Will work for pizza

I arrived back in bella Roma and got settled into my little house in the garden. The plan was to find a job so I could stick around for a while and actually have some euros coming in instead of just going out like water through a fire hose all the time. I decided to try getting a job as an English teacher since it is one of the things that I could be qualified to do here being that I've been speaking English for a while now. A friend of mine had recommended a school to me where his wife was teaching so I took a resume down there, and surprisingly I had an interview two days later. When I arrived at the office for the colloquio there were a few other people waiting for the same thing. In short, my interview lasted maybe 4 minutes and I was asked to come back again to meet another woman. The next interview was somewhat longer, maybe 7 minutes, and I was asked to return again to sit in on an actual class to see how it's done. It was a private class with just the teacher, a lady from South Africa (yes they speak English there too) and an Italian woman who already spoke English at an advanced level. It lasted about an hour and I realized that the Italian woman probably knew English grammar better than me and I think I even learned a thing or two. This started to give me some doubts as to if I could actually do this or if I even wanted to. At any rate, the next step was to return later that day and give a "pretend" lesson to the two women I had interviewed with, with the simple instruction of "follow the lesson plan and teach the past tense". Alright, so I went home and had some pizza and came back later still wondering just what they expected of me. When I arrived the room was full of people awaiting interviews. It seems as though they schedule everyone at the same time and just take them as they go along. I waited patiently for about an hour, made easier by the pretty Italian girl sitting next to me that I managed to have a nice conversation with in Italian. She explained that she was there about a secretary job and I told her my story. She was really friendly and smiled a lot, and we were getting along quite well when I got called to teach my lesson. I walked in the room and the two women are sitting there and immediately they began speaking in broken English, assuming there roles as intermediate students. I was a little caught off guard, expecting some type preparatory conversation from them before I got started, but it was time to start teaching, something. Just how do you explain the past tense anyway? I actaully did come up with some examples while I was waiting, but I tried to follow the steps to the lesson plan that they gave. The first step was reviewing last weeks homework, which obviously didn't exist, so after struggling along with that for a minute they told me to just explain the past tense. I spent some time trying to get them to give me some examples of things they had done yesterday or last week, but they seemed to purposely go around what I was trying to get them to say. I thought I was handling them O.K. though as far as my speaking, but I struggled to understand just what they wanted me to do, so after about 10 minutes they concluded and told me they would call me later that day and let me know. I think if they had explained a few things to me I could have done better, but since I've never been a teacher I don't have any skills I could lean on and it showed. Oh well, by that time I was honestly more interested in the Italian girl I was talking to in the waiting room than getting the job, but as I left they were coming out to interview her and there wasn't an opportunity to say anything more to her except "ciao". So I left without getting the job or the girl, cazze.

After that I decided to go with something I know better, drawing plans. So I started sending resumes to some architectural offices I found online. Again surprisingly, I got a response from one of them that week. It was from a woman who had her own interior design office. She told me that she didn't need anybody at the moment, but that she had worked in New York and understood how hard it is to work in another country and she wanted to help me. Che fortuna! So I met with her and I explained what I was doing and she gave names of some other places to look into and took a few resumes from me to give to some people she knew. She was really nice and I was fortunate to meet someone who was willing to just help me like that.

I sent off a few more resumes and slowly started to run out of ideas, so I decided to give it a little time and see some things in Rome that I haven't seen yet. You can spend a lifetime in Rome and never see it all since there are an infinite number of amazing things to discover here. My only problem was that each time I step out of the house I spend money, usually just on food, but if you add in admission tickets to sights and other things it starts to add up, so I had to find things to do that didn't cost much. I decided to see different parts of the city that I haven't been to, one of them being the EUR, an area a few miles from the center that was the idea of Benito Mussolini as a new way of living. The architecture is all cold 1940's fascist style and the roads are wide and straight, with things maybe being in a more orderly fashion, like a good communist. It really doesn't feel like you are in Rome, and that's why I didn't like it much.

On the way back I hopped off the metro and visited the second largest church in Rome, the Basilica di San Paolo. Saint Paul is the other important apostle along with Peter, who had the big church in the Vatican city named after him. It was very impressive inside and the facade was beautiful, but the rest of the outside and the grounds were pretty plain, unlike St. Peter's.

At home I met some new students from the language school staying in the main house, Lisa from Berlin and Lubi from Croatia. I enjoyed talking with both of them and often we would cook dinner and enjoy some good meals and wine together at home, as well as a few beers in the garden with Lisa. Daniela, another German girl that I met on my last visit, also returned to the house for a week, and I even got to see Evi again when she stopped in for a couple days. It was great to be seeing my friends since I never knew when I would see them again.

The only bad thing about Rome at this time of year are the zanzone, mosquitoes. It was pretty much impossible to sit outside and relax due to the fact that after about 2 seconds they start biting you and never stop, it's unbelievable. There are so many and they're big too, with black and white stripes, ugh. I didn't notice it so much when I went out in the center, so I think maybe being in the garden at home was an exceptionally bad location, but it was horrible. The weather was so nice everyday that it was a shame you couldn't sit outside and enjoy it, but what can you do?

I finally got a visit from some friends from back home. Ian and Josh from San Jose were in Germany for Oktoberfest and decided to take a "day trip" to Rome. We met up in the afternoon and walked around the city. It was nice to see them and to speak real American English for the first time in a while. They were set to return to Germany that evening, but I talked them into changing their flight and staying the night in Rome. Ian showed us to a restaurant he had been to before and we had a good dinner before going for a beer. I realized it was the first time I've hung out in Rome with just guys. I always seem to be with girls here (why do I like it here again?) and this was the first time I could talk about all the pretty Roman girls with other guys, so that was fun. The guy's had to leave for the airport at 4am to catch their flight and we stayed out until about 3am. They took an hour nap in my little house while I had some wine in the garden with the girls and some of their friends. I saw the guys to their cab and then got some sleep while they took a short flight to Germany followed by a long train ride to Austria. That's how you do it.

Josh catching some "Zs" on the bus

The month of September was nearing an end I was still without a job. I never heard anything from my architect friend, but I really didn't expect much. I considered other teaching jobs and even working in a bar, but decided that just wasn't what I wanted to do there. I was still waiting for a document from the U.S.A. that I needed to start my citizenship application, but I still have no idea when that will show up. Because of that and some other reasons I started to realize that maybe I wasn't quite prepared enough to pull-off living here right now, so I decided to just enjoy myself as much as possible right now and then go home and regroup. In the meantime, I had my friend Christine, the German girl I met in Rimini, coming to visit Rome for a few days so I was looking forward to seeing her and showing her around the eternal city. Hmm, maybe I can be a tour guide?

Yes they have McDs all over, but still no Starbucks. Notice the price, 6.20 euros, and then multiply by 1.45 to convert into US dollars, and the sign says "save with McDonalds". I'll stick with a 2 euro piece of pizza, grazie.

Castel Sant Angelo on the Tiber river. There were swimming pools and sun decks on the white platform in the summer. In this picture they are removing them.

Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. At night this square is full of colorful people and sometimes entertainers doing things like eating fire and other random stunts. Don't they know there are plenty of good restaurants around?

Church of San Giovanni. One of the few churches of the Vatican city located outside the walls. You can see those statues miles away from the hilltops around Rome, they're huge.