little guilt that I left the place having only had a bottle of water. I walked back towards a decent bus. On the way, I stopped in a supermarket to buy cereal and pasta. As I calmly glided amidst air-conditioned aisles, I was surprised to hear Metallica's Nothing Else Matters. I was even more surprised to hear a couple complaining about how they always hear that song while (unknown italian verb)ing.

The afternoon ended in baffling fashion, with my arriving just as a 105 bus (cauldron of hell etc... see prev) was getting ready to go, with only 6 people on it and a bloody airconditioning system. Fully-operational at that! Alas, I couldn't just sit back and take it all in... an Italian man that was wearing a San Diego Dodgers shirt had to get on. I engaged him politely, asking where he got the shirt - saying I was from San Diego. He talked way too fast... I think he got in Costa Rica (?). Or maybe he said the shirts store. In any case, I tried to explain to him that the shirt was not technically correct (i used that exact phrase) because the Dodgers play in Los Angeles. He thought the team had died and played with Angels. Or maybe he thought I was talking about the Angels, who also play in LA. Undeterred, I told him that the PADRES played in San Diego, but couldn't remember the word for Priest. The subsequent explanation concluded with him thinking a team of Former Popes played in Mexico under the name of Saint David (before I got off he revealed that he didn't know San Diego was a city). Next time I'll just chill.