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In Easter of 2000 fifty students of CRGS ventured into deepest darkest Italy... a year later, their footage was found.
CRGS usually organises a classics trip once a year, either to Greece or Italy (we won't talk about the ill-fated Turkey trip, cancelled after a small war broke out there mere days before we were to go). The 2000 Italy trip was, believe it or not, a great experience. This diary represents the first half of the trip, which was in Rome.
Terror and Despair in Rome
(c) Joel Sams, 2000.
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Cell Block 2085#D
Our 'hotel' room in Rome. Shep is giving me a thumbs-up because I told him to, not because he's feeling particularly cheerful. |
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Sunday.
The coach journey was okay, I suppose. I needed sleep, but never got any. It was raining. We got to the airport, and spent ages, after our luggage had been taken from us, doing absolutely nothing. The Heathrow women spent this time decorating our bags with attractive stickers. Someone who shall remain shrouded in the clouds of obscurity (no, it wasn't me) had an expired passport. This meant that we had to spend yet more time between white, depressing walls, while the airport staff bent the emigration rules so far backwards that the Romans would probably have used the resulting legal mess as some sort of catapult.
The plane flight was just about bearable; the landing was pretty awful, but there again, Dicko was on board at the time.
Once in Rome's airport, we were treated to the experience of passport control, Italian-style. This consisted of holding up your passport and smiling at a bored-looking official, who waved you on, his face buried in a somewhat dodgy magazine. The gun-detector thing was a farce - three slightly embarrassed, grinning guards ushered us through while the machine sung merrily away, obviously picking up Ms. Booth's silencer and pistol, Mr. Chambers' anthrax cylinders, Mr. Brinded's robotic travelling gerund, and Mr. Bird's neutron bomb, carefully broken into tiny pieces and cunningly concealed in shiny sixpences.
We arrived and travelled to our hotel, which we left soon after to see the withering heights of St. Peters. Mr. Bird was used by us as a passport to the Italian culture, and subsequently as a battering ram through the shaking volunteer guards of St. Peter, rushing as he did straight through the middle of them, giving a hearty cheer, encouraging us to follow him.
Dinner was smelly pasta and vegetables stewed in stomach acid. Considering the things threatened by Mr. B, this was good. Compared to the carnivorous option, being three-quarters gristle with a tendon running down the middle, it was bloody brilliant.
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Monday.
Well, it rained and rained, and, just to make sure of any lucky bastard it didn't get in the first two waves, it rained some more. I had already used up two of my films, and urgently needed extra exposures. The size of the breakfast was comparable to that of the ocean, but the plate was comparable to a small mollusc.
So, we departed for the Colosseum, being molested by Dodgy Market Traders selling a grand total of 84 umbrellas. Mr Brinded, that pillar of hope to all mankind, decided that, as the rain was "clearing up" (i.e. it was merely hitting the shoulders of passers-by rather than ricocheting off the pavement and knocking them out) we should walk to the Colosseum rather than take the "crowded-and-dirty" (but mercifully, dry) metro.
I promised myself that, although the rain was steadily getting worse, I would never by such cheap umbrellas as those being sold by the Dodgy Market Traders we passed en route.
The Colosseum was amazing, and seemed the biggest thing I'd ever seen. St. Peter's was far larger, but this played tricks on the eye, making it look as if it expanded into infinity. It was terrifying to think about all the people to whom, what I was now seeing for the first time, was the last ever thing that they saw. Did it have an evil atmosphere? No, I don't think so, but even so, it was eerie to look at the crowds jostling to get in and realize that exactly the same thing had happened before. Now, it was to see a dead landmark. Then, it was to see people and animals in the process of dying.
I brought 3 films for my camera - 40,000 lire. A bit of a rip off cash-wise, but good value for money when you think about the incredible sights I wanted to capture. The rain was now pelting at us with rather disconcerting force.
Next stop was the Forum. No decorum in it, apparently, but the place was deserted. We used Mr. Brinded as a guided tour of the place. The Senate house had been rebuilt by some pleased-looking Italians who where now flattened and glued onto posters that were dotted around the place. I doubt that they had given their lives to afford us respite from Poseidon's squalls, but at the present, we were too wet through to care.
On our way to the Pantheon, I managed to buy two bottles of sparkling water for later, reasoning that it was safer than using the taps. Christopher Edwards, being sceptical of the reports of tummy-ache from drinking tap water, did use the taps, and as a result had diarrhoea for the whole week (a rich shade of ochre, if Neil Ward is to be believed). Now, the rain had forgotten about coming down in drops, preferring simply to throw the entire contents of the Pacific at us in one go. The Pantheon was awesome with its perfectly circular dome. Mind you, it had a dirty great hole at the top, so obviously the Romans weren't too brilliant at architecture. I brought an umbrella.
By now, it was lunchtime, and I had become completely encrusted with filthy rainwater. My toes had waved goodbye long ago, and my left shoulder was aching from the weight of my hand luggage. I went into a McDonalds, and seeing the breed of cave men present within, reconsidered, preferring instead to go into a sandwich bar. Meeting back at the Pantheon, I was hustled by yet more Dodgy Market Traders, who were attempting to sell me an umbrella, completely oblivious to the fact that I had a perfectly functional one already. Our next item on the itinerary was, in the words of that Jedi Master and personal guru Mr. N. Brinded, "that fountain where everyone hangs out".
