Rome: A few other interesting pictures

I haven't really posted yet about the Italian culture and other things, so this post is going to be dedicated to that, along with a few pictures of our visit to the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain.

Here are some observations I had:
1. When you order a pizza at a restaurant, bring your own pizza cutter. Italians don't cut their pizzas into slices. Most people eat it with a fork and knife.

2. There are more tourists in Italy than anywhere else I have seen in my entire life.

3. Toilets in Italy are different from ours in two ways: most of them do not have a toilet lid, like the one pictured below, and there are two "flushes," one big and one small. I think you can figure out when you are supposed to use each flush!


4. There are a lot of modes of transportation in Italy: train, foot, car, subway, bicycle. But the most popular one, by far, is the scooter. You have to watch out for the scooters, too, because they weave in and out and don't really pay too much attention to pedestrians. Florence was the scariest place with the scooter-drivers.

5. Air conditioning in Italy is not at all what we think of here. In most places, it's actually cooler outside than inside!!

6. Most people drink water "with gas" in Italy, rather than regular old bottled water like I drink.

7. Whenever I had difficulty speaking to an Italian in English, I would speak to them in Spanish instead, and we would have a rather pleasant conversation. I guess Spanish and Italian are so closely related that they could understand it and speak it easier than English, which we all know is a very crazy language full of all sorts of grammatical exceptions!

That's all I can think of for now. I'm sure there are others, and I'll post them when I remember them!

Here we are in front of the Trevi Fountain. It's a terrible picture (we are virtually white, and you can barely see the fountain), but when you ask others to take a picture for you, you have to know that you may not get much!!

Here's a better picture of the fountain. Once again, there were soooo many people at the fountain. Most people were sitting around eating gelato and listening to the water.

Here's a pretty courtyard we found just outside a church.
This is Bernini's elephant sculpture. I find this picture quite humorous because there I am at the very bottom of the stature. Did you even notice I was there?!!
Shane with St. Peter's in the background.

I had to get a picture in front of the famous Spanish Steps.