Organized Chaos

After completing my project in the UK I thought it would be a good idea to take a week and go and visit Rome. I could use my airline miles to get there for free from the UK and hotel points for the accommodations. So the only expenses would be site seeing and food. The first thing you notice once you get into Rome is that no one fallows any traffic rules at all. My dad used to tell me that the signs and singles in Rome were only used for insure to figure out who pays for an accident in Rome and I believe.

RG and I stayed a little bit out of the city center on the edge of Rome Central Park. It was a nice hotel and the staff was friendly but it certainly was not in the center of the action. But it did have a free shuttle that took guests from the hotel to the center of the city and back once an hour. So this is how we would get into the thick of things everyday. It was quite the ride for us though. Rome is of course and ancient city with narrow roads and while it is not as densely populated as New York or London it seems to be twice as chaotic. There are easily as many scooters on the road as cars and everyone is darting in every direction.

Most of the roads have cars parked along both sides. But a lot of the time there are also cars double parked on both sides leaving just enough room for one car to get through on a bi-directional street. While that one car is trying to maneuver about 8 million scooters will try to whip through whatever space is left. It is absolutely insane. I was certainly surprised that we didn’t see any fender benders or other such events. At one point we even thought about renting scooters ourselves for a couple hours, but I was sure we would have gotten very lost, very quickly!

The other funny think that we noticed was how small all the cars are. The Italians take it to another level past the British even. We walked down one block and counted at least 6 smart cars parked in a row. You never saw even a mid sized car. They were all Fiats, Alfa Romeos, these little Spanish cars, and Peugeots. At one point I laughed pretty hard when RG said “I never though that a Mini Cooper would ever look like a big car”! Every once in a while we saw a BMW or a Mercedes and they seemed absolutely enormous. I also found it amusing that I saw more exotic cars, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and such, in Portsmouth a small city in the UK than in Rome were many of them are made. But then again with the way people were driving I guess there is no point to own such a car in Rome.