Tricks and Treats

In Santorini I found myself with two books to exchange and quite happily changed them for what I believed were the first and second books in the Foundation trilogy. I was excited to read them after having studied the trilogy in the science-fiction history unit. It wasn't until after almost finishing the first and being keen for more that I discovered Second Foundation is the third book in the trilogy. Come on, what kind of sneaky trick was that? Or for a better question, who leaves the first and third books from a trilogy in a hostel book exchange?

Today another string of strange events happened!
First, I needed a haircut and hence braved an Italian barber. Haircuts already make me nervous, so the many unknown quantities of not knowing the barber or speaking much Italian made me even more nervous than usual. But it turned out I didn't need to worry! With my minimal Italian and the barber's minimal English I actually got a pretty good haircut. Hooray! Now I am well Roman.

Next, Jenny and I met up with Anne in Rome. What is this madness? Turns out Anne and her friend Mark were holidaying in Rome at the same time as us! I don't know what was stranger, unexpectedly meeting up with them here or realising that we'll see them again in a couple of weeks. European madness!

Thirdly, for lunch we went to a restaurant with no English translations on the menu. Luckily Mark spoke pretty good Italian! I was keen for some ravioli and from the menu Mark gathered that the ravioli option was, perhaps, 'with sausage sauce'. Sounded good.
The ravioli we got came in a sort of tasty bolognaise sauce. Maybe the sausage was inside? Nope! Inside was marzipan. Or at least, something that tasted very much like marzipan!
And this was how I ended up having marzipan ravioli with bolognaise sauce for lunch. Hands down winner of the craziest thing I've eaten on my trip so far.

All up Rome has been going well! We weren't able to get tickets to Burke and Hare at the film festival but we did head out of town to see Pompeii yesterday. Pompeii was very, very cool. Like Delos, much bigger than I expected and like Knossos, much greener than I expected. It's cool how much it still feels like a town, rather than a cluster of ruins (which was what I expected). A mega day getting out to Naples and back, but a good day!
It was also cool heading to another place that I studied a lot in history and it reminded me that at one point in time I knew the difference between the four styles of Pompeiian artwork. Apparently my brain thought this would never come in handy and promptly forgot it. That was a foolish move, brain!

Between the four styles of Pompeii and Foundation I feel like I'm getting a lot of value out of my history degree at the moment!

After a lot of messing around I've finally gotten the rest of my Greece photos uploaded: now up from the bottom of here
If you look at the photos from the main page some are in a confusing order, but they're all as they should be from that link!

Tomorrow I'm going to be having a spooky Halloween at Vatican City and then it's Venice round the corner! Yesss.