Wednesday 1.8 In which there is a private tour, and a public laundry.

I had booked a tour of Ostia Antica (the first “new” spot on the Rome leg of our odyssey for me), and we hustled our fannies to get to the meeting place by 8:30 this morning. The directions clearly said “near the red umbrellas” and there we were, near the red umbrellas, but no sign of anyone tour-guide-y. I was getting rather nervous when a young woman came up to me and said, “Meelayr? Viator tour?” I allowed as how I was indeed Meelayr. She motioned for us to follow her. When we looked confused, she explained that in fact no one else had signed up for the tour, but since it was on the train and not by expensive private bus, we could still go. So we had our own private guide for the morning!

We walked through the necropolis, the small baths at the edge of town (mostly for soldiers and out-of-town businessmen who were just stopping in the warehouse district and then off again somewhere else), the theatre, the forum, the world’s teeniest synagogue (couldn’t have been more than about 12’x12’), some apartment buildings, a lovely restaurant, and the big baths near the center of town, complete with 20-seat latrine. I so enjoy freaking out the students with the total-lack-of-privacy latrines. I took lots of pictures of floors, as usual :) But it was too hot and too long, so we cut it a little short (after all, we were the only ones there, we could cut it short if we wanted!), rested for a bit in the tiny but lovely excavations museum, then back to Rome.

After a brief nap I decided it was time to do laundry. A large part of why I booked our hotel was that its website announced that it had a laundry service. Turns out, what they MEANT by “laundry service” was “there’s a laundromat 5 blocks away that you can tote your stuff to and they’ll do your laundry for 14E.” So I had to put all the dirty clothes (and walking 4-6 miles a day in 95 degree Roman heat leads to many many dirty clothes in a week) into a suitcase and shlep over to la lavanderia. The little man there said that I could do the laundry myself if I wanted, but it would still be 14E. So I let him do it! Why not, after all. And he even dried the linens and lingerie on low, and folded everything and repacked the suitcase! So it was completely worth it, given that that’s what it costs anyway. For those of you familiar with the lingo, though I was heartily annoyed at the time, it's a past tense funny :)