"That fountain where everyone hangs out" turned out to be "that fountain where everyone, drenched with the fetid contents of foreign clouds, hangs, dripping and sordid." Some of the street water had somehow found the way into my trouser legs, and was fast negotiating its way into my underwear. We passed on quickly, as Mr. Brinded had begun to receive death threats from a certain member of staff who, to preserve their good name (and my chances of bearing children), shall remain nameless. Our last visit for this day was to a bunch of steps. With water running down them, and us at the bottom. I, at this point, even were I to have jumped headfirst into the hanging-out fountain, would still have been somewhat drier than I was at present. I was absolutely freezing, and completely exhausted. Not only were the bricks of time weighing down our weary backs, but they were being joined by the pregnant hippopotamus of hopeless despair. My Dodgy Market Trader's "completely functional" umbrella had ceased to function.
The meal was interesting that evening, too. As like last night, we ate at a revolting little restaurant with waiters who spoke little English and even less Italian. The starter was pasta. I asked whether it was vegetarian.
"Hmm?"
"Vegetarian. The pasta."
"Sorry?"
"Sono vegetariano?"
(Brief pause while the waiter processed this difficult phrase structure) "IS PASTA!!!"
I presumed that this meant yes, it was indeed vegetarian. Then, Michael Brooks found the front end of a fish learning to swim in the tomato sauce. Now for the main course. I had whipped out my somewhat dodgy phrasebook (which had everything you could possibly need for a holiday in Italy, including such useful phrases as "How much is that sheep's head?" to "pass the condom, please"), hoping to impress the waiters with my grasp of their language.
"Sono vegetariano."
"Ah! Vegetariano!"
The little chap rushed off. A crash was heard. The rest of the group got their meals; those of a herbivorous persuasion did not. Five minutes after I had finished my dessert, I received two slices of what I sincerely hoped to be cheese (they looked more like failed skin grafts), and two leaves of red cabbage (uncooked). As we left the hotel, David Thomas discovered two grinning waiters serving what looked peculiarly similar to the new strain of diarrhoea Chris had discovered the night before.
Wednesday.
Never there was such a strange, twisted day. If you remember, I had got home absurdly late last night, too late to bother packing my bag. This meant that I had to get up early, before breakfast. I woke Robin up - he was so tired that his eyes dangled down, hitting the bed sheets as they swayed to and fro.
Breakfast was marginally worse than yesterday, if that's possible. There appeared to be a complete lack of clean tables. In fact, there appeared to be a complete lack of everything normally associated with eating. There were no knives, forks or plates. Presumably, the owner of the hotel felt that this lack of cutlery was made up for by the colossal amounts of half-eaten rolls lying around the place. As we sat and ate our fresh crunchy napkins, Mr. Brinded got out and made a beeline for the coffee machine, pressing the button again and again for a cappuccino. A slow stream of what looked like urine dribbled out of the greasy contraption.
After breakfast, we dragged down our bulging suitcases. Dicko merely dragged down his bulging stomach. We lined up in the corridor, and every so often moved six inches towards the exit to annoy the hotel people. We waited here for a while. No coach. We waited a little longer. Still no coach. Mr. Brinded went to the phone, talking quietly in hushed tones. Mr. Bird and I watched, silent, our conversation on the delights of Roman culture having come to a standstill. One hand appeared outside the small telephone booth. Was it a "thank goodness" hand or a "my God it's so awful" one? Both Mr. Bird and I suspected the latter. Mr. Brinded hung up and smiled a smile of helpless optimism. He exited the hotel and hurried down the steps, telling us to wait while he shot a few foreigners. Ms. Daynes joined him, rail-gun in hand.
While we waited, I had time to form a theory of the origins of Mr. Bird. The fact was that too many of the, well, facts about him, didn't add up. He claims to have been born the day Pearl Harbour was bombed, in which case there is no way he could have got his copious qualifications and have been teaching at CRGS for thirty years. Secondly, he had exactly the same style of speech as the classical author, Terrence. There was only one conclusion possible. T. A. Bird was a time-travelling Timelord, whose TARDIS was caught up in a freak temporal vortex around the CRGS Classics department. By day, he lives and works here, but by night, he digs a tunnel to find his lost TARDIS, fossilized in the pre-Cambrian bedrock GB is built on.
Mr. Brinded rushed back to us, and waved us forward. I hurried to the front, just as well, as you’ll shortly discover. I was following him... following him... following him... damn. He'd vanished. At the same time Mr. Bird stepped out of a blue police-telephone box. More freak time-vortexes, surely. Mr. Brinded appeared again, and told us to try our best to walk faster. No, he didn't. What he actually said was "Hurry up and stop being so fucking useless! Don't you have any eyes, you spineless backsliders?" Luckily, I was not one of the spineless backsliders in question, but boarded the waiting coach. Fifty-five of us got in; the rest were told that either a second coach would come for them, or they were walking to Sorrento.
