When I got to Rome I started walking, looking for the church. It was actually pretty pleasant. It wasn't too hot, early in the day and it was kind of pleasant to walk through the streets of Rome in the early(ish) morning. It was starting to get busy, with tourists on the sidewalks and cars in the streets, but it wasn't hard to cross the streets yet, which made things much more pleasant. Apart from not being able to find the church quickly enough, and already being late, it didn't seem like such a bad start to the day.
One thing I noticed was that there were just as many homeless people walking around the streets, and lying in the parks and little grassy roundabouts in Rome as there were in Milan. I was walking across one particular street, in the cross-walk, when a homeless lady started walking toward me. There were signs up all over the train station and metro warning against pick-pockets and thieves, so I was kind of making a point of paying attention to my surroundings but I figured she was pretty safe, since she was holding a piece of pizza in each hand, and I wasn't very worried. So, I was looking around at all of the very old buildings and somebody just ran into me. I was startled and started to apologize. And then I realized that the street lady had walked all the way across the street from the little roundabout just to body-check me, and then turned around and walked back to her little pull-cart of belongings on the other side of the street. That made the whole day seem less fun. I realize that it is probably not fair to judge all Italians on the actions of one (presumably) mentally-unbalanced homeless person. However, in all of my travels, that was the only time I was ever attacked, even when surrounded by large groups of inebriated people, homeless people, and/or beggars (and some of the little begging children were very insistent).
I was kind of upset by the whole "attack of the street lady" thing and when I came across a McDonalds, since I was too late to get to church, it seemed like the perfect place to get breakfast and to experience a little bit of homieness in a distressing situation.
I will say that while I was in Europe I was very conscientious about eating in local places. During the entire year I was gone, I only ate at an American chain restaurant once, except while I was in Italy (and that was because the Burger King was the only place serving warm food in the train station late at night while I was traveling back home). While I was in Italy I am afraid that I ended up eating at McDonalds an awful lot. On the other hand, as far as I could tell, that was a super-authentic Italian experience. There were McDonalds on every street corner, practically, and they were always full.
So, I was happy to have the opportunity to experience something like home. I was also looking forward to having some super-fast service à la an American international corporation. What I wasn't prepared for was how much McDonalds tailors its business model to the local community. (If you look here, you can see some of the international foods offered in different countries. Italy has Italian-type hamburgers. If you scroll down a ways, you can also see the McKroket that the offer in the Netherlands--typische Nederland (just like the Dutch)!) Well, in Italy, they really like their cafés and their coffees, so in most of the McDonalds I saw, the McCafé menu would take up two-thirds of the menu board, with the rest of the menu just squeezed into a corner. In others (like the one I went to Sunday morning in Rome) it was like a big McCafé, with a tiny McDonalds tucked in at the side. I was actually pretty okay with that part of the adaptations (and, I will say this, coffee in the Italian McDonalds was way better than the coffee you get in American McDonalds). Unfortunately, another adaptation that McDonalds made was in hiring Italians and adopting a more Italian plan for time management. When I got in line, there were three people ahead of me and it took more than half an hour to get through the line. However, when I finally got some food (I had a giant cappuccino and a brioche, which is like a croissant that is baked with chocolate chunks inside) I went downstairs into the little basement eating area (lots of the McDonalds in Italy were on two, or even three, floors). It was cooler down there (it had been getting progressively hotter) and I got the chance to figure out where I was in the city and how to get back to the train station and how to get to the Colosseum, which was my next stop. I was pretty relieved. It made for a nice, restful (and cool!) break in between all of the crazy Italians.
(If you click here you can see something about the McCafé. It is in Italian, of course, but if you are looking at in Google, it will translate for you. And in any case you can see what it looks like. You can see the menu here, but it was pretty much typically Italian--you could choose combinations of coffees or cappuccinos and brioches or croissants or tortes.)
No comments:
Post a Comment