Some notes about Rome

Rome has been interesting, but because our hotel has been so far away from the tourist areas, we’ve had to do a lot of travelling. It’s cheap enough to do so, because the three day tickets are very reasonable and you can go on the Metro too, but the buses leave something to be desired. They have very few seats (so more people can cram onto them) and with everyone hanging on - and sometimes almost falling over - it’s quite an experience in human contact! The trams seem to have gone from the Roman streets - Celia says it was trams we used last time. The streets aren’t really built for vehicles: rattling over the cobblestones in a bus is bone-wrenching and this morning I couldn’t get words out to Celia because my teeth rattling around in my mouth.
Italian is a language I think I’d get tired of soonish: the way the words are overloaded with vowel sounds gets a bit tedious. German, by comparison, was actually a lot more varied on the ear. And the Italians, some of them, race through the words at a speed that’s quite phenomenal - again it must be something to do with the excess of vowels. It produces a kind of sing-song effect after a while. Furthermore, they all talk at full bore - there’s no kind of quietness about their conversation. Everything has to be done as though the whole world wanted to hear.
ATM machines in Germany are called Geldautomats. In Italy they’re Bancomats. Geld of course is the word for money in German - and has links with our ‘gold.’ Banco is the Italian ‘bank.’ Occasionally you come across a Postomat in Italy; the Post Office has its own system, seemingly.