When in Rome, be a Roman. This was what first struck me, when I landed in Rome (ROMA) airport at 1400 hrs on 2nd June. I do not know, why Rome was chosen for this proverb (am I right?). Why not, "When in India, be an Indian"?
We had to wait for our guide, who was to meet us at 1700 hrs. We were exploring the airport and had the first experience of how important oral communication is. No one spoke English here. We had a tour of the restaurants at the airport (There were very few). We had the company of another tour party, who had travelled with us for an hour, before they got picked up by their guide.
After an hour, we opened our first packet of Savouries, which were given to us by our Engineer, Natarajan, for killing time during travel. We got to know of its real utility, as the tour proceeded. Besides savouries, we had some mouth watering Avakkai pickles too.
After some time, we decided to have a cup of coffee. We could not distinguish between Expresso, Cappuccino, Latte and all other coffees exhibited. Finally we pointed out to a person having the type of coffee we had in mind and had the same. We were to learn later that this was to be called "White Coffee", or "Coffee Latte".
The guide met us at 1700 hrs and asked us to either wait in the airport till 1900, when the others in the group will join, or sit in the coach. We chose to load our baggage in the coach and stroll around. There was nothing to see, other than vehicles moving in and out. We did see some Hotel coaches and bus stops for these coaches, with timings.
One thing of interest was the number of smokers in Rome (We were to see this in all other places, as well). I had decided not to smoke during this tour, and did manage to stick to this, with a single exception, in London.
The others in the tour party arrived, and after all baggage was loaded we left at 2000hrs. Our first halt was an Indian restaurant for dinner. We all had a real good meal and got driven to our Hotel at 213o hrs, where we checked in.
For day 2, the guide announced in the bus, that we would have our Wake up calls at 0630, breakfast at 0730 and check out and depart at 0830.
So much for day 1.
2 comments:
Congrats on your non smoking resolve and result!
The first time I was in Italy, Lira was still in use and with the italians using the comma instead of decimal point, I thought they were charging 5000,000 for a cup of coffee! Needless to say, I waited a long time before buying myself a coffee...
Did you also notice that most of the smokers there were women?
The resolve was for the tour only.
There were many women smokers. Can't say they were the majority
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