beer garden

I began my very first hostel experience today at 2 am.

The story of how it came to be 2 am when our plane arrived at 8:30 pm is a joke in and of itself, so we'll just say that we walked for a really, really ridiculously long time and I'm not sure how my arm managed to remain attached to my body for the 5.5 hours in which I dragged 75 pounds of luggage up and down stairs, in and out of buses, in and out of a train, in and out of the metro, and across broken beer bottles (and beer bottles that become broken) on a scary, scary street. Also, my Swiss Army Knife once again came in handy. I became some sort of secret ninja warrior and carried it pointing straight out in front of me the whole way. When cars slowed down, I actually baton twirled my Swiss Army Knife with my fingers. This in and of itself seems like a bad plan, but trust me, in perspective with my plan that included deciding to navigate an unfamiliar bus/train/Metro system in a country I've never been to before, with a dominant language I don't speak a word of, at night...

I am more awesome than words can ever describe.

Somehow, we actually arrived at picturesque "Tiber Camping Village." The first thing I saw was a sign that said "CEILING BEING RENEWED!!" in large, urgent letters beneath something in Italian that had more i's and z's than seems necessary in any situation. It was confusing because as far as I know the sky doesn't have a ceiling, and how do you even renew a ceiling in the first place? This sign was posted in random places every few feet along the pathway. I became actually quite taken with it. It was my friend that said, "There is an Italian hostel with people that sort of speak English (kind of) soon (maybe) in this general direction."

Tiber Camping Village is right by the Tiber River in Italy. I think when people were building Tiber Village, they basically were like, "Let's put every type of thing that humans can inhabit possible in this area!" So they put tents and trailers and motor home hookups and little trailer-like things you can rent and female dorms and men's dorms and mixed dorms and shared rooms and possibly a single private room. This makes for a strange conglomerate of extremely courageous and foolish families, really old and clinically insane people, and drunk twenty-somethings.

Still, I am a fan of Tiber Village because it includes a bed, and I can't tell you how concerned I was that we were going to have to go and sleep in some bushes last night. Although I should mention that this bed is a bunk bed above another bunk bed and beside another bunk bed, which is beside a wall that emits a persistent, unending, and irregular sound like rusty robots fighting. They never quite manage to kill each other, though. Every few minutes there is a silence that makes me think the sound is finally over, but then it starts up again. I think it is actually louder when it starts again. It's like the rusty robots are mocking me in my attempts to sleep.

I'm especially happy that Tiber Village has a small and exorbitantly priced market from which you can buy food, hot showers, and the internet.

Tiber Roma has a few perks that I couldn't even have thought up to ask for, however. The first of these is a "beer garden." If I was having some sort of acid trip/dream in which I was somehow imagining a "beer garden," I would imagine trees and bushes that grew beer. I know this is irrational, but what on earth is a beer garden? I will tell you. It is a bunch of picnic tables in a wilderness that includes nature's many wonders like mosquitoes, flies, fire ants and man-eating venus Flytraps (just kidding) in which people drink beer. A lot of beer. I don't think they ever stop drinking beer, actually; I'm rather concerned about alcohol overdose. There's a man lying here who has been here since yesterday and I don't think he's moved. Someone once tried to check his pulse, but they were pretty drunk so I don't know if their reading was accurate. I was going to, but I don't want to touch him because I have a phobia of getting AIDS. Even though I don't do anything that could possibly give me AIDS.

Anyways. So as my first hostel experience, I think that Tiber Roma is exactly as....unique as everyone says. Except for the maybe dead guy. I think he makes it even more unique.

This week is going to be fun.

Love,
Lizzy ;)