Every Boy's Got One

Travel Diary of Jane Harris

Travel Diary of Holly Caputo and Mark Levine

Jane Harris

We’re HERE!!!!!!!! At the hotel, I mean.

It’s the sweetest little place, tucked into a side street that isn’t wide enough to let a car coming from the other way pass by. And packed with people! I thought it was a pedestrian walkway and that the taxi driver was going the wrong way. But it turned out it was the Via di Buffalo, which is the street our hotel is on.

Still, it was kind of scary when those Italian school kids kept knocking on the car windows. I wonder what the driver yelled at them to make them run away like that. This is what comes of not having enough social programs for young people. Those kids should have had something better to do on a Saturday than stand around the Via di Buffalo, knocking on tourists’ car door windows.

Not that I want to tell another country how it ought to be bringing up its children, or anything. But still.

All I wanted to do was get to my room and take a nap, but Cal had to start arguing with the taxi driver when he saw the receipt. He said over his dead body was he paying 80 euros for a ride from the airport and that the taxi driver might think he could bilk the tourists that way, but that he, Cal, had been to Rome before, and he knew the fare from the airport wasn’t a cent over 40 euros. In English. Which it turned out the driver perfectly understood. And after a lot of grousing, he finally agreed that 40 euros would do.

So it’s good Mark invited Cal along with us. I guess.

Anyway, my room is so adorable, a tiny little blue-and-white thing with gold curtains that, when I opened them, turned out to be for a window that looks out over the most beautiful courtyard, with white doves flying around it, and bougainvillea spilling from window boxes all over the place, and a sky stretched over it that, I swear, looks bluer than the sky over Manhattan, somehow. It is EXACTLY like Helena Bonham Carter’s room in the pensione in Room with a View . Only there’s no view. Well, except for the courtyard and the sky.

And there are big bottles of water right here in my room, for later, and I turned on the TV, and everything was In Italian!

I mean, I knew it would be. It’s just SO WEIRD!

I thought I would be way too tired to want to go out and sightsee, but now that I’m finally here, I’m really stoked! I want to get out there and see EVERYTHING. After all, we only have about 24 hours in Rome before we leave for Le Marche.

On second thought, I didn’t sleep very well on the plane, thanks to The Armrest Nazi. I suppose I shouldn’t call him that anymore on account of him having been so tragically jilted all those years ago by that model.

But seriously, what did he expect, marrying a model? Modelizers get exactly what they deserve.

Maybe I’ll just rest my eyes for a minute or two….

Funny. I miss The Dude. I’m so used to his big gray body curled up to mine in bed, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to slee—

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