The single coach left, and two hours later arrived at a pit-stop shop, where we bought and ate food. As we ate, the resident ant colony turned up and started to eat anything they could find, including us. How we cheered when news came through that the second coach was on its way! Mr. Chambers, feeling mildly sadistic, decided to leave for Herculaneum before it had a chance to catch us up.
All this time, Dicko had been pacing the interior of the coach. The driver (another spineless backslider, presumably) had locked him in, as he couldn't be bothered to wait for our spherical friend to disembark. We passed the poor little lad some scraps of food. Erm, no, not really. The great bloated rhinoceros demanded saturates and plenty of them, chop chop pretty damn quick. Feeding the monkeys? It was like feeding a starving brontosaurus.
We arrived at Herculaneum, and looked around. One hour later, the second coach arrived. Funnily enough, Ms. Daynes had not in fact exploded. She was not being scraped off the walls of the coach and coaxed into little jam-jars. She was just standing still, smiling and quite clearly completely at one with the universe. It is truly amazing how that woman's temper improves at the slightest inkling of something going terribly wrong.
From Herculaneum, we journeyed to our hotel in Sorrento. It was good. No, it was tremendously good. In fact, compared to it the one in Rome was hell eternal. This hotel was, basically, heaven. Tea was lovely. So were the beds. I sat on my balcony and wrote my diary before turning in for a quiet night.
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Golly Gosh!
Heh, it's Terry checking out the Coliseum. He's not one to lie doggo, and that's a fact! |
Tuesday.
The coach failed to turn up. Out we trudged, into the resolute maelstrom of Roman weather, umbrellas at the ready. Mr. Chambers got his mobile out and, phoning the coach company, gently suggested that were they not to turn up sometime in the near future, they might feel slightly bad about it around teatime. Then, Ms. Daynes grabbed the phone, and, screaming into the microphone, threatened to rip off the unfortunate man's genitalia were he not to get his coach down here pretty damn quick. We heard a quiet sobbing as the truly wonderful lady clicked the phone shut. The coach turned up.
After another 45 minutes, we arrived at the Roman port of Ostia, the rain pouring down our miserable brollies (or, as Dicko had by now christened them, "brella brellas") and joining its fellow drips soaking into the sodden earth. If nothing else, by the end of this holiday, we would all have something of note to contribute to the field of underwater photography. Ostia was amazing, and yet again Mr. Bird was employed as a guide. He seemed peculiarly fascinated with the drainage system of the public lavatories, or, as he called them in his rich intonations, "the Bogs". I found two pieces of tesserae, and we boarded the coach for the Baths of Caracatta.
The Baths of Caracatta, although not actually still full of spring water, were so wet from the ungodly weather that we got a good impression of what it would be like to bathe in them. As we huddled beneath elevated umbrellas, we considered our plight, and reached the conclusion that Aeneas had it easy by comparison. Ms. Daynes seems perfectly cheerful at the prospect of everybody getting even more drenched, but there again, she does seem to cheer up at the prospect of impending doom.
As we still weren't quite saturated enough with the rain, Mr. Brinded decided that it might be beneficial to walk to a food stall the other side of Rome. Although the prices looked like something out of Wall Street Crash II: the Reawakening, quite frankly, my dear diary, I couldn't give a damn. One tasteless pizza and a packet of crisps later, we journeyed to the Circus Maximus. This had neither clowns, nor wild animals, as Dicko observed. However, neither did it have any chariots, walls, racetrack, seats, stairs or ramps. What it did have was grass, growing in wild abandon, free of those annoying stone structures so resilient to its roots, yet so strangely interesting to young humans on classics trips.
Next step was a very early Christian Church, complete with very early Christian priests (possibly mummified, although a paint-before-assembly job was also suspected). The inside was gloriously spectacular, a really nice place. Unfortunately, the priests didn't speak a word of English, although this didn't stop Messrs. Brinded and Chambers engaging them in enlightening, if slightly one-sided, conversation. The garden was nice, too.
We saw two Roman temples, and then returned to our hotel. Tea that night was actually quite palatable. Michael apparently got none of it, although he did get a marvellous demonstration of American table manners, courtesy of Christopher Edwards (two glasses full of water and a bottle that was, mercifully, fairly empty).
After tea, Mr. Brinded took 23 of us out on a pleasant jaunt in Rome at night. It was decided that we would take the metro and walk back. Unfortunately, 12 students and 4 teachers managed to take the wrong train, a definite improvement on last year, where Guru Brinded managed to lose only two students (albeit for most of the day). We waited for two trains to see if they would turn up, then decided to abandon the idea of ever seeing our friends and comrades again, no flocks of swans being currently in sight, nor any nice Spartan huntresses (more the pity). I had some of the Best Ice-Cream In The World, and brought a laser pen from a Dodgy Market Trader for about £2.50 (=8000L). We finally got back at about midnight. Robin Sheppard was asleep, so I entered as quietly as possible, and fell into bed. Then I got up again, put plasters on the resulting bruises from falling onto the bed, and got rather more carefully onto the cold slab of granite that passed for a mattress.
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