Rainbow in Rome

Rome Rome Rome. Rome is busy and full of guidos and average people. Average people by American standards. Like, fat people, and people who wear sandals and cargo shorts. The big difference in Italy is that those sandals are made by Prada and those cargo shorts cost a month's worth of pay at the pizzeria. Enough bigotry, I'll try and stay theme-based.

The cool part about going to Rome was that my stay coincidentally coincided with Europride. As the latter part of the name should suggest to anyone living in this millennium, this is a gay pride festival. The biggest in Europe, in fact. Jack and I had no idea it was happening on our last night there until our landlord asked us about our plans for the night. Being the spontaneous youngsters we are, we said "Uh, not sure." He told us about the festival: "It's for normal people too!" When he told us Lady Gaga was going to be performing in the Circus Maximus (where they used to hold chariot races) we could not possibly say no.

We went out for true Italian food that night and happened to cross paths with the flamboyantly epic parade that cut through the city. We caught it at the halfway point and the series of love-filled semi trucks to half an hour to finally pass us. There were trucks for lesbians, for transexuals, and for those who wanted the world to finally accept their S&M lifestyles. I've heard Italy was into plastic surgery, and true to their reputation I saw dozens of men with perfectly natural-looking breast implants. Jack pointed out one of the self-identified males and explained how fucking hot she was. "Dude, that's a dude." That's the spirit!

SHAKE DEM TITTIES!

After the parade passed us Jack and I went exploring to find an Italian restaurant that had better food than Olive Garden. We failed, and were charged 30 Euro for our stupidity at choosing the first place that had someone standing on the street, desperately corralling any tourists foolish enough to respond to their greetings.   The restaurant's card machine was supposedly broken, so I was forced to leave on a long search for an ATM  that according to the hostess was "down that's street." The entire time I fantasized about leaving Jack on his own to either foot the bill or escape with his wallet intact. The stupid moral part of me forced me to return. And I paid for the meal of peppered spaghetti and regurgitated sturgeon like I was supposed to.

The crowd at the Circus Maximus was enormous, as expected. I forced Jack to rush there because I knew the crowd would be even bigger than a Gaga concert that actually charged 60 dollars for admission. We managed to squirm our way through the dense crowd of belligerent Italians until we were maybe 200 ft. from the stage. I would have complained, but from the back row even the jumbotron would have looked like nothing more than a blinking piece of confetti.

GAGawD Worshipers

 Of course it wouldn't be a political event if there weren't speeches. We had to wait through a gauntlet of rants I couldn't understand a word of before Lady Gaga finally took the stage and put in her two cents. While it was in English, Gaga's speech was the most long-winded of them all. Many people heckled her throughout the speech. She knew what we wanted, and it wasn't to hear her rant about gays being awesome and her being 25% Italian.

But they surely wanted to here that her dress was custom made by Donatella Versace herself. Conventional designer clothes like pants and bags are hard to appreciate, but when it comes to dresses, top-tier designers create works of art. The dress looked like the subject of an MC Escher painting and captivated me for the entire show. That's not saying a whole lot considering she only sang three songs after her speech.

Gaga's a great singer, so great in fact that she can draw a crowd big enough to fill the Circus Maximus. It was clear that 90 percent of the audience came not to hear poorly-dressed lesbians shrieking about gay-rights because the field was nearly empty within 10 minutes of Gaga's show ending. I would have joined the exodus, but the following act was a troop of Spartan-bodied men dancing to Lady Gaga singles. The choreography was good enough, but the my attention was held at the surreal fitness-level of the dancers, which I had not though possible outside the airbrushed pages of GQ.

After the concert we partied.

Intro to Amsterdam

It started out with a plane taking off from Kastrup Airport in good ol' Copenhagen. I learned quickly that if I made swallowing motions with my facial muscles I could avoid a debilitating migraine caused by the pressure changing in the cabin. Jack, my travel companion either did not share the same physiology or the same learning curve, and spent half the plane-rides doubled over in an emo stupor of excruciating pain I knew too well from past flights to Florida with my dad.

Landing in Amsterdam, we learned just how far away the actual city is from the international airport. It's the same for all the airports in Europe. If we were in Lord of the Rings, the journey from the airport to downtown would last for six chapters. It was easy enough to hitch a ride on a bus on a route that lead us to a Hard Rock cafe only a few blocks from our hostel. I had no idea how useful tourist information could be until I arrived in a country only knowing the name of the place I was staying.

The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel markets itself as "The world's worst hotel." The reception desk is decorated with post cards and posters with images of customers cheery faces at check-in and gaunt, heroin starved masks at check out. All these for sail from the receptionist at .50 euro a pop. I nearly bought a poster depicting the hotel's policy of cutting out sections of the carpeting to get rid of cigarette burns.

Long exposure of the hostel

Despite the "hotel's" self-inflicted reputation and dubious reviews on Hostelbookers, it was actually an extremely pleasant place to live. Well, maybe scratch the "extremely." The walls were thin and apparently Dutch kids were having something like a prom night rented out rooms on several of the floors. I had trouble sleeping the first night either from my surging excitement at finally leaving Denmark or the incessant screaming I could hear coming from outside my door. But for the price, I couldn't complain. It was a hostel after all, and in a room with 6 beds a little screaming from outside is a whole lot better than a fat guy with sleep apnea. 

Amsterdam itself was amazing. Yes it was pretty. The flowers were blooming and the flower market was in full Spring. Even Venus Flytraps and other tropical plants were flourishing in the weather. The canals sparkled as they pulsed with images of the cityscapes that inspired Van Gogh's imagination. But what really charmed me was that it only took a 2 minute walk outside the hostel to find what the Dutch call coffee shops.

Not to be confused with "cafes" (I think you know where I'm going with this), coffee shops are dispensaries of high quality cannabis, hash, brownies (space cakes), and and overpriced juices you are obligated to purchase if you plan on smoking inside. I was privileged to have the ability to enter these shops, which the government will be banning tourists from in within the next year. Each shop had it's own identity, one was comic book themed, others electronic, some reggae. But they all got the job done.  They had weed-smoking down to a science. The environments and the drinks provided were the perfect supplements to extremely high doses of THC. The music where we went was loud and had a baseline that even the most vegetative stoner would find impossible to sleep to. And the organic juice had the body and hydrating potential to alleviate a cotton mouth I thought to be incurable.